“After all,” he said, “I suppose this man is a citizen of the Federation now. Can we deny him his right of speech?”
Varn Allan’s blue eyes flashed hotly at him. Then she spoke to the images in the screen. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. But perhaps this will demonstrate the situation here more clearly. I have had no cooperation from the primitives, and my own subordinate is apparently trying to undermine my authority.”
The dark younger man of the four said impatiently, “This is not the occasion to hear complaints of administrative wrangling!”
Kenniston was glaring upward at the quartet on Vega’s faraway world who seemed to hold the fate of Middletown in their hands. He demanded, “Are you the executive committee responsible for the evacuation order?”
The oldest man said to him quietly, “There is no need for truculence. Yes, we are that committee.” He glanced at Varn Allan. “I think, Allan, that since the interruption has been made, we may as well clear this thing up now.”
Varn Allan shrugged, and Lund’s smile broadened a little.
Kenniston said, “I’m sorry, but there isn’t time for politeness. In a few minutes my people are going to fire on your ships. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want my people killed, nor yours.”
The old man answered, “There will be no killing. The paralysis ray, used at full potency, can immobilize your whole population without harm.”
Kenniston shook his head. “That’s only a postponement. When they come to again they will fight. That is what I must make you understand.
As long as my people live they will fight to stay on Earth!”
The ring of utter truth in his passionate cry seemed to disturb them deeply. And the white-furred Spican said slowly, “It may be so. Some of my own people still have such an illogical attachment to one planet.”
Lund spoke up, his tone smooth and deferential. “That is the point of basic psychology which I have been trying to make with Administrator Allan.”
Varn Allan said icily, “If you have a suggestion to make, I shall be glad to hear it.”
“Of course,” said Lund, “it’s quite impossible to allow these people to remain on Earth. To do so would establish a fatal precedent for other waning planets whose populations must be transferred. But my idea—”
Whatever Lund had been going to say was lost, for Kenniston drowned him out. “The hell with your ideas!” He moved closer to the screen. “I ask you to revoke the order for evacuation.”
The old man spread his hands in a weary gesture of negation. “That is out of the question.”
“Then,” said Kenniston harshly, “I appeal your decision to the Board of Governors in full session!”
That startled them all. They stared at him, and Lund said, “So the savage has learned a little law!” Then he laughed. “But of course—Gorr Holl and his friends have been coaching him.”
Varn Allan came up to Kenniston, “This is a waste of time,” she said. “The Board of Governors will issue the same ruling.”
“Quite so,” said the dark brusque man in the screen. “It’s merely a stratagem to gain time.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Spican, regarding Kenniston with faint amusement in his slit-pupiled eyes, “his demand is perfectly legal.”
The old man sighed. “Yes.” He looked at Kenniston. “I am forced by Federation law to grant your right of appeal. But I warn you that Administrator Allan is right. The Board will ratify our decision.”
“Until they do,” Kenniston pressed, “I demand that you withdraw from Earth the ships that have created this critical situation.”
The old man nodded reluctantly. “That too is a legitimate demand. The ships will be recalled temporarily to Vega. And you will come with them, since all appeals to the Board of Governors must be made in person.”
In person? The significance of the two casual words hit Kenniston staggeringly, replacing his dawning hope with a breathless and more personal emotion.
Those two words meant—they meant leaving Earth, he, John Kenniston, going out into the dark abyss, out across half the starry universe on a forlorn hope. Out to an incredibly distant and alien world, to plead the cause of Middletown to alien ears, with all the odds against him! He knew now what Gorr Holl had meant, “—with your background, it won’t be easy.”
Varn Allan’s crisp voice was challenging him. “Do you agree to go?
Say quickly—there’s little time left to notify your people before they attack.”
Mention of that imminent attack that meant irrevocable disaster to his people, steadied Kenniston. He had to avert that, at any cost or risk.
He drew a long breath. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’ll go.”
“In that case, Administrator Allan,” said the old man, “you will take your ships off in not more than two hours.” He rose, signing that the interview was closed. “I shall notify the Board of Governors.”
The screen went blank. Varn Allan looked at Kenniston and said, “You had better go and tell your people, at once.”
He knew, as he went out, that she was very angry. But Lund seemed strangely pleased.
* * *
With what speed he could muster, Kenniston went back across the desert toward the portal, and with every step he took the incredible reality of his commitment beat into his mind.
“You’re going away from Earth. You’re going to get into a ship, that ship, and step clear off the Earth, out to the stars—”
Just the realization of it gave him a feeling of vertigo, a shuddering recoil, and he knew that he had to keep his mind away from what it would be like in that ship, in space—he had to avoid anticipation or the impact of it would be too much for him.
Soldiers met him well outside the portal, raising their rifles but lowering them again when they recognized him. Beyond them, the red dust was flying from laboring shovels and the gun limbers were being wrestled into place.
“What’s going on out there?” cried a sergeant. “Are those ships going to attack? Are—”
“Where’s the Mayor?” Kenniston interrupted. “Back inside the portal. They’re all there, waiting.” Kenniston pushed past them, between the half-dug trenches, and saw Hubble and most of the Council grouped around Mayor Garris just inside the dome.
Most of Middletown’s people seemed crowded in the background, held back by rope barriers. They weren’t shouting now, their faces looked anxious, and he knew that that demonstration of the paralysis ray’s power had cooled down their rage and given them something to worry about.
Garris’ plump face was haggard with strain too, and he greeted Kenniston with a suspicious scowl. “What brought you back? I thought you’d stay out there with your friends.”
Kenniston’s temper, tightened by the weight of the thing he was going to do, let go. “For Christ’s sake,” he snarled, “I’ve been fighting to save your necks. I’ve even agreed to go out to Vega to do it, and this is the kind of reception I get!” Then he was ashamed of his outburst, and got a grip on his nerves. “Listen to me. Those ships are leaving. They’re leaving inside of two hours, and I’m going with them. I’m appealing this whole evacuation question to their Board of Governors.”
A wondering silence fell upon them all. They stared at him, all their faces except Hubble’s uncomprehending.
Hubble exclaimed, “Good God, Ken—you, to Vega? But will it do any good?”
“I’m hoping so,” Kenniston said. He ignored the others, speaking to Hubble as he rapidly explained. “So there’s a chance that I can make them understand our case, and let us alone.”
Mayor Garris had only now begun to understand, apparently. His face had changed—there was an eager hopefulness in it now, a hopefulness dawning also on the faces of Borchard and Moretti and the others.
Kenniston realized then just how hopeless they had all been before his coming. They, and the soldiers, and the people of Middletown, were still ready to fight evacuation, but the futility of such a fight had been made clear to
them by the power of the ray, they had known they must fight a battle foredoomed to failure, and now he had brought them a hope at least of another way out.
“Well, now,” said Garris, a little unsteadily, “that’s the way I’ve wanted it all along. Due course of law, peaceful debate… It was just that I couldn’t let them force our people…” He broke off, seizing Kenniston’s hand. “You’ll do your best for us out there, Kenniston, I know that! They can’t all be as stubborn as that blasted woman!”
And, almost unmanned by his relief, Garris turned and cried out to the anxious crowd, “It’s all right, folks, there’s not going to be any fighting right now. Mr. Kenniston’s going to go clear out to where those people come from and put this thing to their government! He’s going to ask a square deal for us!”
There was cheering, during which the Mayor’s high color began to fade back to its original pallor as a new thought struck him.
He said to Kenniston, “But if anyone’s going out there to represent us, maybe as Mayor—” Kenniston really admired him as he struggled to get out those last awful words—“as Mayor, I ought to go?”
Kenniston shook his head. “You’re needed right here, Mr. Garris. And besides, you don’t speak the language, so there wouldn’t be any use in your going.”
“That’s so,” said the Mayor, beginning to breathe again. “Of course, that’s so. Yes, indeed. Now, Kenniston, what can we do to help you? Anything—”
“No, there’s nothing,” said Kenniston. “I haven’t much time. I only need to get a few things, and to say goodbye to someone. Hubble, will you come with me?”
Hubble came. And behind them, as they hurried back into town, they heard the Mayor shouting, and heard the rising voice of relief and jubila-tion from the people.
They had seen themselves about to be beaten in a hopeless fight against weapons they couldn’t combat, those people. And now, suddenly, there wasn’t going to be any fight, the ships were going away, one of their own was going out and convince the star-folk that they couldn’t shove Earth people around, everything was going to be all right!
Kenniston groaned. “I wish they weren’t so God-damned sure! This is only a reprieve.”
“What are our chances, Ken?” Hubble asked him. “Between us.”
“Honest to God, Hubble, I don’t know! I’ve got us into a big undercov-er struggle that I don’t half understand yet.” He told Hubble what Gorr Holl had said, and added, “Gorr and the humanoids are on our side, but maybe they’re only using me as a catspaw. Anyway, I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will,” said Hubble. “I wish I were going with you—but I’m too old, and I’m needed here.” He added, “I’ll get Carol while you pack.”
The nightmare unreality of it hit Kenniston again as he hastily got his few necessaries together. It was just like packing for an overnight run to Pittsburgh or Chicago, instead of for a trip across the galaxy. It couldn’t be really going to happen… Carol’s face, when she came, didn’t help him. There was no color in it at all, and when he took her in his arms and tried to explain, she only whispered, “No, Ken—no! You can’t go! You’re not like them—you’ll die out there!”
“I won’t die, and I can maybe help us all,” he told her. “Carol, listen—if I can do this, if I can find a way out for us, it’ll make up a little for our work that brought this whole thing on Middletown, won’t it? Won’t it?”
She wasn’t even listening to him. She was searching his face, her hands clinging to him painfully, and she said suddenly, “You want to go.”
“Want to?” said Kenniston. “I’m scared stiff! My skin is crawling right now! But I’ve got to.”
“You want to go,” she said again, and looked at him, he thought, as though she finally saw clearly a barrier between them. “That’s the difference between us, it’s always been the difference. I only want the old things, the old, loved ways. You want the new.”
Time was running out, and a sort of despair was in him, and it made him grasp her with a rough male masterfulness, and hold her fiercely against the intangible tide that was sweeping them apart.
“I’m going, to do what I can for us all, and I’m coming back the same, and you’re going to be waiting for me, Carol! You hear?”
He kissed her, and she returned his kiss with a curious tenderness as if she were never going to see him again and was remembering all the good days that they had had together. And when he let her go, her eyes were bright with tears.
He went with Hubble toward the portal, and now the whole city was vibrant with a new hopefulness and excitement, that centered upon himself. But he was quaking with the realization of what he was going toward, he hardly saw the crowded faces that watched him with a mixture of anxious hope and of awe, he hardly heard the voices that shouted,
“Good luck, Mr. Kenniston!” and “You tell ’em out there, Mr. Kenniston! You tell ’em!”
Kenniston went on, out of the domed city and across the plain, and the black, strange belly of the Thanis took him in.
Chapter 15
MISSION FOR EARTH
He would not show fear. They expected him to do so, they were watching him with sidelong glances of interest and amused expectation. But Kenniston clenched his fists inside his jacket pockets, and resolved fiercely to disappoint them.
He was afraid, yes. It was one thing to read and talk and speculate on flying space. It was another and much more frightening thing to do it, to step off the solid Earth, to rush and plunge and fall through the world-less emptiness.
He stood there with Gorr Holl and Piers Eglin in the bridge of the Thanis, looking ahead through the curving view windows, and a cold sickness clutched at his vitals.
“It isn’t the way I expected it to be,” he said unsteadily. “Only those stars ahead—”
He fought against the impulse to clutch for support. He wouldn’t do that, while the bronzed star-men behind him were curiously watching him.
The deep humming and slight quivering of the great fabric around him were the only evidence that the Thanis was moving.
Directly ahead, Kenniston looked at a depthless black in which fierce stars flared like lamps. The blue-hot beacon of Vega centered that vista, and up from it blazed the stars of the time-distorted Lyre and Aquila, crossed on the upper left by the glittering sun-drift of the Milky Way.
Only that section of sky ahead was clear. The rest of the firmament, ex-tending back from it, was an increasingly blurred vista of warped star-light whose rays seemed to twitch, jerk and dance.
Gorr Holl nodded toward the bank of controls behind which four men sat. “You know the principle of propulsion? Reaction rays many times faster than light, pushing back against the cosmic dust of space.”
Kenniston sighed. “I feel ignorant as a child. The possibility of such rays was wholly unsuspected, in my day. And Einstein’s equations proved that if matter moved faster than light, it would expand indefinitely.”
Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling chuckle. “Your Einstein was a great scientist, but we’ve opened up new fields of knowledge since then. The mass control that prevents that expansion, and other things.”
Kenniston was only half listening. He was looking at the blue-white eye of Vega, glaring arrogantly at him from the great drift of spangled stars. And looking at it somehow made him sense their awful speed, their nightmare fall through the infinite.
It was worse than the takeoff, and he had not thought that anything could be worse than that. If he lived forever, he would never forget those last still minutes, strapped into a recoil chair, trying to relax and not succeeding, listening to ringing alarm bells, watching the blinking of lights, feeling the deep quivering of the ship as it gathered itself for the outward leap, his heartbeats choking him and the icy sweat running, trying to tell himself that it was no different from taking off in a plane… And then the lift, the pressure, the instinctive gasp for breath, the terrible claustrophobia of being shut into a moving thing over which he had no control.
He could not know yet by what mastery of science the occupants of the ship were shielded from the enormous pressures of that acceleration.
Yet shielded they were, for the pressure was not so much worse than that in a fast ascending elevator. It was the knowledge that Earth was falling irretrievably away that made the lift horrible. He could hear the whisper and the hiss and then the scream of air against the cleaving hull, and then almost at once it was gone. He was in space. And he was sick with the age-old fear of abysses and of falling. He thought of the emptiness that lay beneath his feet, beyond that thin floor of metal, and he shut his teeth hard on his tongue to keep from screaming.
“Don’t think about it,” Gorr Holl had said. “And remember, there’s a first time for all of us! I thought I wouldn’t live through my own first takeoff.” He had helped Kenniston get to his feet. “Let’s go up on the bridge. You might as well get it all over with at once.”
And so they had come to the bridge, and Kenniston had looked into outer space where the great Suns burned unveiled and there was neither air nor cloud to hide them. And he had got hold of himself, because he was too proud to do what he wanted to do, which was to get down on his belly and whimper like a dog.
He tried now to visualize the ordeal that awaited him there at Vega where he must plead the cause of little Middletown to the Governors of the stars. How could he make people who traveled casually in ships like this one, understand the passionate devotion of his own people to their little, ancient planet?
Yet if he failed to do so, he would fail the people of Middletown, who had such hope in his mission. That was what he had to think about—not space, nor his sensations about it, but the task he had ahead of him.
He glanced at Gorr Holl and said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”
They left Piers Eglin there and went below again, and when they were in the main corridor, alone, Kenniston said, “All right, Gorr. I want to know what I’ve got myself in on.”
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