On the Run (Mankind on the Run)

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Well, now's the time," said McElroy. "Files is licked. The Police are licked. We're up against something now Files can't check. It's up to you."

  Again the look of pain crossed Chase's face. Slowly he shook his head.

  McElroy stared.

  "No?" he cried, like a man who has just heard his own death warrant read aloud.

  "David—" said the old man, with effort, "we haven't anything for you. You don't know—"

  "I know you've had a hundred years!" said McElroy, furiously.

  "David," said the old man again, "you don't understand. A hundred years ago. we knew, here in our Project, that occasionally a rare individual was able to do things in apparent contravention of physical laws. Today, after all those years since they gathered us and isolated us here to work for a solution, we only know those same things are being done not in contravention, but outside the ordinary laws of physics."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's—not easy to explain. When these things happen-when we make them happen—there's no transfer of energy. The causes and effects operate below the level of energy; that's why we call this Sub-E, Sub-Energy. We've discovered a new field of science. We've found out that the physical laws can be merely the manifestations of a philosophy of the individual mind. Through the system of that philosophy the physical universe can be partially manipulated. But by each person only for himself. For example, I can walk through walls; but I couldn't take you by the hand and lead yo"u through them. That's both the blessing and the curse on this Sub-E of ours, because on account of that aspect of it, it can't ever be used to hurt someone else—but by the same token, it can't be used to help them, either."

  McElroy leaned forward, his face etched with passion.

  "Then teach people how to use it for themselves!" he said.

  "If we only could!" answered Chase. "If we only knew how! But that's just what we don't know. For those who already have the ability, we can do a lot. We can teach them and train them to large and complicated uses of their talent. But to kindle the fire of it in a cold mind—that's the thing we've never succeeded in doing, even with some of our own people in the Project that've been with us from the beginning. Rarely, an adult individual gets it—suddenly and without warning from nowhere, the way Kil—" he looked at Kil, "—did. Children always get it—they seem to accept it instinctively if they're raised as ours are, with adults who have it. But those already grown up can't—" he stopped and lifted his hands hopelessly.

  "Can't? Why not? What does it take anyway?"

  "It takes," Chase stumbled, "an act of will, of faith somehow. You've got to believe you can do what you want to do, without reservation. Children can believe that way because they build their world on faith. Adults—" again he stopped; and shook his head.

  McElroy stayed planted before him.

  "You must!" he said between clenched teeth. "You must—" Chase shook his head.

  "We can't," he answered. "David, do you think we want people to have this any less than you do? It's just that we haven't found the answer, where it lies. And all we can do is go on looking for it."

  "But there's no more time—" McElroy broke off, biting his lower lip. Chase looked intently at him.'

  "Why not?" he asked. "Why not more time?"

  McElroy opened his mouth; then hesitated. He closed it again. Behind them the door through which Kil and he and Ellen had just entered swung open once more.

  "Won't you tell them, then, Dave?" asked a new voice, from beyond it. "Then I'll have to."

  All the eyes in the room swung about, to look. The door was ajar; and, as they watched, slowly and ponderously through the opening, entering one by one with due care not to touch each other, came two figures completely encased in glittering magnetic armor. Oxygen tanks hung from their backs, the voice of the one that spoke coming from a speaker chest-high on the smaller of the two, a slim and pleasant looking young man. Beside him, the larger, a gigantic man, held, in addition, the heavy, awkward shape of an oxygen-catalyst flame thrower, the one unstoppable weapon capable of cooking a man, even inside the magnetic armor. For all its brutal size and weight the big man held it casually in one hand. For the big man was Toy; and the smaller man was Mali.

  Silence held the room. Fantastically, the audience was not disturbed or alarmed. The odd, fear-free faces of the seated people rested on Mali and Toy only with surprise and curiosity until Mali, who had been running his eye along the front row of seats, pointed to one old man.

  "Try him," he said.

  Toy swung the muzzle of his weapon up and pressed the trigger. Kil saw sudden fear leap into the eyes of the man and understood suddenly that this must be one of the original project members who had never achieved Sub-E. But, even as he tensed to jump forward, Ellen was quicker. In the same second, she had stepped in front of the old man. The white, spurting flame struck her, wrapped her, and flared ceilingward, holding her for one brief second in its roaring heart like some new, slender phoenix, fire-triumphant, burning yet unconsumed. Then Toy released the trigger, the flame and roaring Vanished; and Mali chuckled in the sudden stillness.

  "Just testing," he said, lightly. "You can throw that away now, Toy."

  The giant tossed the thrower from him. It fell loudly and heavily on the polished dark floor of the amphitheater and rolled twice to a stop.

  "Who're you?" demanded Chase. The old man's face was white with horror and anger.

  "The one Dave didn't want to tell you about," Mali smiled at him. "My name's Mali, and I head the combined Societies. I followed Kil here." He nodded across the space that separated them. "Hello, Kil."

  Kil looked grimly back at him.

  "Melee's dead," he said, bluntly.

  For a second, a thin film gauzed over Mali's eyes. They seemed to go blind and opaque, like the eyes of a man who turns inward to gaze at his own soul.

  "Yes—on Tuesday, wasn't it?" he murmured. "I turned around for just a moment in the corridor—and she was gone-just last Tuesday—"

  A shiver trembled him for a moment. Then his eyes cleared and he looked back at Kil and smiled.

  "You've been a good guide," he said. "We planted a small tracer set in the bone behind your left ear during the Search. Didn't you feel anything there when you woke up? We've never been far behind you since."

  "I want to know what you're doing here?" snapped Chase.

  Mali looked at him.

  "I've come to collect this last piece of my world," he said. "Collect your world?" Chase stared at him, dumbfounded. "My world," replied Mali. He looked at McElroy. "Eh, Dave?"

  McElroy's eyes were ice behind which banked fires burned.

  "Yes," he said, expressionlessly.

  "I don't understand you," said Chase.

  "Do you see this?" asked Mali. He moved his hand to his waist. The magnetic field covering his fingers flowed into the magnetic field about his body; and the fingers closed on a small, tan box at his belt, the thumb resting on a little button atop the box. "If I push this down, it'll send out a signal that will result in certain—mechanisms being put into action at various points about the .world. And once that's done, you won't have to worry any longer about the people who don't have Sub-E."

  Chase stared at him, puzzled.

  "This is nonsense," he said.

  "No. Remember the Lucky War? Remember what Files and the Police were set up to guard against? Well, you waited too long to take over from them. That's what Dave here was trying to tell you. Whether the world lives or dies is up to me." '

  Chase's wrinkled eyelids slowly drew up and back. His eyes opened and his face stiffened. Slowly, as if with great effort, he turned his head from Mali to look at McElroy.

  "David," he said, "this can't be true—"

  "Why not?" said McElroy, in a dead voice. "Why do you think I—the Police would admit we're licked? Why do you think he's so sure of himself?" He stood slightly spraddle-legged, shoulders hunched a little, head thrust forward, his gaze burning on Mali.

/>   "But—" Chase turned back to Mali and his voice struggled. "You couldn't. It'd be wholesale murder—you wouldn't—"

  "Why wouldn't he, Chase? Why wouldn't he?" said McElroy, his gaze still fixed on Mali. "They are CH bombs?"

  "Of course," answered Mali. "Didn't you know?"

  "Not in details," said McElroy.

  Chase was staring at Mali in horror.

  "What right have you got—to even think," he said, "of murdering four billion human beings?"

  "As much right as the next man," retorted Mali, looking up at him abruptly. "What's four billion anyway, but a number? What's it to you? Tell me, are you four billion times as shocked as if I'd told you I was going to murder just one manr

  "You're a devil," said Chase hoarsely. "No—you're the devil!" - '

  "I'm a man!" said Mali. He smiled a little and softened his voice. "Just like you, Chase."

  "But the only ones who could come through something like that would be us—the ones with Sub-E! Would you want to kill yourself, too?"

  "Of course not," answered Mali. "I'm safe for the moment here in my armor. It's just a matter of staying safe for a month or so afterward. And then, after the radiation's gone; and the wind's blowing the stink out of the dead cities—I can start the world over again in my own way with my own people that I've got tucked away in a safe place."

  He looked up at the old man. The empty silence grew between them.

  "So you see," said Mali, softly. "It is my world. I own it— and all of you. Or would you want to be the one to defy me and make me push this button?"

  "It's too late, Mali," Kil said.

  Mali looked at him quizzically, and smiled.

  "Too late? Why, Kil?"

  "Because I've found the answer these people have been seeking for a hundred years," he answered. "I know how to make it available to anyone—Sub-E."

  The eyes of all the room were upon him.

  Chapter twenty-one

  There were two in the room that he must convince.

  In the little suspension of time, the momentary breath-caught silence that followed the second of his announcements, it seemed to Kil that time gathered itself like a breaking wave, poised for a second above the frail craft, the Santa Maria of his discovery and conviction. The winds that thrust him forward were all of the spirit. The ocean that dragged him back was all man's centuries of stubbornness and slowness to believe. Mali was looking at him from the middle distance with an interest as cruel and sharp as a crouching cat's.

  "What new fairy tale's this, Kil?" he asked in his soft voice.

  "No fairy tale," he said. He turned to Chase. "The truth."

  The old man stared at him as if stricken with a senile paralysis. His firm old face sagged a little, looking numb and grey.

  "Kil—" he said, shakily, "Kil—" gradually the shock seeped out of him and life flowed back. His face tightened up again, became stern and hard.

  "Lying won't help us here," he said, harshly.

  Kil saw through the harshness to the sudden fear of a wasted lifetime lying beneath it.

  "You found it too, Chase," he said. "Many times. You just didn't recognize it, that's all."

  "Kil—what is it?" demanded McElroy. His voice burst in on the conversation with sudden, staccato insistence.

  Kil looked over at him for a moment.

  "The children," he said. "That's the only way anyone can achieve Sub-E; the way the children do it."

  "I don't see what you mean," said McElroy, shaking his head, "You—"

  "I did it," said Kil. "I scrapped everything I believed and started over again, like a child, without any ideas of my own. I was willing to do that, to get Ellen back. I would've believed the moon was made of green cheese and the stars were pumpkins—" he looked down at her beside him "if that would've helped me find her again."

  "Yes indeed—fairy tales," murmured Mali slumberously; but his eyes on Kil were anything but slumberous.

  "No," replied Kil, again. "Faith. What Chase saw—the complete faith of a child—coupled with something he didn't see, the urge of a child, the want of a child, the complete necessity of a child to learn to do what its parents do. No one works harder in' their life at anything than they do at growing up. Adults forget what it was like—when they came once, helpless strangers into an alien world of giants with unknown languages and customs."

  "Faith," said McElroy, sharply. "And effort. That it?"

  Kil looked at him without answering for a moment.

  "Part of it," he said at last.

  McElroy's eyes held him unyieldingly.

  "What's the other part?" he demanded.

  The room trembled on the question. Across the short distance that separated them, Kil was aware of Toy staring at him with a strange curiosity in his black eyes.

  He turned a little away from those eyes.

  "There's something new in the world today," he said. "A new time coming for us all—" a sadness thickened his voice as he said it; a sadness neither for the good nor the bad of the past, but the familiarity of it, the part of his life it had been. And he could see from the faces in the audience that his emotion had somehow got through to them, too; so that, without understanding, they felt the sorrow as well. Their quick empathy caught him up and drew him on, so that he went on to say more than he had intended. "Already, the old ways are dying. Soon they'll be dead and buried, in histories and monuments. And to the people in the new times they'll be unreal, we'll be unreal, like something out of a book, or old woven figures on a medieval tapestry." He looked aside at the bare and gleaming wall of the amphitheater, feeling with unfocused eyes out of the new depths in him, a vast inexpressible, irrational sorrow, like the remembered sound of violins in the twilight winding the lost chords of memory around his throat to choke him into silence.

  Ellen reached out and put her hand on his forearm; and the human .touch of her brought him back to his purpose. He looked again at the people in the room, thrusting the thought of Toy from him.

  "A new time," he said, crisply, "A new era—and Sub-E's only a by-product of it. It's the whole of which Sub-E is a part. The complete maturity of the individual, with everything that implies. The ultimate power, in Sub-E, for the individual to protect himself against anything but himself. And the ultimate sense of responsibility in a fully developed empathic nature, to hold back from hurting others."

  Mali laughed, almost relievedly.

  "And this is what the John Q. Citizens of our time are on the verge of? Kill" He shook his head and laughed again.

  "But you don't tell us how; how to get to it!" said McElroy, violently.

  Slowly Kil turned to him. The shorter man's face was forged into a mask of intent and determination. Now was the time.

  "For every person, it's different," said Kil. "Everyone has to find it for himself by facing up to the weaknesses in himself and strengthening them. My weakness was that I didn't want to concern myself about the world. I wanted it to trundle along by itself and not bother me; and I was set to do just that until—" he glanced at Ellen, "I found there was something I wanted more."

  "And mine?" asked McElroy.

  "Don't you know?" said Kil.

  McElroy frowned, the sharp effort of his concentration cutting deep the short line between his eyebrows. "No—" he said, "no—" Mentally, Kil crossed his finger.

  "Think, Dave," he said, gently. "Chance brought you into the world more intelligent than most people. Impatience with their slower minds drove you from them. But loneliness drove you back. And your full conscience blocked the selfish path for you, that Mali's taken to personal power. So you took it on yourself to work for and protect people. That way your conscience and loneliness were both satisfied. But if the day comes at last when you're not needed any longer, then you'll have to face yourself all over again, won't you? You'll have to find a new purpose, a purpose—"

  He let his voice die, for something was happening to the other man. For a long moment, as Kil spoke, there had been no
change. And then abruptly, the spark of awareness in McElroy's eyes seemed to go back, to dwindle and recede, back and back until it appeared to have gone off into some great personal infinity, on a pilgrimage from which there would be no finding its way back, except by the light of the lamp it searched for. For a long, remembered moment, an empty man stood before them all; and then, slowly, McElroy came back once more to look again out of his own eyes.

  "Yes," he said; and sighed—a sigh that had some of Kil's earlier sorrow in it. Then, like a tired, but satisfied man he straightened up and smiled at them, a queer, sad, impish smile that had something of the lost Dekko in it. And he held out his hand, cupped, toward the audience.

  "Sub-E," he said; and abruptly—in one fractionary moment, one infinitesimally brief bit of time—there sparked in his palm a tiny bit of fiery matter that was bright and hot as only a part of the sun could be; and then was gone again.

  And so, the first one was convinced.

  A long, pent-up breath soughed out through the room.

  "Oh, God—" said Chase, shakily.

  "Amen," said McElroy, lifting his face to the old man. But Mali looked across the room to Kil and chuckled. "And now you'll convert me, Kil?" he asked.

  Kil slowly shook his head.

  "I'd give a great deal to," he said. "You've got the guts, and the intelligence. If you'd face the fact that you're empathically blind, open up that tight ego of yours—"

  Mali laughed out loud.

  "And give up the world, no doubt," he said, "for a little extra insight? No thanks, Kil. I'm not that much of a fool, to make that bad a bargain."

  "Yes," said Kil, sadly. "I didn't think you would. You belong to the old days, Mali, the days that're already dead, when selfishness was a survival factor. It's twisted you so badly that you couldn't even love the one person in the world it was possible for you to love: your sister. You could only dominate her, warp her natural need for affection into nymphomania—and be the cause of her death."

  For a second, Mali's face became a white and perfectly sculptured death-mask with rage. Beside him, Toy turned his head to look suddenly at the smaller man, searching Mali's rigid features with an abrupt., demanding interest, like a dog, tense by a fox's hole, who suddenly thinks he sees the blackness stir inside. But then, slowly, Mali's face relaxed and the color came back. He smiled again.