by Philip Wylie
“Yet that chance did not appeal to many. By the year 16,675 Ecliptic—which is the last year for which I can find a census—the total population was under twelve million, and many of them very old. The number of children under ten years is given separately; they were less than a hundred and fifty thousand. At the rate they were allowing themselves to die, probably there were barely ten millions of people of all ages when the disturbing star—which they called Borak—came its closest and cast them off into space.
“The best of the energies of the dwindling millions had been put, for two generations, into these five cities which were planned, located and created and equipped for the final defiance of extinction. They abandoned all older habitations and adopted these.”
“But where did they go, in the end?”
A dozen demanded it, together.
“Of that mystery, we have not yet,” Philbin confessed, “a trace. They had reduced themselves, we know, from a billion in number at the time of Lagon Itol—two hundred years before—to about ten millions. Barely one per cent of them, therefore, were spared up to the time of the catastrophe to attempt the tremendous task of further survival.
“Throughout at least the last five thousand years of their history, cremation of the dead was universal among them. We will find no cemeteries or entombments, except perhaps a very few archaic barrows from a very early age. The people throughout their civilized period disposed of their dead in a systematic, orderly and decent way.
“Now, did the last ten million also die, and as they went, were they also cremated by their survivors, so that we will find, at the end, only the bones of some small group who, enduring to the last, had disposed of those immediately before them? Or somehow, did some of them—escape?”
The great chamber of the Council was tensely silent, close-crowded as it was.
It was Tony, presiding, and having the advantage of having heard most of these facts before, who first found voice:
“Returning to our present problem,” he recalled them to that which had gathered them together, “it is clear that we can find no other cities of the shielded type, and equipped to combat the cold, except the five we know; for no others ever were built. We know also that there is no other generating station providing light and heat and power, except that close to Gorfulu; for no other ever was planned or built.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE PIONEERS PLAN REPRISALS
JACK TAYLOR’S post, when on watch, was the northern gate.
“The Porte de Gorfulu,” Duquesne had dubbed it, recalling the fashion in Paris of naming the gate after the city to which, and from which, its road ran.
There was not at this gate, or at any of the seven others, any actual guard station. What Philbin had read had made certain, if it had been doubtful before, that the builders of these cities had acted in complete coöperation and unison; they had been banded together in their desperate attempt to defy their fate of dark and cold.
However, the structural scheme and the materials chosen had made each gate exceedingly strong. It would have required artillery to reduce it; and artillery here did not exist, except perhaps in some museum of archæology of the Vanished People.
The blast of the atomic tubes, which had transported the Arks through space, of course could reduce any of the gates; but first they must be brought to the vicinity and placed in position; and if this could be done without danger, there was the problem of the lining of the tubes. Those in the second space-ship from Michigan, commanded by Ransdell, actually had burnt out at the end of the passage, and had contributed to the disaster which overtook that party.
Little, indeed, had been left of the lining in the tubes of the Ark which Hendron himself, more successfully, had piloted. So it was fairly certain that the propulsion tubes in the possession of the Midianites must be in similar state.
“What they have left of the lining, they’ll save for their own defense—as we used ours,” Jack expressed his opinion to Eliot James, who to-day was standing watch with him.
Eliot nodded. “I think so. At least, I’m sure they’ll not attack us with the tubes; they’ll not think it necessary. They figure, of course, we’ve got to come to them.”
“Well,” challenged Jack, “haven’t we?”
Eliot gazed out the gate along the road where the shadow of a post placed by the Ancient People lay long and faint upon the ground.
“There goes the sun,” he said. “And gosh, it’s cold already! But we can burn things to keep warm. It’s humiliating as hell; but we can burn old wood or grain, or a thousand things, and keep warm for a while, anyway. Physically, we’re not forced to go to them; but can we be men—and stay away?”
“That’s it,” Jack commended his friend. “That’s it exactly.”
“I know,” said Eliot. “I was never so mad in my life as the night when they cut off our light and heat. I could have done anything—if I could have got to them, for it. It was the most infuriating thing I ever felt.”
“Are you telling me?” said Jack. “You thought you were alone in that feeling?”
“Of course not; but I can’t laugh at it yet. Can you?”
“No; and I never expect to—until I can fix that feeling.”
“But how can we fix it?”
“Exactly. How can we? How in the world—how on Bronson Beta, Jack, are we going to be able to get at them?”
“Tony’d like to know; but it’s got to be without too great a risk. He won’t have us killed—not too many, anyway.”
“Well, how many of us would he think it worth while to lose, if we took Gorfulu?”
“Do you think you know how to do it? … Whew, that chill certainly comes on.”
“Sun’s gone; and damn’ little of it there was to go. We simply weren’t made to be this far away from the sun.”
“Half a year from now, you’ll be saying we weren’t made to be as near the sun as we’ll be.”
“If we live till then.”
“Yes; and if this cock-eyed world decides to do a decent orbit really around the sun, and not go sliding off into space, as it’s done before.”
“What makes you say that? Do you think Duquesne and Eiffenstein are giving us a run-around? They say we’re coming back, and too close to the old sun for comfort.”
“Yes,” agreed Jack. “But do they know? Does anybody know until the old apple does it—or doesn’t do it? Somebody certainly must have told the people who built these cities that they were going to stay in sight, at least, of some sun; and they certainly took a long ride in the dark.… Hello, here’s our relief.” And Jack hailed the pair who appeared in the twilight of the street; he passed them his report, “Everything quiet,” and he started up the street with Eliot toward his quarters.
“What’s the hurry, soldiers?” some one softly hailed from the darkness of a hooded doorway. It was a girl’s voice, teasing, provocative.
Both halted. “Who are you?”
“Please, soldiers, we’re only friends caught out in the dark and needing protection.”
Jack laughed, and knew her before he turned on his flashlight. “Marian,” he demanded, “what are you doing here, and who’s with you?”
Then her companion, Shirley Cotton, made herself known.
“We were hoping,” Marian Jackson said, as the two girls walked along with the two young men, “for somebody to come by who knows how to turn on the heat again, not to speak of the lights.”
“Were you in that building?” Eliot asked her.
“We were; and I tell you, it’s hard to open doors now that the power’s off. They stick terribly.”
“What were you doing in that building? You know you shouldn’t have gone in from the street alone.”
“Sure I know,” agreed Marian blandly. “But where have we got by obeying all your nice orders?”
“What were you doing, Marian?”
“Shall we tell them, Shirley?”
“Why not?”
“Well,” said Maria
n, speaking carefully as though she might be overheard, “we decided we’d see what we could do as baits.”
“Baits?”
“Baits. The chunks of meat trappers used to put in traps, and like minnows on hooks—baits, you know. My idea.”
“Then,” said Jack generously, “it must have been a pippin. Baits. I’ve got the general underlying scheme of you girls now; go on.”
“But there’s nothing to go on to; nothing happened.”
“The fish didn’t come?”
“No nibble. No. But give us time, boy. There’s some way, we know, by which somebody still gets in and out of this city. The idea is, we hope he—or they, if they’re two of ’em—will try to grab us. We’ll go along.”
“Sabine-women stuff, Eliot,” Shirley put in.
“What?” asked Marian Jackson.
“I’ll tell you later, dear,” Shirley offered.
“Oh,” sniffed Marian. “Deep stuff! Well, anything they didn’t teach in the first six grades of the St. Louis grammar schools is lost on me. Still, you got me curious. What did the Sabine women do, Shirley?”
“They went along,” Shirley told her, “with the men from the other city that grabbed them.”
“And then what did they do, darling?”
“They stayed with them as willing little wives.”
“No stabbing after they found the way in and out?”
“No,” said Shirley. “That’s where the Sabine women were different.”
Jack Taylor whistled softly. “So that’s what you little girls were up to?” he said. “Perhaps it’s just as well we came along. But they rather show us up, eh, Eliot?”
Dinner was a moody meal in the evening of that prolonged day. The natures of the people from earth had not adjusted themselves to the increased length of both day and night; most of the people still slept, or at least went to bed, for eight hours of each twenty-four, so they dozed by day and were awake, on the average, sixteen hours of each period of darkness.
Philbin had learned that this had not been the custom among the ancient people; they had passed through the stages of evolution adapted to the long day and night; but it appeared impossible for the people from earth to acquire this adaptation.
Accordingly, after dark, there were long, restless periods; and to-night Eliot James, Jack Taylor and Peter Vanderbilt, with two more of the younger men—Crosby and Whittington—met for a midnight discussion.
Tony was not called to this informal council of his friends; nor was Ransdell; for Tony, though personally the same with all of them, yet was Chief of the Central Authority; he bore the responsibility; and if he forbade the enterprise on foot, his friends could scarcely proceed. So it was agreed not to let him know. And Ransdell, too—being charged with the security of the city—had better learn about the plan much later.
The five gathered in Vanderbilt’s quarters, which were not cramped, to say the least. There was no need in that city, constructed on its splendid scale for some two millions of people, for any one now to be niggardly of room. Each of the emigrants from earth could choose his own dwelling-place, so long as it was approved for its security.
Peter Vanderbilt had chosen what would have been called, on earth, a penthouse—a roof-dwelling, built, he was sure, by some connoisseur of living.
The place delighted Peter; it was on a roof but near an edge of the city where the shield sloped steeply down; so the roof there was not high, and was easily reached by foot, after the power failed.
Also it was especially well adapted for habitation in the present emergency when the heating apparatus prepared for the city had failed or rather, had been cut off. For the original builders had allowed for no such emergency; they had been dealing with elements in respect to which they had no reason to figure on that factor of failure—the internal heat and radio-activity of the core of the planet. Stoppage of that was unthinkable; and so, to them, was the cutting of the power-conduits to any of the cities. Therefore they had supplied no alternative heating arrangement.
As a consequence the present tenants had to employ the most primitive methods of keeping themselves warm in these lovely supercivilized chambers. They were driven to build bonfires in some of the great halls; but they spared those of exceptional splendor.
Peter Vanderbilt, being on the roof in his “penthouse,” had contrived a chimney and a fireplace which gave him heat without much smoke or soot.
It was before this fire that the five gathered.
“Wonderful place you have, Peter,” said Whittington, looking around. He had not visited it before, and he went about examining the metal panels of mountain, woodland, marsh and sea, all splendid in the colors of enamel paints baked on.
Peter asked him: “Are you complimenting me? All I’ve done is to choose it.… Do you know, not a thing was flecked or rubbed, not a thing was worn. The man who made it never used it.”
“It seems so with most of the buildings,” said Whittington. “It seems they must have gone on building them to complete their plan, after they knew they themselves would never fill them.”
“What else could they do,” asked Eliot, who had thought much about this, “while they waited? Could they just wait—for slow annihilation?”
“Philbin,” said Vanderbilt, “rendered a couple of lines of his poem ‘Talon.’ He says it gives no idea of the enormous melancholy of the original; but as he said modestly, it is better than no translation at all:
“‘And now the winds flow liquid,
The sole cascades to seek the sea.
At last these awful streams themselves are hardened.
The air that once was breath is metal, frozen.
Where, then, are we?’”
Nobody spoke until Taylor, after a moment, put wood on the fire.
“Did you hear, Peter,” he questioned, “what those girls—Marian and Shirley—were out to do?”
“Yes,” said Vanderbilt; and the five got immediately at the problem of how to gain entrance and control of Gorfulu.
“Seidel is in command, Von Beitz is sure,” Eliot James said. “Cynthia agrees that is most probable. He was pushing aside Morkev, who was nominally chief Commissar—he called himself that—when Lady Cynthia escaped.
“Von Beitz says that Seidel supplanted Morkev but did not kill him, Morkev had too many friends. It is perfectly certain that there are two factions among our friends the Midianites, which is complicated, of course, by their racial mixture. Their position is further complicated by the English, who obey them only because they must.
“Cynthia has told us, and Von Beitz has confirmed it, that the mixture on top is constantly afraid of what they call ‘a rising of the serfs’—that is, the English. They guard against it. The English are allowed to gather—even for work—only in very small groups, and always under supervision.”
“It looks like a set-up,” observed Whittington, optimistically, “if once we get in.”
Vanderbilt shook his head. “Eliot specialized, in that speech, on their elements of weakness. Their strength is utter ruthlessness. I believe that, when they attacked your camp,” he said to Eliot James, “you killed a good many of them, and some of the most violent fell. But enough were left. Von Beitz says that Seidel keeps himself surrounded by them. He has no use for the milder men. He has a despotism which he completely controls by intimidation; and no form of government is more merciless and efficient—at least at first. And this is very early in the life of this particular despotism.”
“There is a building which they call the Citadel,” Jack Taylor said, as if he had heard none of this. “It held the offices of administration of the Old People. Seidel occupies it with his inner ring.
“If three of us could get in—or two of us—and kill ten of them,—the ten top men, including Seidel,—we’d—”
“What?”
“We’d at least be able to start something,” Jack ended somewhat weakly.
“But the two of you would have to kill the ten of them and t
he top ten—before you could really begin,” said Peter Vanderbilt quietly. “How simple you make it seem!”
Taylor swore, then laughed. “We don’t know what we could do; or what we’d have to do. But we do know this: some of us, somehow, have got to get into that city, and that Citadel of that city. Then we can trust to God and what chances He may offer us. But first, and whatever’s before us, we’re going to get in! Agreed?”
“Agreed!” said all voices, and Vanderbilt’s was distinct among them.
“Now how? We’ve no chance to advance against them by air or on the ground—or under the ground from the direction of this city. We know they’ve got guarded all the conduits and passages which we’ve discovered; and probably some we don’t know about. But would they guard the conduits from the other cities?”
“That’s something, Jack! Say—”
“See here. There’s Danot—on the other side of them from us. They’ve a guard in there; we’ve nobody. They’d never look for us to come from that quarter. We get into Danot and go underground! We—”
That night was long, but not long enough for the five conspirators.
CHAPTER XX
JUSTICE TIPS THE SCALES
RANSDELL, on the evening of the third day later, reported to Tony:
“Five men have not returned—three of our best friends, Tony,” he said, dropping formality. “Eliot, Jack Taylor and Peter Vanderbilt—and Whittington and Crosby with them. They left, you know, in two ‘larks’ about two hours before dusk yesterday. They said they were only going to have a look around. I thought it was a good idea; I told them to go.”
“No word from them at all since?” Tony asked.
“Not a syllable. Marian Jackson is missing too.”
“She went with them?”
“No. Entirely separately; and she went on the ground, not in the air. The gate watch who let her go out—it was Cluett—was ashamed of himself and did not report it promptly. It appears that she drove to the gate in one of the small cars, and wheedled Cluett into letting her take a turn outside. It was near noon, and the sun was shining. He saw no harm and let her pass. Then she turned the battery on full, and streaked away.