Nor did these people look brutal, or barbarous, as Cameron would have expected. They were like anybody else save for their spirit of banter and their proud glances.
Cameron was still with wonder and a reorganization of conditioned ideas. He had been taught thus and so about the outlaws; what he saw did not confirm the teaching. He was confused and went quietly with his escort.
They led him into a long low building with opaque plastic walls, down a corridor bright with synthetic sunlight to a room which was built around a council table. It was obvious that this room played an important part in outlaw affairs, and Cameron studied it.
He had seen its counterpart, generally speaking, in all the Centers. His own office had been so constructed. But there were differences here, too, as there were in the people. This plastic had never come from Plastic Center; nor the floor covering from Textile; nor was the lighting characteristic of Power’s product.
Pier Duvain dismissed the two crew members who had accompanied them, waved Cameron and Willis to chairs, and sat across the polished table. His dark eyes held surface amusement, but fires glowed deeply, and his tone was not as casual as his words.
“I suppose you’d like to ask some questions.”
Cameron twisted his mouth. “Fat lot of good it would probably do.”
“Oh, yes,” Duvain said. “You’ll get answers. Correct, too. We’ll be glad to tell you anything.”
Cameron leaned forward. “All right. I’ll ask you a question. What are you intending to do with me?”
Duvain’s eyes were steady, unblinking, though not unpleasant. “That depends on you, and is not a subject to concern us yet.”
“Depends on me? How?”
“We won’t discuss it. Anything else, however, I’m willing to talk about for—” He glanced at a wall clock. “For twenty minutes.”
“Where are we?” Cameron asked.
“On an island in the Pacific.”
“I could see that.” Cameron’s voice rose. “You’ll tell me everything, you say. So I ask about what most concerns me, and you tell me nothing. Suppose I don’t ask questions. Suppose I just listen.”
Harvey Willis turned red-rimmed eyes and a conciliatory smile on Cameron. “Now, now, friend, no need to get worked up.”
“You and your outlaw doctor!” Cameron grated.
Willis shrugged. “I had to tell you something. That was as good as anything else.”
“There isn’t any doctor?”
Willis hesitated. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. Let’s say, rather, that he has not been successful as yet.”
His captors were silent while Cameron frowned at his folded hands. They waited, courteous but at ease, as if he were an honored guest. Presently he raised his eyes to Duvain’s.
“Look here, I’m confused. This seems to be more than a matter of accident or coincidence. For some reason you intercepted me and brought me here. Why me?”
“We need men like you, Josh Cameron. You have qualities of leadership. If you have other qualities as well, you can be of assistance.”
“In what?”
“In overthrowing the master-slave system in the Centers. In making all men equal.”
“You’re insane!” Cameron said.
“Do you really believe that, Cameron? Truly?”
Cameron studied the dark lean face. He remembered his first impression as Duvain came toward Fleetfin from his own plane; remembered the vitality, the arrogance, the self-assurance. These characteristics were more pronounced here at close range and were subordinate to some calm determination that radiated from steady eyes. Insane? Surely not.
“Well,” Cameron hedged, “what else would you call such a proposition?”
“You could call it fair. You could call it just.”
Cameron vented a short explosive sound of derision. “You sound like . . . when was it? . . . the eighteenth, twenty-first, or some other early century. All men equal! Fat chance!”
The outlaw was pleased. “You know history?”
Cameron remembered his pangs as Captain Robert Fane had confiscated his reading tapes. He didn’t mention them. “A little,” he said.
“Good! You won’t have to go through elementary training then. You know that there was a time when a man’s costume, or badge, or whatever, did not rigidly limit him to a certain social class. You remember?”
“They outgrew it, though,” Cameron replied.
“Didn’t they just!” Willis put in bitterly. “Look at me. I have a special purple. So I’m useless—because of the uniform and not because of actual disability. There are many productive jobs I could handle, but because I have this shade of uniform I’m barred from them. Look at you. You’re in civilian brown. Are you the same man you were?”
Cameron frowned. “From the standpoint of the State, no. I’m not the same. I have no authority any more.”
“Are you the same character, though? The same personality?”
“We-e-el,” Cameron said. “I suppose so. Listen, I see where your argument is leading, and I can’t refute it on your grounds. But I still say it’s wrong. We’ve been going along pretty well for several hundred years in this way.”
Willis spread his twisted hands, palms upward, and shrugged his shoulders. “What was good enough for father is good enough for you, eh? I can’t argue with stupidity.”
Cameron flushed, rose to his feet. “Quit patronizing me. I’m not a child, but I’m not a half-crazy idealist, either. I don’t subscribe to your theory. My primary interest in you is what you’re going to do with me. I’m your prisoner. Why do you bother to argue ? I wouldn’t if our positions were reversed.”
“Sit down, Cameron,” Duvain said quietly. “I thought you were intelligent enough to see the justice in our project. I still believe you are, but you’ll need to shed the master-slave conditioning first. We’re not going to do anything with you. You’re at liberty.”
Cameron remained on his feet. “I can go back?”
“To what?” Willis asked. “You’ll be shot down for breaking parole.”
He was right, Cameron reflected. Unless—
“Yes,” Cameron admitted, while a plan formed in his mind. If he were in a position to bargain, if he could expose the outlaws, they wouldn’t shoot him down. “I suppose you’re right,” he said with pretended despair. “I can’t go back, I guess. Well, you say you want me to help overthrow the Centers. How do you propose to go about it— and when?”
Duvain and Willis looked steadily at each other. There was tension between them, conflict. Friendly, yes, but deep and unyielding. Duvain’s dark eyes were like black plastic; Willis’, blobs of blue, circled with red.
“We have a difference of opinion,” Duvain answered. “One faction advocates violence, a quick thrust at the military. But another, headed by myself, contends that we should merely substitute one evil with another in that way. I have no definite plan to offer as yet, but I believe there is a way aside from killing off the opposition.”
“Look at Cameron,” Willis broke in. “You can’t educate him. Oh, in time you could, perhaps. But there are millions like him. It would take forever.”
Cameron was astonished. “Who’s the boss here, anyway?”
“I am nominally the president,” Duvain answered. “But each member of our organization has an equal vote.”
“That’s appalling!” Cameron exclaimed. “You’ll never accomplish anything. What kind of business do you call that?”
“We call it Democracy, Cameron.”
“Rubbish,” Cameron said. “Democracy is what we operate under in the Centers.”
Both Willis and Duvain loosed explosive laughter.
“We have a United States Congress, don’t we?” Cameron said. “We have a council in each Center, don’t we? They’re elected by the people.”
Duvain rose, a friendly smile on his dark face. “I wish I had time at the moment to argue the point, but I haven’t. I hesitate to leave you with Harvey because he’ll
convert you to his creed of violence. But—”
Cameron interrupted heatedly. “Why will anybody necessarily convert me to anything? I’m an individual, the same as you. Aside from theories, though, I don’t believe you could conquer the Centers. You’re not strong enough.”
“I’ll set you straight on that right now,” Duvain snapped. “Within twelve hours we could be in absolute control of all Centers. We are strong enough. This island is only our capital, so to speak. There are millions of us on the mainland, nomadic tribes living between Centers. Oh, we could conquer, all right.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“We have a difference of opinion as to procedure. But we’re in no terrific rush. The Centers will still be there when we’re ready.”
“You can’t break through their Shields.”
“We have. We do. We can.” Duvain glanced at the clock again. “I must go.”
“I’d like to ask one more question,” Cameron said. “How do you get through? How did you know about that shipment of Baltex?”
Duvain smiled, flicking his eyes at Willis. “Harvey’s sister knows about such things.”
“Ann Willis?” Cameron exclaimed. “So she’s the spy! No wonder she was going to turn me over to the military. But how—”
“She wasn’t,” Willis cut in. “When she reached for the phone she was going to call me. But when you hit her she decided to play unconscious and give you a chance to get away. You tied her almost too well. I barely made that plane.”
“But what if I’d gone somewhere else?”
“We had the other ports covered.”
Duvain said impatiently, “Look around, Cameron. See how we live. I’ll see you tonight.”
Cameron looked at Harvey Willis after Duvain was gone. “Well? What do I do now?”
Willis shrugged. “Whatever you like.”
Cameron marveled a little at their indifference. In one of the Centers—in Plastic for example—he would not have been willing to let a prisoner wander. He thought again that if the conditions were reversed—if he were the captor and Willis or Duvain the captive— another death would have been recorded before this.
He had this nebulous idea of escape. If, he reflected, he could expose Ann Willis, he might get back his job. He needed more information than he had now, for it would be his word against hers, and she was an executive. He needed proof of that destructive screen which he had seen in action.
“So you’re the head of the violent faction?” he asked Willis.
Willis apparently did not sense that Cameron was merely making conversation. He treated the question seriously, clasping his hands in that odd manner necessitated by their twisted condition.
“Yes, but I admit that I may be wrong. Pier has a great deal on his side.”
“Ah?”
“You, for example, friend Cameron.”
Cameron frowned. “I don’t get it.”
Willis smiled with faint amusement. “You don’t see it? You were discharged, according to the rules and regulations of our culture. But you rebelled.”
“I rebelled? Against what?”
“The master-slave set-up. You didn’t take your medicine like a loyal citizen. You set out to prove your innocence. To that degree, you rebelled against the culture.”
“But the charges were false!”
“Who believes that, besides you? Haven’t you seen others discharged when our obsolete councils lodged a criticism against them? Haven’t you accepted that procedure as just?”
“Yes, but—”
“But you’re different, eh? And so you are. You rebelled. You were an outlaw from the moment you decided to reinstate yourself. You are an outlaw.” Willis flared twisted fingers as Cameron formed a hot protest. “Think it over, Cameron. Look around. Go through our streets. Watch us. Then make up your mind.”
~ * ~
The differences Cameron had noted upon arrival—differences in attitude, architecture, and general feeling—between the outlaw capital and any Center were more apparent as he walked leisurely along the green streets which must look like grass from the air.
He did not enter any of the low, chameleonlike buildings. From some of these came sounds, as if those inside were manufacturing some article or another. Time to look into that later. At the moment he was interested in the people.
They wore a variety of dress, designed apparently to blend into the natural environment. The patterns were not standard, nor were social classes discernible as in the Centers. All walked as equals.
Cameron was distinctly uncomfortable in this unnatural absence of formality. When he was greeted pleasantly by some stranger who walked and talked like an executive, it was with effort that he restrained himself from saluting. He wanted to get away from this place.
He did so. He followed one of the streets paved with that strange substance as hard and smooth as Textile Center’s best, which curved along the base of a hill and came to an abrupt end at the forest edge. A path slanted off from this point and Cameron followed it into the quiet green gloom.
It took him through thick trees and between walls of underbrush. As he walked he pondered his situation. He was conscious of heavy odors and bird movements in trees about him, and though these were strange and would have been exciting under other conditions, he kept his eye on the rising path and pulled his brows together in thought.
Pier Duvain, he suddenly realized, was the answer to all his problems. If he could turn the outlaw chief over to constituted authorities, Cameron might ask what he wished of any Center. Pier Duvain was their big headache. Cure it, Cameron reflected, and any job he liked was his.
Accomplishment of this project presented difficulties, to be sure, but was all the more worth consideration. Cameron doubted his ability to capture the outlaw and return him go the mainland, but if he, Cameron, could escape by one means or another, he could lead authorities to this island.
He marched on, upward, oblivious of the occasional bird he flushed, or the occasional rabbit that fled into the underbrush, until he reached the top of the path. He stopped and caught his breath.
A beach on the eastern side of the island shone in morning sunlight below him. Moored to a pier, apparently unguarded, were several sleek water craft. Here was a means of escape!
He stood motionless, examining the pier and the boats for signs of life. He saw none, heard nothing but rustlings of the forest, faint slap-slap of waves against the plastic pilings. He began the descent along the twisting path.
Every nerve was strained. He strove to detect life aboard the craft, for it was incredible that they should be unguarded. He sifted all sound that came to him, and though much of it fell strangely upon his urban ears his instinct labeled it as strictly natural.
When he stood at the bottom of the path he searched the curving beach and the hill behind for watchers. Then he hailed the pier.
“Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?”
His shout cut off all bird cries, and an utter, weird stillness fell around him for a few seconds. Then the normal sounds began again and Cameron decided to make a run for the pier. If any unseen guard was behind him he might be able to make a quick escape. If he encountered anyone on the boats or pier he would adapt his actions to circumstances.
As he struck out through low bushes he frightened a cottontail rabbit. The little animal streaked ahead of Cameron as a shout rang out behind him.
“Stop!” a thin voice cried.
Cameron plunged ahead. He saw the rabbit jump erratically to one side, then back, and it seemed to him that it cried out in terror as he rushed toward it. Then it leaped straight for the beach—and vanished in a small but brilliant flash with a sharp crack like an explosion.
Cameron knew what had happened. He remembered the screen of invisible death into which Captain Jorgeson and the pilot of Fleetfin had plunged. Here was another. He tried to stop. He dug his heels in the slick grass. He slid. He threw himself to one side and grabbed a small bush.
/> This strained, pulled half out of the ground, but held. He sat up, heart pounding, and saw that no more than a yard beyond his feet, where beach and vegetation met, was a line of shifting sand. Dancing grains, as if a million tiny animals burrowed from below.
He sat quietly, regaining his breath, but almost jumped out of his shorts as a voice spoke in his ear.
“What’s the matter, sonny? Don’t you like it here?”
She was an old woman. Incredibly old, Cameron thought as he scanned her deeply lined face. Yet her eyes were bright and she stood erect as a young tree. Her legs were skinny but straight.
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