by Earl
A clicking sound echoed through the room, causing Williams to stop.
“The Unidum radio signal!” cried Hackworth turning pale. “I must answer. It is more than likely. . . . about Lila!”
“Then listen,” Williams said rapidly, “Lila is strangely sick, in a coma, for the past few hours. You are perplexed and are about to call a doctor and see what it is.
Hackworth nodded and placed himself before a projecting mouthpiece in the wall, surrounded by a carved frame of gilt metal. He tripped one of two levers beside it, which would throw the incoming voice through the room; the other lever would have brought the voice through a receiver hanging on a hook just below the mouthpiece—for private conversations.
“Hackworth speaking.”
“Unidum calling; Eugenics Bureau. Your daughter Lila has failed to appear at the subheadquarters in Philadelphia, as specified in the third and final summons of September 10th, three days ago. What have you to say?”
The voice was peremptory and commanding.
“I am most sorry. . . . I—I. . . .”
Williams gripped his cousin’s hand tightly. Hackworth drew a breath and began more firmly. “My daughter Lila has inexplicably. . . . er. . . . fallen sick just this afternoon. She is in a coma and nothing seems to awaken her.”
“What?” came from the diaphragm on the wall. “In a coma?” The voice became stern. “Is this some trick?”
“No,” returned Hackworth now playing his part with assurance, “it is the honest truth. My daughter has not been feeling well for many days. A few hours ago she simply collapsed and has failed so far to awaken.”
“Have you a doctor there?”
“No, but I was just going to—”
“Never mind,” interrupted the voice. A new note crept into his tone. “We will send our choice of doctors, since your daughter is legally under the care and authority of the Unidum’s Bureau of Eugenics.” A click and it was gone.
Hackworth wiped a perspiring brow.
“You see, Williams, what the Unidum is like? There’ll be a doctor from them here inside of an hour. He will be suspicious. He will—”
“We must hurry,” interrupted Williams.
He turned to the girl and looked into her eyes as he said: “Lila, are you ready?”
Without a word, the girl embraced Terry and kissed him, then bared her arm. Williams gave a few last-minute warnings. Then Terry filled the hypodermic needle, licked dry lips, and slowly brought it closer to the girl’s arm. Without flinching, Lila waited for the needle. Terry hesitated, trembling in every limb for a moment. Lila caught his eye and silently commanded him to do it.
A second’s work and it was over. Then Terry looked into her eyes, with his arms supporting her body, and repeated over and over: “Awaken only when my voice commands. . . .”
CHAPTER IV
The Unidum
l Dan Williams sat before a two-foot oval screen in the lounge of Hackworth’s home with the shades down and the doors closed so that the television images would be clear in the dark. M’bopo sat at his side, the whites of his large eyes gleaming eerily in the ghost-light of faintly illuminated dial controls. Talking and singing figures became involved in a stirring intrigue of the year 1945 when the rising Unidum regime had startled a whole world. The sound effect which seemed to come from every corner of the room was absolute perfection without the slightest tell-tale hum of radio apparatus, but the visual interpretation flickered and fluctuated somewhat. Television had gone into the home before 1973, but in an undeveloped state. When the drama ended, Williams played with the phosphorescent dials and brought to the screen a still worse scenic effect showing a race between a rocket auto and rocket train on tracks. But indistinct though it was, Williams was awed when the announcer revealed that the event was taking place at that identical moment thousands of miles away near Berlin in Europe.
Hearing the front door slam, Williams sprang to his feet and went to the parlor. Hackworth, who had come in, immediately began speaking.
“That drug is all you said it was, Dan. Lila is sleeping as sweetly as a child. The doctors are stumped and told me as much. They asked me a hundred questions and I kept wringing my hands and looking heart-broken. . . . oh, that was great!”
He seemed in great humor over it. It was three days after the evening in which his daughter had been given the mysterious narcotic.
“Did they seem suspicious?? asked Williams.
“In a way. When I mentioned having returned from Africa, the doctors—there were three of them—looked significantly at each other. I know what they figured then—sleeping sickness!—transmitted from me as a passive carrier to my daughter Lila. Now for the next week they’ll work at that angle, and of course they’ll simply get more puzzled. This is working out great, Dan. My heart sank the other night when the Unidum doctor, after his short examination, ordered Lila removed to the Eugenics Bureau’s own hospital. I thought sure they would awaken her somehow—”
“No, Earl. D’Lawoef was right after all. I think we can rest assured now that Lila will not awaken till Terry and Terry alone commands her to!”
“And that means—”
“And that means we’ve got plenty of time to plan something. By the way, is she in good hands—that is, is she being fed properly, etc.?”
“No worry about that, Dan. The Unidum doctors and hospitals are the pride of medical science. As long as she is in their hands, they will take perfect care of her.”
“The next move,” said Williams half to himself, “will be ours. Terry will be here tonight. We’ll talk it over then. Right now, Earl, suppose you tell me a few things I want to know but never had a chance to find out so far. Up till now its been hustle and bustle and rush and run. Honestly, I have only the vaguest idea of what sort of world I’m living in.”
“Come on, then,” said Hackworth. They went to the drawing room where Hackworth kept cigars and tobacco. In passing through the lounge, they found M’bopo twisting the radio dials with reverent hands and staring at the screen in fascination. Williams spoke to him when he started up and told him to stay there and play the set all he wanted to.
“First of all,” said Williams when they had seated themselves in comfortable chairs and lighted cigars, “tell me about yourself, Earl. Here we’ve been together for days and I still don’t know what your life has teen in the past forty years or how you came to find me in the heart of Africa.”
“Exploration has occupied my life,” began Hackworth, “just as it has the lives of many of oar common ancestors. When the All-Nations War broke out—that frightful cosmic struggle of 1936-38—I became an officer in the United States air force and, God help me, I was there at the shelling of Tokyo. Two million people—try to imagine it, Dan—exterminated like rats in ten hours!
“Enough said about the war; I’ll skip past it. When the Unidum took over control in 1943, I was commissioned as surveyor for new sites for cities built here in America. A hundred million people were shipped over from suffering, starving, exhausted Europe and put to work in the new cities. That was the beginning of reconstruction—post-war rejuvenation. But I did not stay at that. In 1948 my requests were finally granted and I was commissioned as an explorer. Since that time I’ve been in a dozen out-of-the-way corners of the world. I married four years later. My wife, Heaven bless her, died in childbirth, bearing Lila.
“You will understand, Dan, that I had never forgotten you and your father. But knowing Africa and especially the Congo—and not knowing the ways of the Unidum Exploration Bureau—you will readily comprehend that I tried to reach you only twice—and twice failed. Three years ago I was fortunate in discovering a rich deposit of platinum ores in Siberia. My rewards for that were sufficient to make me independent. Then, with my new wealth, I made an intensive study of the matter, uncovered the north route, and finally penetrated to you. It took me months actually to find you and I had little hope of seeing any of your father’s expedition alive, as the Zulu activities
were rumored all over the coast. You will have to imagine my great joy when I saw a white man and knew it to be you.
“That, in brief, has been my life, Dan. With the pension from the platinum find, I am very comfortably situated and could sit the rest of my life away in an armchair if I wanted. But I plan on trying the Amazon again before I quit the game.”
Williams smiled in understanding.
“I understand, Earl. You’ve got that fire in your blood that has been in the Williams line since the discovery of America. It’s the same urge that sent my father and myself into the Congo forty years ago. But the results of that were strange indeed. . . .
“Speaking of worldly wealth,” went on Williams, shifting his line of thought, “is there much unrest between labor and the capitalists today as there was in 1933?”
“Dan, you’ll be surprised to hear this,” answered Hack worth. “There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’—in the 1933 sense—existing today! The Unidum controls transportation, communication, and food. All other industries are under Unidum sponsorship, too, but in a lesser degree. The average standard of living has become high in Unitaria. What you would call our ‘rich’ today would have been considered paupers to the money barons of 1933, but at the same time our ‘poor’ today never face want nor suffering nor privation. From the highest to the lowest in Unitaria is not a great step—from the money point of view.”
l Williams was surprised at these revelations.
“Then the Unidum has done good work.”
“Yes, Dan, it has done more good than evil. As I told you during the hyp-marine trip, there are still sad mistakes made, like the Eugenics Law. But, speaking impersonally, there are a dozen things the Unidum has done that are as beneficial as the Eugenics Law is detrimental. And the basic idea of that law—to produce great minds—is worthy in itself.”
“But the method, forcing women into loveless marriages, is. . . . is inhuman!” added Williams quickly. “Sacrifice of personal happiness for future benefit to the state is. . . . is. . . . ah! It is the very thing an emotionless scientist would think of! Those ‘scientists’ you speak of, Earl; just how do they figure in the Unidum?”
“Well, the term ‘scientist’ today is applied only to a man of knowledge who has proven himself a worthy savant. Usually he must perform some brilliant intellectual work, for which he receives a diploma and the special privileges accorded men of science. The Unidum is composed of two equal-powered executives, two lawmaking bodies, two judicial systems, and a long line of bureaus. Now exactly one-half of the total government is in the hands of diplomaed scientists. One of the executives is a scientist; one of the legislative bodies is the House of Scientists; one of the judicial systems is the Science Court; and many of the Bureaus are purely scientific in nature—as the Eugenics Bureau.”
“And the resulting government?” asked Williams.
“And, the resulting government has made Unitaria a supercivilization, way past the rest of the world. For the first time in history, the intellectual forces of mankind have become the governing power. In the past, it has always been the ruthless, hereditary (and therefore degenerate), and selfish forces. The Unidum is the first experiment in a rule of reason as opposed to a rule of might and main. It is a milestone of advancement.”
“But the Eugenics Law,” commented Williams, somewhat disconcerted in finding his cousin praising the Unidum so highly, “there is no excuse for that.”
Hackworth waved a noncommittal hand.
“Enough about those things for a while,” he said, changing tone. “I see a raw hunger staring out of your face. It’s dinner time.”
“Umo g’rak paas,” said Hackworth in bad dialect to M’bopo as they passed him on the way to the dining room. The black man sprang up with an alacrity that made them laugh.
Terry arrived soon after the meal. Hackworth repeated to him what had occurred at the hospital.
“By the way,” he added, “I also met the scientist that Lila. . . . er. . . . was to have married. He dropped in just before I left. Professor Jorgen is his name, and he is a biologist. He was a nice enough fellow except that he had an overbearing air of self-importance—something Lila could never have been happy enduring. He assured me he would do all in his power to see that Lila was cured of her ‘ailment.’ He was all confidence.”
Terry had listened with clenched fists; his lips had tightened grimly.
“I’d like to face him man to man,” he growled angrily. “The very thought of any other man touching her while she lies helpless—”
“Now, now; calm yourself,” interrupted Hackworth, but there was sympathy in his tone. “I know how you feel, Terry. I’m glad, though, that I didn’t take you along, as you so much wanted, because I’m sure you would have lost your temper and got yourself into trouble.”
“If I ever meet Professor Jorgen,” said Terry more quietly, but still frowning darkly, “I will make him wish he’d never heard of Lila Hackworth.”
“I’m sure you would,” agreed Hackworth drily, “but the Unidum would afterwards make you wish you’d never met Jorgen.”
“If I thought it would do any good,” continued Terry, “I’d kill the man!”
Hackworth snorted.
“Terry, how silly to even think of that. You know perfectly well that if Jorgen were to vanish, Lila would be given to another scientist.”
“Just a minute,” Williams said firmly as Terry seemed about to continue the subject; “we’re together tonight for the purpose of planning the future, not to think up violent impossibilities. Now, in brief, the matter is this: Lila is forfeit to Terry under the Eugenics Law; but at the same time she is in such a state that the Unidum cannot accomplish her marriage to a scientist. We are reasonably sure that she will not awaken till Terry himself commands her to, and at the same time we know that she will be well taken care of. That gives us time enough to plan our next step.
“There are only two possibilities as I see it: either strings must be pulled to release Lila from the Eugenics Law, or she must be spirited away to a foreign land safe from the reach of the Unidum.”
“The first is practically impossible,” said Hackworth.
“Why?” countered Williams. “You’ve got money, haven’t you? You can bribe officials and buy out opposition. In 1933—”
“Yes, in 1933,” Hackworth took up the words, “bribery and graft were a flourishing trade. But this is 1973! The Unidum, in keeping with its ideals, is adamant to corruption of that sort.”
“Do you mean to say,” hissed Williams with incredulity in his voice, “that money could not cause a little change in records, releasing Lila from—”
“Very unlikely,” said Hackworth, and Terry nodded. “Dan, you don’t know the Unidum and its hard-and-fast system. Money would not take the dot off an i in any Unidum records!”
“Can anything be done through friendship? Are there any influential men who would help you for the sake of friendship?”
“That too is doubtful,” muttered Hackworth.
“Would it do any good to appeal the case to a court?”
Hackworth and Terry exchanged wan smiles.
“That would be like taking meat from a hungry lion and offering it dried biscuits,” said Hackworth. “You see, Dan, many of the women—probably most—confiscated by the Eugenics Law, take their fate philosophically and soon come to forget their first bitterness. They are treated well; their husbands are influential and respected; their life is easy—the court would laugh at the petition to grant one girl a release because she loves another man.”
“Yet you, Earl, and Terry, you would not laugh.”
“I should say not,” agreed Terry vehemently. “Even outside of the fact that I am the victim of the Eugenics Law’s injustice, I never felt in my heart that it was right. The women concerned should have a free choice.”
“I agree heartily,” said Hackworth.
“And I at first glance considered it inhuman,” finished Williams. “Since it s
eems that neither bribery nor friendship will release Lila, the only possibility left is—”
“Wait!” cried Hackworth suddenly. “I have a close friend in Long Island City—in fact a remote relative—who might. . . . at least I can talk to him about it. He is secretary to Executive Ashley.”
“Who is that?”
“One of the two executives of the Unidum, corresponding to the president of a democracy. The scientist executive is Professor Molier. Ashley is the other and is not a scientist.”
“Good,” said Williams. “That’s worth a trial, as much as the drug was.”
“I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Hackworth. “But we can’t bank on it too much,” he added gloomily. “I’m telling you, Dan, you have no idea of the efficiency and. . . . and. . . . and impregnability of the Unidum.”
“You’ve said that before,” countered Williams. “But I for one will battle the whole iron system for Lila’s sake. So far we’ve succeeded in halting the Unidum decree for a space of some time. Why lose heart? Not till we’ve come against a stone wall should we give in.”
“I’m with you there,” cried Terry. Williams flashed him a look of approval. “And so am I,” said Hackworth.
“Agreed,” said Williams. “So it’s a matter of scouting at present. In Africa, when surrounded by Zulus, I hunted here and there during siege till I found a weak point. Then I sent through a body of my best Bantu warriors to fall upon their backs. In that way I more than once beat off an enemy force five times our strength. Analogously, we must first find the Unidum’s weak point, if any. If not, we must resort to flight. You, Terry, just go about your work till you get a call from us.”
l A mile from the Hackworth home was the airport at which was kept their private Sansrun airplane. It was a warm and pleasant September day as Hackworth and Williams walked toward it, with M’bopo behind them like a faithful shadow. He had pleaded to go along with his master.
It was very quiet and the passing strangers sauntered leisurely. Now and then an automobile purred smoothly by, shining in the bright sun. Overhead an occasional airplane droned along, some large with multiple engines. Far to the left an electro-car sped on its rails like an enlarged needle.