It crashed out and lingered.
Not only through the visors. In Delaware Keep, through fathoms of water, the sound waves rushed and struck with a deep impact on the great impervium shell. Was there the faintest tremor—the slightest possible vibration—in the Keep itself?
Did the Keep—the Keep!—shiver a little as the undersea titan smashed his hammer against the sea bottom?
The sound died. There was a stillness.
Far above, in the flagship, Sam flipped sound-absorbent panels into place and turned to the auxiliary screen. He was getting a report.
No face showed on this tight-beam circuit connection. No voice sounded. But Sam automatically translated the scrambled code into an understandable message.
“Kedre Walton left Montana Keep an hour ago. She’s just entered Delaware.”
Sam instinctively looked down. He used his own scrambler.
“Does she know the situation?”
“Not sure. She’ll find out from the public televisors in Delaware.”
“Has Sari got the special stuff?”
“As soon as we got word Kedre left Montana. She’ll have taken it by now.”
The other screen was calling insistently. Robin Hale’s voice came from another auxiliary.
“Reed I Are you handling it?”
“I’ve got it,” Sam said, and went back to his Keep connection. But he waited a second, looking into Zachariah’s eyes, while he marshaled his thoughts. He couldn’t quite repress a twisted, triumphant smile in the face of the Immortal’s godlike—but fallacious—confidence.
For his schemes were working. He had chosen the time very carefully indeed. The vital key, the zero hour, depended on just when Kedre Walton returned to Delaware Keep. The psychological hammer blows were far more useful against Immortals than any bomb.
By now Sari should have in her hands the narco-dust Sam had conveniently provided for her, through his new underworld connections. A narco-addict asks few questions. She would have taken the powder the instant it reached her—and this was not ordinary narco-dust.
There was another drug mixed with it.
By now Sari’s nerves should be jolting with shock after shock. By now her brain should be building up a high potential, temporarily crumbling away the mortar of caution, of reserve that had held the bricks of her sanity together. By now she should be ready to explode, when the hair trigger was touched. And the direction of her explosion had already been channeled by her own conditioning and environment. Besides, she was born under the same star as Blaze Harker. Not Mars—it was the more baleful star of Earth that glared coldly above the Venus clouds, the star that had given Sari her dangerous heritage of mental instability.
“Reed,” Zachariah said calmly, “we can’t be bluffed. You won’t destroy Delaware Keep.”
“That was the first bomb,” Sam said. “We’re heading for Delaware. A bomb will be dropped every five minutes, till we anchor above you. But we won’t stop dropping them then.”
“Have you thought of the results?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “We have radar and anti-aircraft. We have guided missiles. And none of the Keeps is armed. Besides, they’re undersea. It’s safe undersea—as long as you’re not attacked. Then there’s no way to strike back. You can only wait and die.”
His voice went out over the public telecast. Sam switched on an auxiliary to focus on one of the great public televisors at a clover-leaf meeting of Ways. A crowd had gathered, he saw. From all directions the Keeps were like arteries carrying the people to their listening post. Red cells, not white—builders, not fighters. Well, they needed builders to colonize Venus.
At present, however, he was fighting the Keeps.
He began to worry, a little, over Hale. He wasn’t sure about the Free Companion. If it came to a final showdown, would Hale actually drop a bomb on Delaware? Would he himself?
He mustn’t let matters go quite that far.
By now Kedre must be on her way to the Harker stronghold. She would have learned what had happened; the televisors all over the Keep were carrying the news. She would be hurrying to Zachariah’s side. Zachariah, whom she had loved for hundreds of years, not with the unflickering glow of a radium lamp, but as a planet inevitably swings toward the sun at perihelion, swinging away toward other planets, but returning whenever the orbit took her close. Yes, she would want to be beside Zachariah in this crisis.
“Another bomb,” Sam said.
Again the telefocus shifted. Again a bomb dropped. This time it struck rock. The explosion came in long, rolling thunders through the public visors, and the crowds swayed with the tides and currents of vibration, as seaweed moves in water.
Again the roar continued as underwater sound waves moved in the track of televised sound waves.
And this time men were surer. Delaware Keep shivered slightly.
Silence dropped. The Ways hummed. The people of the Keep waited, in greater throngs than had gathered in the Ways since man first reached Venus, a herd that always, until now, had been guided by the Immortals—watching the duel between Zachariah Harker and the pirate.
Sam said, “Suppose you surrender? The Families may lose a little, but the common people won’t. Are you afraid of letting the short-termers go landside? Afraid you won’t be able to rule them out there?”
“Any man who wishes to volunteer for your colony is free to do that,” Zachariah said. “Just as every man in the Keeps is free. You’re trying to get slaves. Men won’t go landside yet; it isn’t time. It’s too dangerous just now. You can’t get volunteers. You say you want korium. But I think that will be only your first demand. Later you’ll want colony conscription—peonage.”
“The time’s past for abstruse arguments,” Sam said, knowing his voice was heard in every Keep on Venus. “Listen! Pay us the korium we want or we’ll bomb Delaware Keep!”
“You won’t bomb the Keep. Half a million people would die.”
“A cheap price for you to pay if you can stop the colony—is that it? Perhaps you’re willing to die with Delaware, but what about the other Delaware Immortals? There’s a rumor all the Harkers but you have already left the Keep—and that you’ve got a getaway ship waiting. Where are you vising from?”
Zachariah dared not let that challenge drop. Beside him, too, as Sam knew, was a scanning screen that showed the throngs in the Keep. All the Harker prestige—the Immortal prestige—depended on keeping the trust of the commoners. And they would not follow rulers who were not leaders.
Zachariah turned his head and spoke briefly. He said to Sam, and to the Keeps, “No Immortal has left Delaware. I’m speaking from the Harker Council Room. As you see.”
The image on the screen changed; it showed the well-known Council Room, empty except for Zachariah, who was seated at the head of a long table before a broadcasting unit.
But now the door opened, and men and women began to come in. Sam recognized Raoul. He was watching for another face he knew.
Was his timing correct?
“The other Families—” Zachariah said. “We’ll scan them quickly.”
Other Council Rooms showed on the screen—the sanctums of the great Families of Delaware Keep. They were all filling rapidly, the Randolphs, the Wood clan, the Davidsons and Mawsons—but the Harkers were the real rulers of Delaware, as everyone knew. The focus returned to Zachariah. It was the long view, showing Geoffrey and Raoul and a few others seated at the table. Sam looked for Sari and saw her. He wished he could get a closer view. Had she taken the hopped-up narco-dust?
She sat motionless. But suddenly her hands moved together on the table top and clenched violently, and Sam knew.
“Your bluff won’t work,” Zachariah said. “No Immortal has left the Keep.”
“So you’re all willing to die rather than give up a little korium,” Sam said. “That’s your affair—your own lives. But the korium isn’t yours. It belongs to the Keep people. They made it and they own it—or should. You’ve no right to decide wh
ether they should live and die.”
“We are the people,” Zachariah said.
“You lie,” Sam said. “What do you know about us? You’re gods. You don’t know a thing about the common people, who have to work blindly for reward we’ll never lay our hands on. But you’ll get those rewards. You’ll get them by waiting and doing nothing, while the short-termers work and have children and die—and their children do the same. You can wait to colonize landside, because you’ll live long enough to walk under the stars and the sun and know what it was like on Earth in the old days. You’ll go out in ships to the planets. You’ll get the rewards. But what about us? Well die, and our children will die, and our children’s children—sweating to build a pyramid we’ll never see complete. You’re not the people!” His voice raised in a shout. “You’re not even human! You’re Immortals!”
“We rule by will of the people. Because we’re best qualified.”
“Qualified?” Sam asked, and then, “Where is Blaze Harker?”
“Not in Delaware Keep at the moment—”
“Tight beam,” Sam said.
There was a pause. Then Zachariah made a gesture. All over the Keeps the screens dimmed and went blank. Only two visors carried the conversation now—Sam’s, and the Harkers’.
Sam, too, had adjusted to the private tight beam. He said: “I know where Blaze Harker is. I’ve got telepictures of him. I can broadcast them, and you know what that will do to Harker prestige if the people learn that an Immortal can go insane.”
Sam heard signals begin to click behind him. Automatically he translated. “Kedre Walton entering Harker grounds—” Almost time.
The signals suddenly began again. Mystified, Sam heard them say, “Listen to the Keeps! Tune back! Listen!”
He didn’t want to. This distraction was something he hadn’t counted on. There was so much depending on his own split-second timing just now, and on chance and luck—if anything went wrong he was ruined. He didn’t want to deflect his attention for a single instant from this flood of pressure he was pouring on the Harkers. But he switched his private screen on briefly—and then for a moment stood tense, listening.
Down there in the Keeps the screens were blank. The people had been cut off from this fascinating and vital debate just at the moment when it was reaching a climax.
And the people didn’t like it.
A low roll of anger was rising from the packed thousands. The crowd was shifting uneasily, restlessly, surging in little eddies around the screens as if pressing closer could make the image come back. And the murmur of their anger deepened as the seconds ticked by. Voices rose in thin shouts now and then—the imperative commands of the mob. They would have to be answered. Quickly—very quickly.
Sam whirled to the tight beam where the Harkers waited. From their Council Room came a distant echo of that same rising murmur of anger. They, too, were watching the temper of the crowds. They, too, knew time was going too fast. Sam grinned. It was perfect. It couldn’t be better. He had them on the run now, whether they had realized it yet or not. For until this moment no Immortal had ever known such pressure. They weren’t used to coping with it. And Sam had lived under pressure all his life. He was adjusted to fast thinking. Now if he could only talk fast enough—
“Immortal prestige!” he said rapidly into their private beam. “You’ve lost all touch with human beings. What do you know about human emotions, you Immortals? Faith—loyalty—do they look so different after a few hundred years? I’m glad I’m a short-termer!”
Zachariah gave him a bewildered look as Sam paused for breath. This didn’t ring quite true, and Zachariah was quick to hear the false note. It was all very well to orate when the mob was listening, but these high, abstract things were irrelevant on the private beam. False heroics were for the small minds of the crowd, you could all but hear him thinking. Or for a small mind here, clouded and confused—
Sam saw understanding break across the Immortal’s face—too late. Sam had a few more words to hurl into the transmitter, and as he gathered himself to do it he saw the door behind Zachariah swinging open, and knew he had timed himself almost too closely.
“So it’s all right for people like you,” he shouted, “to pick up some gullible fool of a woman for a while and kick her out again when you’re ready to go back to—”
Kedre Walton came quietly through the door and into the Council Room. From the corner of his eye Sam caught the flash of green-gold hair as Sari’s head flung up, saw the hunched tenseness of her shoulders under a gleaming shawl. But his eyes were for Kedre.
She did not seem to have heard. She came quickly across the room, tall, exquisitely fine, holding her head back under the weight of her cascading hair as if it were too heavy for the slender neck. She was unclasping her long cloak as she came, and she let it slip to the floor in shining folds and hurried forward, her narrow white hands outstretched to Zachariah.
Sam had been sure it would happen so. Between her and Zachariah lay too many decades of past intimacy for her to ignore the tie now. They had created between them in the long orbits of the past a communal flesh and a communal mind that functioned most highly only when they were together. If Zachariah had ever needed this completion, he needed it now. She had come as quickly as she could. Every eye in the room could see that these two were as nearly one, and in their crises must always be, as any two humans can become.
Sam’s gaze swung back to Sari. So did Zachariah’s—but just too late. Both of them knew what was coming a split second before it came, but by then it was too late to stop her. The timing was perfect. Shock after shock had hammered upon Sari, already fighting down the cumulative neural explosions of the adulterated narco-dust Sam had supplied.
And Sari’s action was already channeled. She hated Zachariah and Kedre. This was the moment of critical mass.
She was born under the star of exploded Earth. Sari, too, seemed to explode into an incandescence of madness and rage.
Within seconds the assembly of Immortals had degenerated into a primitive struggle as they swarmed to loosen Sari’s homicidal grip on Kedre’s throat.
Sam threw a switch and saw his face appear in miniature, far below, on the great public televisors. The sullen muttering of the crowd, which had been increasing slowly but steadily, fell to abrupt silence as Sam called,
“Harker! Harker, I can’t reach you! Tune in!”
How could they? There was no answer.
“Harker, Harker! Are you leaving the Keep?”
Another depth bomb dropped.
Above the rolling thunders of the explosion, above the ominous creaking of tortured impervium over the city, Sam’s voice called again.
“Harker, where are you? If the Harkers have left, who’s next in authority? Answer me!”
Zachariah’s face came into sudden, swift focus. He was breathing hard. Blood trickled down his cheek from a long scratch. His face was icily calm.
He said, “We have not left the Keep. We—”
He did not finish. For the roar of the crowd drowned him out. It was Montana Keep that roared. It was the first time in all Venusian history that the voice of a mob had lifted under a city dome, the first time since the Immortals had assumed control of human affairs that a crowd dared dispute that control.
They disputed it now. If the sound meant anything, they rejected it. Zachariah mouthed silently at them from the screen, no words coming through the vast, voiceless roaring.
For to the crowd it must have seemed that the Keep was already falling. Zachariah, coming back from the urgency of some hidden crisis, breathing hard, blood running down his face—it was a terrifying sight to see. The dome still groaned above them under the impact of the bombs and even this imperturbable Immortal looked panic-stricken at last.
It was terror that made the crowd roar. Surrender was what they roared for, and the volume of the noise mounted.
And then Sam made his first mistake.
He should have stood back and let eve
nts go their way. But the sight of Zachariah’s ice-cold calm, even in this tumult, made him want suddenly to smash his fists into the flawless, ageless face, batter it to a more nearly mortal aspect—force the acknowledgment of defeat upon the inflexible Immortal. If there was anything there to admire, Sam did not recognize it.
And because he could not reach Zachariah with his fists, Sam lashed out with his voice.
The first few words he roared at the Immortal no one heard. But when his blunt, red-browed face forced itself into focus upon the screens the shouting of the crowd quieted a little, slowly, until Sam’s message came through.
“—surrender now!” Sam was roaring. “No Harker’s fit to rule! Give us what we ask, or show us what happened just now in your Council Room! Show us! Show us how sane any Harker is when a crisis oomes! No—wait, I’ll show you! People of the Keeps, wait until you see Blaze Harker and what he—”
The shadow that was the waiting Zachariah made an impatient gesture, and Sam’s face and voice faded into the background, still gesturing, still shouting. Zachariah came clear before them, leaning forward, seeming to look down, godlike, over the panic-stricken throngs.
“I have news for you, people of the Keeps,” he said quietly. “You’re still safe. No bombs have fallen here. No bombs will. This man is—not what he seems. Until now I’ve kept his secret for him, but this is the time to speak. Joel Reed has told you he never knew his father. He’s sworn to wipe out the dishonor of his name and give you a second chance at landside life that Sam Reed robbed you of.” He paused.
“This man is Sam Reed,” he said.
A bewildered buzzing followed the silence when Zachariah’s voice ceased. He let them murmur for a moment, then lifted a hand and went on.
“We have definite proof of that—the eye prints and finger prints match. Our investigators don’t make mistakes. This is Sam Reed, the swindler, the dream-duster, who’s promising you so much. Can you believe anything he says, knowing that? Sam Reed—speak to the Keeps! Make more promises! Speak to the people you’ve swindled! Or do you deny who you are? Shall we show the proof now? Answer us, Sam Reed!”
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