Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]
Page 15
In the five years since, Kellon hadn’t seen his son. Roy had ignored an invitation he made Selene send. But he knew, through the Goon Department, that Roy was still at the old unitronics laboratory, furiously busy with his research. Learning that his funds were running low, Kellon had ordered the Transport Authority to double the promised royalties. Roy had replied with a brief note of thanks.
~ * ~
Now, standing stunned and alone amid the whirling dancers under the green-glowing murals of the Neptune Room, Boss Kellon felt a crushing need to see that thin, determined face, that was so much like Ruth’s had been.
But Roy had failed him. Under the burden of the tottering Union, he stood all alone. There was no other that he could trust completely. And Marquard’s thin, frightened whisper goaded him back to face the present grim emergency.
“The Preacher’s in Sunport,” the distracted Goon chief repeated. “His followers already know. Mob gathering in Union Square.” His lean shoulders shrugged, in a helpless bewilderment. “Delicate situation, your genius.”
“Delicate, hell!” Kellon caught his breath, and decision flashed in his shrewd blue eyes. He had fought alone before, and he could again. “Search the drainage levels,” he ordered crisply. “Arrest the Preacher.”
“Is your genius sure—” Marquard blinked uncertainly. “He has terrific influence. Before he came, it might have been safe. Now his followers will make trouble.”
“I’ll handle trouble when it happens.” Kellon stiffened his big shoulders, and managed to smile again. He must hide the black panic that swept him. “Don’t kill him,” he added. “Just bring him in. Martyrs are dangerous.”
“Your genius commands.”
The thin man turned nervously away, the frown of worry cut deeper in his dark face. The orchestra throbbed on—playing from a high platform whose glowing plastic decorations represented an ice cave on Triton, Neptune’s once-visited moon. Kellon started back to Selene du Mars.
She was waiting, slim and tall in the flashing green sequins. Even her smile was hard and bright and beautiful. Kellon felt an eager little quickening of his pulse, for he still loved Selene. Then he saw that she was smiling for another man.
Admiral Hurd came striding across the crowded floor. Black-and-orange pajamas were cut to emphasize the broad triangle of his shoulders. He was young and tall and dark. His toothy smile flashed, and he greeted Selene by the militechnic title she claimed:
“May I, Miss Captain?” Then he saw that Kellon was approaching. A kind of wary alertness tensed his face, and the smile that erased it was a little too broad. “If your genius will allow?”
“Darling, you look tired.”
Selene turned the white dazzle of her smile on him, and slipped into the dashing admiral’s arms before he could respond. Left alone on the floor, Kellon felt a tired envy for Hurd’s youth and looks and vigor. Really, he was getting old.
He watched Hurd and Selene, dancing cheek to cheek. Her eyes were closed; her restless face seemed relaxed for once, and happy. But he caught a covert glance from Hurd’s dark eyes, watchful, oddly hostile.
Turning wearily away, Kellon felt another surge of black regret for his son. If they had not quarreled, Roy might now have been in command of the Fleet, instead of Hurd. The new admiral was brilliant, and his record was clear, but Kellon didn’t like him.
Kellon left the ballroom, escorted unobtrusively by his Goon bodyguards. He crossed the vast, silent Moon Room, to a terrace that looked down over Union Square.
It was night, and Sunport after dark was a view that had always stirred him. The towers were wide apart. Façades of luxion plastics turned them to tapering, graceful pylons of soft and many-colored fire. Their changing splendor lit the broad parks between, and stood inverted in a hundred pleasure lakes. The surface ways were broad curving ribbons of light, alive with the glowing cars of joy-riding engineers. A few pleasure gliders floated above the landing terraces, colored eggs of crystal light.
Sometimes, with an ache of longing, Kellon recalled his first rare glimpses of this bright and magical scene. For his childhood had been lived in the lower levels. It was only on infrequent holidays that he was allowed to come up into the parks, where he could see this forbidden, shining paradise of the engineers.
How mad his dreams had been! Ten million others must have dreamed them, but only he had come up to take the city for his own. Sometimes even yet the hard-won victory seemed altogether incredible. Nor ever had it been the pure untroubled delight he had dreamed of. Heavily, he sighed.
“Your genius!” The husky officer of the bodyguard stopped him in the wide arch of the terrace doorway, where drafts were checked only by a film of moving air. “The terrace may be dangerous—there’s an ugly mob below.”
“Thanks, major.” He shrugged, and pushed on. He couldn’t afford to yield to the fear in him. Confidence was his safest armor. “You know this is my favorite view.”
But tonight the picture was grimly different.
The long rectangle of Union Square, below him, was gray with pressing crowds. From this elevation, the surging masses looked like some strange vermin, crawling about the bases of these mighty, shining, clean-lined towers that he loved.
Scores of bonfires glared, points of angry red. His nostrils stung to a whiff of paper burning. Faint with distance, the angry buzz of voices came up to him. Evangelists were screaming hoarsely, and shrill voices sang. He caught a snatch from the “Battle Hymn of God”:
“Burn the books and break the gears!
Kill Antichrist and engineers!”
Kellon stood there a long time, until his sweaty hands set cold upon the shining rail. He was sick with a fear that all these glowing towers would crumble into that gray ocean of blind destruction. But Melkart said there was nothing left that he could do.
Suddenly his cold body jerked to a brittle clatter of automatic gunfire. A mile from him, at the end of the square, gray mankind was flowing like a queer, viscid liquid over the bright-lit surface way: Cars were seized and capsized in that live flood, like small, glowing beetles.
Tiny screams reached him. Black Goon cars appeared on the shining pavement, and guns crackled again. It was too far to distinguish individual human forms, moving or dying. But the mass of the gray wave drew reluctantly back. The stream of traffic halted, and the light went out of the luxion pavement.
Anxiously, Kellon went back through the archway in the softly glowing wall—it was pulsating tonight with soft and slowly changing hues of violet and rose. He wondered briefly if quieter colors and a slower beat would seem more confident.
In the silent, cyclopean Moon Room, he hurried to the telephore desk. He dropped impatiently on his seat in the U-shaped slot, with the stereo prisms standing in a half circle before him. In the center screen, the bright image of the red-haired operator was a little smaller than life.
“Get me Marquard,” he rapped. The girl nodded silently, and the dark, thin features of the Goon chief sprang into the next crystal oblong. Kellon couldn’t keep the rasping tension out of his voice. “Have you got the Preacher?”
“Not yet, your genius,” Marquard replied in his habitual jerky, nervous whisper. “Mob is getting ugly. Looted the park library and made fires of the books. Started smashing pleasure cars on Union Way. Had to kill a few of them, to rescue an engineer and his girl. Diverted traffic.” His worried eyes blinked uneasily. “Maybe we ought to clean the square?”
“No,” Kellon told him—it was good to be able to make one more sure and instant decision. “The dead ones are martyrs. Leave them alone. They’ll howl themselves exhausted and go back to their warrens.”
“I hope so,” Marquard whispered faintly.
“Just catch the Preacher, and send him to me.” Kellon nodded at the operator, and the Goon chief vanished from the prism. “Reference Department.” He spoke to a dyspeptic-looking female. “Show me the latest Goon report on the Preacher.” The document was projected in the next screen.
Union Goon Office, Sunport, E.
February 30, 2145
BY: Goon Operative GK-89 (R. A. Meyer, Politicotechnic
Engineer).
SUBJECT: Eli Catlaw, alias the Preacher of the Revelation, alias
the Word of God, alias the King of Kings. Labor No. G-496-HN-009. Escaped convict, Mars Penal Reservation, No. 45-V-18. Wanted for murder of guard. Believed now in America, but whereabouts unknown. Note: Catlaw is a dangerous character. Liquidation recommended.
Tapping a key to change the pages, Kellon skimmed significant passages. “Catlaw was born in the Ozark District, of labor-class parents. . . . Mother’s claim to illegitimate technical blood probably false. . . . Transported to Mars for assault on engineer. . . . Guard murdered, in escape. . . . Catlaw reached Venus Commonwealth on ore ship. . . . Became ‘swamp walker’ and successful herb trader. . . . ‘Conversion’ and preaching dates from recovery from attack of jungle fever. . . . Returned to Earth about nine years ago, to lead underground ‘Crusade’ against Union. . . . Enabled to evade many Goon raids by vast popular support. . . . Treason charges against Union factions. . . . Catlaw has incited assassination and sabotage. . . His program implies total destruction of technical civilization.”
Kellon finished the report. He sat staring into the empty prism, as gravely as if he could read there the end of Sunport and all his world. He had scarcely moved, an hour later, when Marquard brought in the Preacher.
~ * ~
Eli Catlaw seemed almost unaware of the burly Goons who gripped his arms. He was lank and tall in faded gray overalls, and he stood erect and defiant. His dark, hollow eyes stared arrogantly past Kellon, at the lofty luxion murals that illuminated the room. Kellon’s shrewd eyes studied the man, against the background in the Goon report. Thick lips and high cheeks and stiff black hair showed Negro and Indian blood. The yellow face was long and angular and stern. At last the sullen, hostile eyes came back to Kellon’s face, but obviously the Preacher didn’t intend to speak first.
Kellon turned on his frank, confident smile.
“I’m glad to see you, Catlaw,” he said smoothly. “I’m sorry if this is inconvenient for you, but it was the only way I knew to get your point of view.”
The boss paused invitingly, but the Preacher said nothing. He stood absolutely motionless, between the big men who held him. His burning eyes stared bleakly away, through the far, glowing murals.
“I know that times are difficult.” Kellon kept his voice suave and even. “The exhaustion of the Jovian mines has caused depression. All the heavy industries are almost dead, and labor has naturally suffered. But I personally am deeply concerned for the comfort and welfare of the masses. And I assure you that the Union will earnestly consider any reform measures you will suggest.”
Kellon paused again. Stillness whispered in the long Moon Room. Beneath the mighty glowing murals, that showed station domes and robot miners and long unitron transports against a background of towering lunar peaks and star-shot space, the little group at the telephone desk seemed queerly insignificant. The room seemed too vast for its builders.
Now at last the Preacher spoke. His long, stern face showed no response to Kellon’s persuasive smile, and he ignored Kellon’s arguments. In a tense, grating, stifled voice, he began quoting texts from the Revelation:
“Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit. . . . Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.”
Kellon’s smile had turned a little pale.
“Are you crazy?” He coughed against a troublesome rasp in his throat. “I suppose you mean Sunport?” His bewilderment was honest. “But Sunport is civilization!”
Stiff and insolent, the Preacher croaked:
“He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. . . . Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire. ... In one hour is she made desolate. . . . And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all
Kellon leaned over the curving desk, with a look of earnest puzzlement.
“I don’t understand you, Catlaw,” he protested gravely. “Do you want to wreck all that men have accomplished ? Do you want the future to forget the power of science? Do you want to turn men back into naked savages, and wipe out civilization?”
“Civilization?” The Preacher made a harsh snorting laugh. “Your glittering civilization is itself the Harlot of Babylon, poisoning all that yield to her painted lure. The science you revere is your false prophet. Your machines are the very Beast of the Apocalypse.”
He gulped a hoarse breath.
“Yea, Armageddon and the Kingdom are at hand!”
“Listen to me,” begged Kellon. “Please—”
Catlaw jerked angrily in the grasp of the Goons.
“I have come to destroy this last, most evil Babylon.” His metallic, pulpit voice rang through the long Moon Room. “Even as the angels of God once smote the wicked cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. And every engineer shall be burned with the fire of the Lord—save that he repents tonight!”
His yellow face was a stern, rigid mask.
“I warn you, Antichrist. Repent tonight, and follow me.” The cunning of the swamp trader glittered briefly in his hollow eyes. “Turn your power to the path of God, and I will receive you into the Kingdom. Tomorrow will be too late.”
Kellon rose, gasping for breath.
“Listen!” His voice trembled. “I fought to rule Sunport. And I’ll fight to preserve it from you and all the lunatics who follow you. Not just because it is mine. But because it is the storehouse of everything great that men have created.”
“Then you are damned!” Scuffling with the Goons, Catlaw shook a dark, furious fist. “With all your city of evil.”
Kellon’s voice dropped grimly.
“I’m not going to kill you, Catlaw. Because you are probably more dangerous dead than alive, just now. But I know that you are a fugitive from the Union, with an untried murder charge waiting for you. I’m sending you to the Outstation prison, tonight, to await trial for murder.”
He nodded at the Goons, and they dragged the prisoner away.
Kellon sat down heavily at the telephore desk. The Preacher unnerved him. It was hard for him to understand that deadly, destroying hatred, that blindness to all reason. But he knew that it was multiplied many million times in the gray-clad masses under the Union. He thought of the howling mob of the Preacher’s fanatics about the foot of this very tower, and he was afraid.
But he must not yield to fear.
“Get me the militechnic reservation,” he told the telephore operator. “The Admiralty Office. Hurd’s at the ball, but I’ll talk to the officer in charge.”
The efficient redhead nodded, in the center prism. Kellon was astonished when the next screen lit with the dark, handsome features of Admiral Hurd, himself.
“Your genius looks surprised.” Hurd flashed his easy, white-toothed smile. “But I left the ball, after one dance with Miss Captain du Mars. I had reports of this crisis, and I felt it my duty to be ready for your commands.”
“Thank you, admiral.” Kellon tried to put down an uncomfortable feeling that Hurd was far too alert and dutiful. “I have arrested the Preacher. His followers may try to set him free. I want a cruiser to take him to the Outstation prison, as soon as possible.”
“At once, your genius. I was expecting duty, and my flagship is hot. I’ll take the prisoner myself. The Technarch will be on the Goon Office terrace, to receive him, in five minutes.”
Smiling, Hurd flickered out of the prism.
Kellon felt another stab of sharp regret that Roy had failed him. But he had no time to dwell upon his dim mistrust of Hurd. For the empty prism lit again, with Marquard’s worried features.
“Your genius, the people know we caught the Preache
r.” The Goon chief’s whisper was nervous and hurried. “Mob in the square getting ugly. Fighting the Goon cordons. I’m afraid they will attack the Tower.”
Kellon caught his breath, and tried to keep smiling. He felt confused and tired. He was afraid that any violent action would jar the human volcano under Sunport into terrible eruption.
But something had to be done. Some display of confidence was necessary, to help the morale of his supporters. He lifted his big shoulders, and groped for his old habit of instant decision.
“I’ll talk to them,” he told Marquard. “They can’t all be as mad as Catlaw. I’ll tell them who butters their bread.” He smiled a little, as he turned to the operator. Any action made him feel better. “I’ll speak from the terrace,” he said, “on the Tower telephore.”