“Wait, your genius,” the Goon chief objected anxiously. “The terrace is dangerous. Automatic arms in the mob. Afraid the demonstration has support from some faction in the Union. My operatives still looking for evidence. Better keep out of range.”
“I’ll speak from the terrace,” Kellon repeated.
Of course, he might be killed. Fear was a cold, crawling thing inside him. But he had faced death before. Now a display of perfect confidence was the best weapon he could use. He prepared to conceal his gnawing unease.
The touch of a key dropped the telephore desk into the lavatory below, a hall of glowing luxion almost as splendid as the huge Moon Room. Kellon adjusted the white toupee. A servant rouged his heavy jowls back to a cheerful glow. He tried to rinse the dry rasp out of his throat.
The elevator section lifted him back to the Moon Room. He walked back through the glowing luxion arch, to the lofty terrace. The telephore stand here had only two prisms. Standing between them, he could look down across Union Square.
Now the pavements had been darkened, all around the square. Surface traffic was stopped. That gray, human sea had grown until it overflowed the ways, to the shining bases of the towers beyond. The hum of voices had a lowered, vicious tone.
Kellon spoke to the operator in the prism beside him. The wall behind—and all the illuminated faces of the Union Tower—began to flash, red and dark, red and dark, to gain attention. That ugly buzzing ceased, and he nodded. The crown of the Tower became a cool, steady violet.
“People of Sunport.” From the three-hundred-foot screen in the wall beneath him, his giant image looked down over the mob. Magnified to the depth of thunder, his voice rolled out of a thousand speakers. “My friends, the action I have taken tonight was taken for your own good.”
He trusted the old magic of his frank, robust smile and his candid, booming voice. After all, he had talked his way to victory over better men than Eli Catlaw. But that breathless quiet lasted only a moment, before the defiance of the mob rolled up to him at the slow speed of sound. It was a monstrous animal bellow.
“My friends, listen to me.” At his quick nod, the operator stepped up the volume of that tremendous voice. “Listen to reason.” A bullet slapped against the cold, glowing wall behind him. Stinging particles of plastic showered him. But fortunately the telephore picked up only a muffled thump. “What can you gain from the Preacher?”
Boos and jeers roared up from the mob.
“The Preacher has told you to destroy the machines.” He tried to drown that defiant bellow. “He has told you to kill the men who create and control them. But think what you owe to machines—everything! Obey the Preacher, and the most of you will perish—”
Brrrram!
A dull but mighty concussion rocked the terrace. Kellon glimpsed flying debris, spreading out in a giant fan from somewhere beneath him. Black smoke overtook it, and covered the mob in a billowing cloud. His knees were shaking, and his throat went dry. But he tried to go on:
“The most of you will perish—”
But the amplifiers were dead. His natural voice was wholly lost in the blasting echoes that came rolling back through the smoke from the distant towers. The telephore was out of order. Even the operator’s image was gone. He shouted hoarsely at it, and clicked the call key. But the prisms remained empty.
He stood clutching the edges of the stand. He felt bewildered and ill, too dazed even to wonder actively what had happened. At last the smoke came up about him, in a choking, blinding cloud. He stumbled back into the Moon Room.
“Your genius!” Frightened members of the bodyguard met him in the doorway. “Are you hurt?” The officer told him: “It was a bomb. Under the giant screen. Spies must have set it.”
The telephore in the Moon Room was still working. Kellon dropped weakly in his seat in the slot, with a grateful smile at the white-lipped operator. He told the redhead to call the Goon Office. Marquard answered, his jerky whisper briefly relieved:
“Afraid they had got you, boss.” Alarm came back to his thin, dark face. “Thing is worse than I thought. Widespread plot. Organization. Probably Preacher is the leader, but engineers were in it. Got surprising quantities of arms and explosives, and experts to use them.”
Kellon managed a hard, little grin.
“Evidently it isn’t sinful to use machines—when they’re guns.”
The Goon chief was too harassed to smile.
“Watch for your life, boss,” he whispered. “Warn your guards. May strike anywhere. Rioters smashing cars and storming buildings and murdering engineers, all over the city. Union Tower may be next.”
Kellon drew a long breath. His shaken nerves were recovering from the blast.
“Chin up, chief!” His rouged smile was easier. “We’ll handle things. I’ll call Hurd, and have him stand by with the Fleet. We may need a few tons of tickle powder dropped out of space. There’s nothing like a couple of hundred thousand tons of long, black unitron cruiser to instill respect.” He turned to the watchful redhead. “Get me the Technarch.”
The operator nodded. Her head bobbed a little in the prism, as her unseen hands sped over the switchboard. But the next prism remained blank. A puzzled expression came over her tense face. At last she told Kellon, “Your genius, the Technarch doesn’t answer.”
Icy, unreasoning panic clutched Kellon’s heart.
“Get me the Admiralty Office.”
A dazed-looking militechnic cadet informed him that Admiral Hurd had taken the entire Fleet into space. “All the ships had been hot for twenty-four hours, sir,” he stammered. “I understand the annual maneuvers are taking place, off the Moon.”
Kellon made a stunned little nod, and the startled cadet was cut off. He stared at Marquard, still imaged in the adjacent prism. The Goon chief had seen and heard the cadet, and his lean, furrowed face reflected Kellon’s consternation.
“The maneuvers were not to begin for a week,” Kellon gulped uneasily. “Hurd shouldn’t have begun them without an order from me.” He shook his cragged head. “But—wholesale mutiny—it’s too appalling to think of!”
Marquard made a tiny, bleating sound.
“That explains it, your genius,” his whisper rasped. “Arms. Organization. Experts. Evidence that the Preacher had help from in the Union. He was plotting with Hurd.” His pale face looked frightened. “Looks desperate, boss!”
“I won’t believe it,” muttered Kellon. He didn’t dare believe it. Anxiously he told the tense-faced redhead, “Get me the Outstation. Manager General Nordhorn. At once.”
The Union’s supremacy—and his own—depended on control of space. To that end, the Fleet and the Outstation were equally essential. That artificial moonlet was scarcely a mile in diameter, but an often-proved proverb ran, “The master of the Outstation will be master of the planets.”
The tiny metal moon had a twenty-four-hour period, which kept it swinging always to the south of Sunport’s zenith. At first it had served merely as observatory, laboratory and steppingstone to space. But the militechnic engineers of the Commonwealth, the Corporation and the Union had thickened its massive armor of meteoric iron, until it was the Gibraltar of the system. The theoretical range of its tremendous guns extended around the Earth and out to the Moon.
“Hurry!” Kellon croaked. Breathless with impatience, he watched the red-haired operator. She fumbled with her unseen controls, as if there was some difficulty. But at last Nordhorn’s thin, dark face flashed into the prism.
Manager General Nordhorn was an old man, bent and yellowed and deaf. He should have been retired years ago. But few younger men had shown steadfast loyalty—and even those few, like Marquard, were usually of indifferent ability. Something had happened to the fine tradition of the militechnic service.
“Has Hurd arrived?” Nordhorn cupped a trembling yellow hand to his ear, and Kellon shouted: “I have arrested the Preacher. I sent Hurd to carry him out to prison. He took the Fleet to space, and he doesn’t answer the tele
phore. There may be trouble. Better call your men to action stations—”
Kellon’s voice dried up. Nordhorn had looked sternly composed. But now, as he gulped to speak, Kellon saw the evidence of desperate emotion in his bloodless cheeks and his thin, quivering lips.
“Your genius, Hurd has already called.” His voice quavered, uncertainly. “I was just about to call you. Hurd did not mention any prisoner. He delivered an ultimatum. A shocking thing, your genius —I can’t quite understand—he demanded that I surrender the Out-station!” Nordhorn’s yellow Adam’s apple jerked, as he swallowed. “Your orders, sir?”
Blood drummed in Kellon’s ears. Cold with sweat, his hands clutched the edges of the desk. In spite of all the evidence, the completeness of this disaster was still incredible. He tried to steady his reeling brain. Hoarsely he ordered:
“You will defend the Station—to the last.”
“To the last.” Nordhorn’s white head lifted proudly. “But the situation is desperate, sir.” A stunned bewilderment came back to his face. “I can’t understand—things are happening so fast. But mutiny is reported in some of the gun crews. Men are fighting in the spaceward bays now.”
“Hold out—” begged Kellon. But suddenly the haggard-faced old general was swept out of the prism. He clicked the call key desperately, and shouted at the operator, “Get back Nordhorn!”
“I’m sorry, your genius,” the tense girl told him. “The Outstation doesn’t answer.”
Marquard’s sick, shaken face was still in the other screen. For his benefit, Kellon tried to grin. “So Hurd and the Preacher are in bed together?” he muttered. “Which do you say will manage to kick the other out?”
“Won’t matter, if the Station falls,” rasped the Goon chief’s hasty whisper. He listened. “Excuse me, your genius. The riot bureau is calling me. Remember—watch your life!”
His image was gone. Aimlessly, Kellon stalked up and down the pale-glowing luxion floor of the long Moon Room. What next? The news from the Outstation had shaken him more than the explosion under the terrace. He felt numbed and ill. Still the Station didn’t answer, and he knew nothing useful to do.
The ball was still going on in the Neptune Room, the officer of his bodyguard told him. Even the telephore newsmen had as yet received little hint of the real gravity of the situation. The bright-clad dancers didn’t know that their world was at the brink of catastrophe.
Perhaps that was the trouble. If the engineering class had danced less—if they had learned more and done more about the other nine-tenths of the population—things might have been different. But Melkart said it was three generations late to think of that.
“Boss!” a guard shouted. “Look out!”
Shots echoed against the high, glowing murals. Somewhere a woman screamed. Fighting men surged through the wide arch from the Neptune Room. The lights went out in the luxion panels. An automatic clattered in the dark.
The broad connecting doorway had been closed only with the sound-absorbing air screen. Now Kellon heard a muffled woosh! The armored safety panel had lifted, but too late. The attackers were already in the Moon Room.
In the faint glow that came through the terrace arch, he glimpsed crouching, darting figures. An arm threw something over the fighting Goons. It crashed beside him. Desperately he groped for it, hurled it toward the far end of the room, dropped flat behind the telephore desk.
His ears rang, and the immense dark room was alive with screaming metal. He rose behind the desk, snatching a hidden automatic from under the seat. But the shooting had stopped. Light flowed back into the high luxion murals.
Three men were lying still inside the closed archway. One made a thin, whimpering sob, and a frightened Goon fired a final shot into his head. The officer came running anxiously to Kellon.
“Is your genius all right?”
Kellon managed to grin.
“Attempt No. 17.” He was glad of the rouge on his face. No other attempt had ever come quite so close, or made him feel so weak inside. He dragged his eyes away from the ruin at the end of the room, where the bomb had shattered a cragged lunar peak into dusty rubble. “Who were they?”
Already the Goons were examining the three dead men. Their fingerprints were swiftly identified by telephore. One of them proved to be an hereditary engineer, who had failed in the examinations for a practical militechnic degree. The other two were members of the auxiliary white-collar class.
“The engineer must have come with the guests,” the guard officer reported. “The others were among the musicians. They had guns and the bomb in instrument cases.” He caught his breath. “I regret this terribly, your genius. But let me congratulate your personal courage, with the bomb.”
Courage! Kellon shrugged and turned quickly away from the still figures in their gay bloodstained rags. There was already an odor. Death made him ill. If he had been an instant slower—desperation wasn’t courage. His voice came harsh and loud:
“Get them out and clean the floor.” Then he thought of Selene du Mars. Concern sharpened his tone. “There was fighting in the ballroom? Was anyone hurt? Find out if Miss Captain du Mars was hurt.”
The safety door dropped again. Anxiety made him follow the questioning Goons. An ominous, hysterical tension met him in the vast green-glowing Neptune Room. Cold-eyed officers were grilling the frightened musicians. Half the guests were gone. The rest were gathered in pale-faced groups, chattering nervously.
He couldn’t find Selene. The guards at the main entrance, off the public glider terrace, had not seen her among the departing guests. But she had vanished early in the evening.
Apprehension seized him. In spite of her scheming ambition—or even because of it—he loved Selene. He knew that the Preacher’s followers hated her savagely, as the very symbol of all that was denied them. She might be abducted, perhaps even murdered.
He hurried back to the telephore in the bomb-shattered Moon Room, and called her suite on the floor below. The dark Eurasian major-domo said she had not come in. But the red-haired operator told him:
“Your genius, there’s a recorded message from Miss Captain du Mars. It was left two hours ago, to be delivered whenever you called for her. Will you receive it?”
Kellon nodded, suddenly voiceless.
Selene’s face came into the crystal block. The fire diamonds burned in her platinum hair. Their changing blaze went blue as her clear eyes, and redder than her lips. Her voice came, cool and hard and perfect.
“Harvey, I am leaving you tonight. We shall not meet again. This is to thank you for all you have given me, and to tell you why I have gone. It isn’t because you are getting old, or because I think you are slipping—believe me, I wouldn’t go because of that. But I’m in love with Admiral Hurd. By the time you hear this, we shall be in space together. I’m sorry, Harvey.”
Kellon sat for a long time at the telephore desk. He felt numb and cold. In a hoarse voice, he told the operator to run it over. Selene smiled again, and wiped away the same solitary jewel-bright tear, and spoke the same gem-hard words.
She lied. Kellon stared blankly at the mural the bomb had shattered—his own life was darkened and broken, like the luxion panel. He clenched his fists in a sick and useless fury. Of course she lied!
Maybe she did love Hurd. The traitor had looks and youth. That would be no wonder. But it wasn’t love that made her go with him. He knew Selene too well to accept that. She had gone with Hurd because she expected him to be the next master of the world.
“Run it again,” he told the operator. “Without the sound.” And he greeted the silent image with a tired, bitter grin. “Good hunting, Selene,” he whispered. “After all, we’ve had our day. Good hunting —but you and your dashing admiral had better watch the Preacher!”
The lone tear fell, and she vanished once more.
And presently Kellon told the operator to try the Outstation again. Selene wasn’t everything. Tonight the world was at stake. His life, and hers. The Union, and S
unport. The game was being played, far out in the silent cold of space. Between an old man’s loyalty and a young one’s ruthless ambition. Between the old world he had conquered and one unknown. He could only wait for the issue. There was nothing else to do.
But the Outstation didn’t answer.
“Nothing, your genius,” the operator said. “There has been nothing from space since General Nordhorn was cut off.”
Wearily restless, Kellon rose from the desk. The dead men had been taken away. But he thought that the faint, sickening smell of death still hung in the room. He felt cold, and his big body was haunched with tension. And he felt desperately alone.
Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Page 16