“What does he say?” Chtexa’s voice said.
“That he does not acknowledge the Law of the Whole, and will not come home,” Ruiz-Sanchez told the microphone. The little instrument was slippery with sweat in his palm. “And he says to bid you farewell.”
“Farewell, then,” Chtexa said. “And farewell to you, too, Ruiz-Sanchez. I am at fault, and this fills me with sorrow; but it is too late. I may not talk to you again, even by means of your marvelous instrument.”
Behind the voice, the strange, half-familiar whine rose to a savage, snarling scream which lasted almost a minute. RuizSanchez waited until he thought he could be heard over it again.
“Why not, Chtexa?” he said huskily. “The fault is ours as much as it is yours. I am still your friend, and wish you well.”
“And I am your friend, and wish you well,” Chtexa’s voice said. “But we may not talk again. Can you not hear the power saws?”
So that was what that sound was!
“Yes. Yes, I hear them.”
“That is the reason,” Chtexa said. “Your friend Xlevher is cutting down the Message Tree.”
The gloom was thick in the Michelis apartment. As the time drew closer for Egtverchi’s next broadcast, it became increasingly apparent that their analysis of the UN’s essential helplessness had been correct. Egtverchi was not openly triumphant, though he was exposed to that temptation in several newspaper interviews; but he floated some disquieting hints of vast plans which might well be started in motion when he was next on the air.
Ruiz-Sanchez had not the least desire to listen to the broadcast, but he had to face the fact that he would be unable to stay away from it. He could not afford to be without any new data that the program might yield. Nothing he had learned had done him any good thus far, but there was always the slim chance that something would turn up.
In the meantime, there was the problem of Cleaver, and his associates. However you looked at it, they were human souls. If Ruiz-Sanchez were to be driven, somehow, to the step that Hadrian VIII had commanded, and it did not fail, more than a set of attractive hallucinations would be lost. It would plunge several hundred human souls into instant death and more than probable damnation; Ruiz-Sanchez did not believe that the hand of God would reach forth to pluck to salvation men who were involved in such a project as Cleaver’s, but he was equally convinced that his should not be the hand to condemn any man to death, let alone to an unshriven death. Ruiz was condemned already—but not yet of murder.
It had been Tannhäuser who had been told that his salvation was as unlikely as the blossoming of the pilgrim’s staff in his hand. And Ruiz-Sanchez’ was as unlikely as sanctified murder.
Yet the Holy Father had commanded it; had said it was the only road back for Ruiz-Sanchez, and for the world. The Pope’s clear implication had been that he shared with Ruiz-Sanchez the view that the world stood on the brink of Armageddon— and he had said flatly that only Ruiz-Sanchez could avert it. Their only difference was doctrinal, and in these matters the Pope could not err. . .
But if it was possible that the dogma of the infertility of Satan was wrong, then it was possible that the dogma of Papal infallibility was wrong. After all, it was a recent invention; quite a few Popes in history had got along without it.
Heresies, Ruiz-Sanchez thought—not for the first time— come in snarls. It is impossible to pull free one thread; tug at one, and the whole mass begins to roll down upon you.
I believe, O Lord; help me in mine unbelief. But it was useless. It was as though he were praying to God’s back.
There was a knock on his door. “Coming, Ramon?” Michelis’ tired voice said. “He’s due to go on in two minutes.”
“All right, Mike.”
They settled before the Klee, warily, already defeated, awaiting —what? It could only be a proclamation of total war. They were ignorant only of the form it would take.
“Good evening,” Egtverchi said warmly from the frame. “There will be no news tonight. Instead of reporting news, we will make some. The time has come, it is now plain, for the people to whom news happens—those hapless people whose grief-stricken, stunned faces look out at you from the newspapers and the 3-V ’casts such as mine—to throw off their helplessness. Tonight I call upon all of you to show your contempt for the hypocrites who are your bosses, and your total power to be free of them.
“You have a message for them. Tell them this: tell them, ‘Your beasts, sirs, are a great people.’
“I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I will be a citizen—”
Michelis was on his feet, shouting incoherently.
“—a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind. I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.
“You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse to obey. Nobody has the right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity is the key. Renounce, resist, deny!
“Begin now. In half an hour they will overwhelm you. When—”
An urgent buzzer sounded over Egtverchi’s voice, and for an instant a checkerboard pattern in red and black blotted out his figure: the UN’s crash-priority signal, overriding the by-pass recording circuit. Then the face of the UN man looked out at them from under its funny hat, with Egtverchi underlying it dimly, his exhortations only a whisper in the background.
“Dr. Michelis,” the UN man said exultantly. “He’s done it. He’s overreached himself. As a non-citizen, he’s right in our hands. Get down here—we need you right away, before he gets off the air. Dr. Meid too.”
“What for?”
“To sign pleas of nolo contendere. Both of you are under arrest for keeping a wild animal—a technicality only; don’t be alarmed. But we have to have you. We mean to put Mr. Egtverchi in a cage for the rest of his life—a soundproof cage.”
“You are making a mistake,” Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.
The UN man’s face, a mask of triumph with blazing eyes, swung toward him briefly.
“I didn’t ask what you thought, Mister,” he said. “I have no orders concerning you, but as far as I’m concerned, you’ve been closed out of this case entirely. If you try to force your way back in, you’ll get burned. Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid? Do we have to come and get you?”
“We’ll come,” Michelis said stonily. “Sign off.” He did not wait for the UN man, however, but killed the set himself.
“Do you think we should do it, Ramon?” he said. “If not, we’ll stay right here, and the hell with him. Or we’ll take you along if you want.”
“No, no,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Go ahead. No balking on your part will accomplish a thing but getting you both in deep trouble. Do me one favor, though.”
“Gladly. What is it?”
“Stay off the streets. When you get to the UN offices, make them keep you there. As arrested citizens, you have the right to be jailed.”
Michelis and Liu both stared at him. Then comprehension began to break over Michelis’ face.
“You think it will be that bad?” he said.
“Yes, I do. Do I have your promise?”
Michelis looked at Liu and nodded grimly. They went out.
The collapse of the Shelter state had already begun.
XVIII
The beast Chaos roared on unslaked for three days. RuizSanchez was able to follow much of its progress from the beginning, via the Michelises’ 3-V set. There were times when he would also have liked to look out over the sun porch rail, but the roar of the mob, the shots, explosions, police whistles, sirens, and unnamable noises had driven the bees frantic; unde
r such conditions he would not have trusted Liu’s protective garments for an instant, even had they been large enough for him.
The UN squads had made a well-organized attempt to bear Egtverchi off directly from the broadcasting station, but Egtverchi was not there—in fact, he had never been there at all. The audio, video and tri-di signals had all been piped into the station via co-axial cable from some unspecified place. The necessary connections had been made at the last minute, when it became obvious that Egtverchi was not going to show up, by a technician who had volunteered word of the actual situation; a sacrifice piece in Egtverchi’s gambit. The network had sent an alert to the proper UN officers at once, but another sacrifice piece saw to it that the alert was shunted through channels.
It took nearly all night to sweat out of the QBC technician the location of Egtverchi’s studio (the stooge at the UN obviously did not know) and by that time, of course, he was no longer there either. Also by that time, the news of the attempted arrest and the misfire was being blared and headlined in every Shelter in the world.
Even this much did not get to Ruiz-Sanchez until somewhat later, for the noise in the street began immediately after the first announcement had been made. At first it was disconnected and random, as though the streets were gradually filling with people who were angry or upset but were divided over what, if anything, they ought to do about it. Then there was a sudden change in the quality of the sound, and instantly Ruiz-Sanchez knew that the transformation from a gathering to a mob had been made. The shouting could not very well have become any louder, but abruptly it was a frightening uniform growl, like the enormous voice of a single animal.
He had no way of knowing what had triggered the change, and perhaps the crowd itself never knew either. But now the shots began—not many, but one shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before. A part of the overall roar detached itself and took on an odd and even more frightening hollow sound; only when the floor shook slightly under him did he realize what that meant.
A pseudopod of the beast had thrust itself into the building. Ruiz-Sanchez realized that he should have expected nothing else. The fad of living above ground was still essentially a privilege, reserved to those UN employees and officials who knew how to get the necessary and elaborate permissions, and who furthermore had enough income to support such an inconvenient arrangement; it was the twenty-first century’s version of commuting from Maine—here was where they lived—
Ruiz-Sanchez checked the door hastily. It had elaborate locks—left over from the last period of the Shelter race, when the great untended buildings had been natural targets for looters—but they had gone unused for years. Ruiz-Sanchez used them all now.
He was just in time. There was an obscene shouting in the corridor just outside as part of the mob burst into it from the fire stairs. They had avoided the elevator by instinct—it was too slow to sustain their thoughtless ferocity, too confined for lawlessness, too mechanical for men who were letting their muscles do their thinking.
Somebody rattled the door knob and then shook it. “Locked,” a muffled voice said.
“Break the damned thing down. Here, get out of the way—” The door shuddered, but held easily. There was another, harder thump, as though several men had lunged against it at the same time; Ruiz-Sanchez could hear them grunt with the impact. Then there were five hammerlike blows.
“Open up in there! Open up, you lousy government fink, or we’ll burn you out!”
The spontaneous threat seemed to surprise them all, even the utterer. There was a confused whispering. Then someone said hoarsely: “All right, but find some paper or something.”
Ruiz-Sanchez thought confusedly of finding and filling a bucket, though he could not see how any fire could be introduced around the door—there was no transom, and the sill was snug—but at the same time a blurred shout from farther down the hall seemed to draw everyone outside stampeding away. The subsequent noises made it clear that they had found either an open, empty apartment, or an inadequately secured, occupied one where nobody was at home. Yes, it was occupied; Ruiz-Sanchez could hear them breaking furniture as well as windows.
Then, with a shock of terror, their voices began to come at him from behind his back. He whirled, but there seemed to be nobody in the apartment; the shouting was coming from the glassed-in sun porch, but of course there was nobody out there either—
“Jesus! Look, the guy’s got his porch glassed in. It’s a goddam garden.”
“They don’t let you have no goddam gardens in the Shelters.”
“And you know who paid for it. Us, that’s who.”
He realized that they were on the neighboring balcony. He felt a surge of relief which he knew to be irrational. The next words confirmed its irrationality.
“Get some of that kindling out here. No, heavier stuff. Something to throw, you meathead.”
“Can we get over there from here?”
“If we could throw a ladder across there—”
“It’s a long way down—”
The leg of a chair burst through the glass on the sun porch. A heavy vase followed.
The bees came pouring out. Ruiz-Sanchez had not realized how many of them there were. The porch was black with them. For a moment they hovered uncertainly. They would have found the gaps in the glass almost at once in any event, but the men on the next porch, who could not have understood what it was they were seeing, gave the great insects the perfect cue. Something small and massive, possibly a torn-off piece of plumbing, shattered another pane and whirled through the midst of the cloud. Snarling like an old-fashioned aircraft engine, the bees swarmed.
There was an instant of dead silence across the way, and then a scream of agony and horror that made Ruiz-Sanchez’ gut contort violently. Then they were all screaming. Briefly, he saw one of them, leaping straight out into space, his arms flailing, his head and chest swathed in golden-and-black furry bodies. Feet drummed past the door, and someone fell. The heavy buzzing threaded its way along the corridor after them.
From below, there were more screams. The great insects could not fly in the open air, but they were free in the building now. Some of them might even make it all the way down to the street, by descending the stairwell.
After a while, there were no human sounds left in the building, only the pervasive insect snarl. Outside the door, somebody moaned and was silent.
Ruiz-Sanchez knew what he had to do. He went into the kitchen and vomited, and then he crammed himself into Liu’s beekeeper’s togs.
He was no longer a priest; indeed, he was no longer even a Catholic. Grace had been withdrawn from him. But it is the duty of any person to administer extreme unction if he knows how, as it is the duty of any person to administer baptism if he knows how. What happened to the soul so ministered to when it departed would be disposed by the Lord God, Who disposes all things; but He had commanded that no soul come before Him unshriven.
The man before the door was already dead. Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself out of habit and stepped over the body, his eyes averted. A man who has died of massive histamine shock is not an edifying sight.
The open apartment had been thoroughly smashed up. There were three bodies there, all beyond help. The door to the kitchen, however, was closed; if one of them had had the sense to barricade himself in there before the swarm got to him, he might have been able to kill the few bees who had come in with him—
As if in confirmation, there was a groan behind the door. Ruiz-Sanchez pushed at it, but it was partly locked. He got it open about six inches and wormed through.
The contorted man on the floor, his incredibly puffed, taut skin slowly turning black, his eyes glassy with agony, was Agronski.
The geologist did not recognize him; he was already beyond that. There was no mind behind the eyes. Ruiz-Sanchez fell to his knees, clumsily in the tight protective clothing. He heard himself begin to mutter the rites, but he was no more hearing the Latin words than Agronski was.
This could be no coincidence. He had come here to give grace, if such a one as he could still give grace; and before him was the most blameless of the Lithian commission, struck down where Ruiz-Sanchez would be sure to find him. It was the God of Job who was abroad in the world now, not the God of the Psalmist or the Christ. The face that was bent upon Ruiz-Sanchez was the face of the avenging, the jealous God— the God Who made hell before He made man, because He knew that He would have need of it. That terrible truth Dante had written down; and in the black face with the protruding tongue which rolled beside Ruiz-Sanchez’ knee, he saw that Dante had been right, as every Catholic who reads the Divine Comedy knows in his heart of hearts.
There is a demonolater abroad in the world. He shall be deprived of grace, and then called upon to administer extreme unction to a friend. By this sign, let him know himself for what he is.
After a while, Agronski was dead, choked to death by his own tongue.
But still it was not over. It was necessary now to make Mike’s apartment secure, kill any bees that might have got in, see to it that the escaped swarm died. It was easy enough. Ruiz-Sanchez simply papered over the broken panes on the sun porch. The bees could not feed anywhere but in Liu’s garden; they would come back there within a few hours; denied entrance, they would die of starvation an hour or so later. A bee is not a welldesigned flying-machine; it keeps itself in the air by expending energy—in short, by pure brute force. A trapped bumblebee can starve to death in half a day, and Liu’s tetraploid monsters would die far sooner of their freedom.
The 3-V muttered away throughout the dreary business. The terror was not local, that was clear. The Corridor Riots of 1993 had been nothing but a premonitory flicker, compared to this.
Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi’s uniformed thugs, suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized their control centers. At the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million people as hostages for Egtverchi’s safe-conduct, with the active collusion of perhaps five million of them. The violence elsewhere was not as systematic —though some of the outbursts of wrecking must have been carefully planned to allow for the placing of the explosives alone, there seemed to be no special pattern to it—but in no case could it be described as “passive” or “non-violent.”
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 59