by John Brunner
Peter found this out when at long last he had an hour to himself which he did not need to spend in exhausted sleep. He felt as though he had been whipped continually night and day for years. His face and hands were coated with grime, his beard was matted round his chin, and his clothes, still salt-encrusted from his mad rush into the ocean, were torn and soiled. He had not looked at himself in a mirror. He did not need to to know that his eyes were red-rimmed and his cheeks suddenly sunken like an old man’s.
What little food he had had lately had been snatched from abandoned stores or delivery trucks. Sometimes he had taken crusts of bread from garbage cans, when there was no time to go hunting for something better and he was too hungry to go without.
The city had stopped when the master took it over. He did not care about the needs of his subjects. They could eat what there was, so long as it lasted, and when they died of hunger there were millions more he could whip into his domain. The only sign of concern he had shown in this direction was to drive a loaded cargo ship into the roads of the harbor. When it broke up against the sea wall it proved to be a banana boat, and men were allowed to stagger through the city with crates of bananas on their backs.
There were no cars or trucks moving in Jacksonville. The wide streets, laid out anew after the great disaster of ’65, when a missile from the coastal defense base fell during practice firings and wrecked the heart of the town, were empty except for men, women and children on feet. Cars, it seemed, were not for human beings. Owners of vehicles had been compelled to drive them to a great junkyard at the city limits, where other men drenched them with gasoline and set them alight. That had been one of Peter’s first duties after staggering into the town.
He was getting quite clever at realizing what the master wanted done. They all were. It was necessary for survival. The stupid were useless.
Fresh in his memory, haunting him like a scar, was the fate of one of the stupid or defiant ones; a man as thin as a beanpole, whose whole being seemed to consist in his nervous energy. He had resisted some order, though the pain was making his tendons stand out like knotted cord on the backs of his hands. Peter had seen how pain whipped another man, a few paces away, who was wielding a gasoline hose to feed the great fire of cars. This man had drenched the defiant one from head to foot, and then, dragging his feet, fighting to the last, the thin frame had walked towards the flames. …
Yes, Peter had been lucky.
His tasks, after the wrecking of the cars, had been many. But not insupportable. There had been the need to collect certain strange things, from warehouses, abandoned workshops, drugstores especially. He was one of an army of perhaps a thousand engaged on this work, who converged later on the square in front of City Hall where the master had taken up residence. He had had walls blown out of the way when he found the small human doors cramping for his bulk. Likewise, as Peter later saw, he was having those parts of the city which offended him dynamited without caring about people who might be crushed by falling ruins.
Working mechanically, able to think a little as he worked, Peter had decided that the incongruous mixture of substances he and others had gathered must be intended to feed the master. Certainly the elements reported in the analysis of the hide and skeleton of the other monster could all be found in this crazy pile. He would have liked to witness the master’s meal, but instead, he was driven away to join a gang clearing rubble from a dynamited building.
He had toiled at that for twenty-four hours without interruption, and was nearly dead with fatigue and the coughing caused by concrete dust, when a lash fell on the whole corps of workmen. They dropped their tools and clenched their blistered hands, wondering.
Then someone found that if he moved towards City Hall, the pain stopped. They all moved, like an avalanche. Others came, too, pouring into the square. There they stopped, waiting. Some of them fell asleep. There was no room to lie down when the crowds thickened, so they leaned against their neighbors, and their neighbors had not strength to push them away.
Someone near where Peter was standing had taken cigarets from a store as they passed. Peter took one, expecting to find that this was forbidden and pain would follow. It did not. Gratefully, he drew in the relaxing smoke, and then found that his dust-irritated throat could not stand it. He was forced to trample it underfoot.
Then there was a stir, and out on to a platform in front of City Hall, built of bronze cladding from a demolished office block and decorated with stained glass ripped from a nearby church, came people. Ten men; ten women. Clean. Dressed in neat clothes. Pallid, but calm. They ranged themselves on either side of the platform, and the dull, dirty crowd looked at them enviously but not understanding why they were still clean and neat.
Then, to the beating of a great brass gong, the master appeared. He was borne shoulder-high by twenty big men, white and black in equal numbers. Behind him, idiotically, came a group of choirboys in surplices, waving censers and chanting something too faint for the words to be distinguished.
The bearers set the master down, and there were shudders that ran through the crowd as many of the watchers saw what was ruling them for the first time. Peter was shocked. The thing had grown! Added another segment to its body, he thought. Added a ton or more to its weight. …
One of the neatly dressed men who had come out first suddenly staggered, as though struck by a blow. He recovered himself and came forward to face the square.
“The master commands me to speak to you!” he shouted, and a hint of pain tingled in every listening mind. “The master orders me to tell you the truth! We are arrogant, worthless insects. A hundred thousand years ago we were the subjects of the masters. They came to us from a world under another star, and found us naked, grubbing in the dirt, with tools of bone and stone, fit only to be slaves, without an original idea of our own. All we know we learned from the masters, and when our master came back from the sea, we attempted to kill him! We failed, but we must be punished. And we must learn the respect which is proper to a superior race!”
There was something tantalizingly familiar about that voice, but it was raised to a shout that was almost a yell, and depersonalized. Peter’s eyes were too bleared with concrete dust for him to see the speaker’s face.
“We must do him honor in a suitable way. We must speak of his powers, his intelligence, his length of life, his knowledge. We must sing to his praise, bow down before him, serve him because he is greater than we are.”
A stir of discontent in the crowd; a sting of cruel pain, and it was stilled.
“Sing!” yelled the man on the platform, and the choirboys, stumbling forward as though dragging chains on their feet, began to raise a familiar melody in piping voices.
Peter had not had a religious upbringing. Nonetheless, he was shocked as he suddenly realized they were singing Old Hundred. …
“No! Never! Blasphemy!” The hysterical cry rang out at the front of the crowd, and a wild-faced woman was suddenly trying to scramble on to the platform and reach the master’s palanquin. As her head appeared above the edge, the man who had been speaking drew back his foot and kicked.
Pain stilled the yells of anger. A few hesitant voices began to fumble with the words, and the pain eased. Slowly, draggingly, the helpless slaves lined out the ultimate mockery.
“Praise, laud and bless his name always,
For it is seemly so to do.”
In the interval before the next verse a child could be heard crying very distinctly. Before the end of the next line, it had stopped. Probably forever.
They finished with the fourth verse, presumably because the master decided Christian theology was hardly applicable to him, and stood waiting for further orders with the last line ringing in their minds: “And shall from age to age endure!”
It seemed only too probable.
A whining passed overhead, and they looked up. Something very swift, leaving a vapor trail, although it was at low altitude, had rushed across the chilly autumn sky. They had heard t
he same sound before. Peter judged that the- people outside were attempting to discover what was going on by using photographic reconnaissance rockets or scanner missiles. Yes, almost certainly, for the whining passed a second time, and a third. Straining tired eyes, Peter caught a glimpse of light gleaming on metal, or perhaps of glowing exhausts.
It was hard to believe that there were still on Earth men who were masters of their own minds.
Abruptly, he saw that the master had been carried back indoors, and that the crowd was dispersing. The movement he was involved in was going to carry him close to the platform from which they had been addressed. He went along with it automatically, for that was the first lesson one learned under the lash.
Defiantly, tensely, the ten men and ten women in neat clothing returned the hate-filled stares of their less fortunate fellows. What had made the master single these out? Peter wondered. Perhaps he could not in fact control the whole population of the world. Perhaps he intended to train a corps of collaborators, Quislings, who would make his authority effective.
But what could lead any man to co-operate willingly with such a vicious tyrant? Seeking a clue in these impassive faces, Peter scanned them—and recognized Luke.
Luke recognized him at the same time, and seemed to be on the point of saying something. Peter spat conspicuously and went on shuffling past the platform.
Luke glanced around nervously, and then stooped so as to be able to whisper. “Peter!” he said. “Peter, there will be a free hour now, I think. Meet me where they burned all the cars!”
“I know what you must think of me,” Luke said, not meeting Peter’s eyes but staring at the rusting heap of scrap which recently had been Detroit’s finest. “It’s what I think of myself, too. But until you’ve sensed that power of his directed at you as an individual … Keep in the mass if you can; it’s not so bad when it’s generalized. I’ve had that too; I know.
“His powers are limited, Peter. And he’s made some errors that could be fatal. Because he found us primitive when he first came to Earth, he thinks we’re primitive still, so it’s up to us to pander to that illusion. The longer we can keep him contented with just this one city and its environs, the better chance they’ll have outside of getting the better of him.”
“Hence the hymn singing?” asked Peter grimly.
“Exactly! I picked Old Hundred because it could be read as drooling with praise for his superior talents—and also because enough people know the words for it to sound as though the crowd meant what they were singing. Peter, I daren’t be long away from him. If he gets suspicious of me, I’m done for. I’ve seen it happen already. Some of the others he’s picked are genuine bastards. There’s an old-time prison governor from Alabama who was here on vacation, and a genuine sadist like I never saw before. There’s a first-class Quisling-type woman. They don’t run much risk; they’re convinced, and they’re scared. They all hate their fellow men so bad they don’t care what happens to them. They’re glad of the chance to help out.
“But before I have to go, listen carefully. Right now, no one would have a hope in hell of getting outside. The highways are blocked, any attempt to get an aircraft in is met with missiles. They shot down two already, and they’re doing a conversion job on the Thunderhorse to enable it to knock down the scanner missiles that have been coming over, too. That damned monster has got technical knowledge. He’s making the engineers do things I never dreamed of, even though I give them the orders.
“This may change. If it does, and you can get away, say that—”
Something went overhead, howling. They ducked instinctively. Before they could raise their heads again, a vast plume of white smoke had gone up from approximately the area of the city hall. And there was the flat crump of an explosion.
They looked at each other with sudden wild hope, and Peter was opening his mouth to speak when the impact of pain and an anger greater than ever told them that the attempt had been a failure.
XV
“I THINK we can take it the result was negligible,” said General Barghin heavily. “We got City Hall okay. We learned that much before they took out the scanner missile. But the warhead was only a ton, conventional.”
Mud squelched around his feet as he shifted uncomfortably. The field headquarters was under canvas and ready for evacuation at fifteen minutes’ notice, as was the entire crescent of the—not defenses; cordon was a better term. A line of men and weapons intended to contain what seemed quite happy to remain where it was.
Dr. Gordon waited to see if anyone else was going to speak. No one did. He coughed and said, “General, I thought you were using scanner missiles because they were too fast to shoot down?”
“We were,” agreed Barghin. “Thunderhorses oughtn’t to be able to catch them. One did. We’re flying a series of nuisance raids at the moment, trying to provoke them into using up their stocks. They had about sixty. So far we’ve made them use eleven. But how much that will help, God knows. The monster’s liable to be in a hell of a temper after what we did to him, and if he knows how to soup up Thunder-horses to hit scanner missiles flying at two thousand per hour, I wouldn’t put it past him to build ’em out of used car parts.”
“Anything on the chemical line of approach?” asked a listening colonel. “Someone said—”
“You can’t expect results in a hurry on that side,” Gordon interrupted. “They have some of the biggest computers in the country working on the job. And so have the Russkis. But they’re handicapped! How’d you like to have to figure out that the quickest way to stop a human being was potassium cyanide if all you had at hand was a bit of mummified skin and a skeleton?”
“I see your point,” said the colonel dryly.
A runner threw back the tent flap and ducked to avoid the swinging lamp. “Signal, general,” he said, saluting. “And more to come, looks like.”
Barghin took the scribbled note. “Looks like the cue for Mechanical Shovel,” he said cryptically. “Let’s hope this one works. Colonel, get me a breakdown of all the weapons larger than small arms known to have been in the Jacksonville area prior to the monster’s arrival.”
The colonel dodged out in the runner’s wake.
City Hall was a pile of rubble, its roof caved in and its walls bellied out. But the strength of the signal from within proved that the master had been able to survive even this.
After all, Peter realized, he’d taken the pressure of the deep Atlantic. A stack of loose debris probably wouldn’t even dent his hide.
They were among the last to reach the spot. A gang of at least a thousand men and women were at work on the rubble, manhandling it away, throwing it into the square. Peter joined in on the end of a chain, with Luke beside him, catching lumps of concrete and dumping them.
A jagged five-pound block hurtled through the air towards Luke. Too late, Peter realized that Luke had not yet turned back from dropping its predecessor, and tried to catch it. He missed.
Luke’s head suddenly caved in from behind. For a moment he showed signs of startled pain. Then he tumbled forward on his face, and blood began to well out under his hair. Peter made to bend and see if there was any help for him, but a new jolt of pain reminded him that the master cared nothing about the fate of his subjects.
At least he could be given a burial. Peter contrived to make a sort of cairn above his friend’s body, and then to move away and heap the debris elsewhere.
Like slaves toiling to build the pyramids, Peter thought. And at the whim of a far worse master than a Pharaoh. …
There were probably other bodies under the heaped rubble when they finally extricated the master, with ropes and brute strength. Some had to wash his hide until it was glossy and clean; some had to hunt material and build a new palanquin for him. Then they all had to carry him, chanting Old Hundred, to a large church five blocks away, and install him there in new splendor.
Twice during the proceedings there were sharp, crackling explosions from overhead, and once what looke
d like the nose cone of a missile ploughed a bloody furrow through a group of workmen. Nobody was allowed to help the dying. Even the elemental compassion of breaking in their skulls with a heavy block to end their suffering was rewarded by another gust of agony.
Either the master was panicking, or he was determined to make what he regarded as idiots understand he meant what his spokesmen had said.
What were the rest of the enslaved population doing? Peter tried to get a clue from staring about him while they were carrying the master to his new abode. Some of them, doubtless, would be at the missile base, manhandling fifty-ton rockets. Some were probably compelled to scout the perimeter of the master’s domains, so that they could be driven to hunt down would-be intruders. Some were engaged in clearing the ruins of the buildings that had earlier been dynamited, and in laying paving. And some were engaged on a special task. …
Down one of the main streets that crossed next to the old church, men and women were laboriously pushing laden handcarts. The carts were piled with weapons: carbines, sporting guns, automatics, together with ammunition for them; and besides these, axes, butcher knives, even cutlasses and swords that must have been taken from a museum.
“Can you handle firearms?” they were saying wearily as they passed among the crowd. Those who answered affirmatively received guns. Those who did not, mostly women, were given knives or axes or hatchets.
He’s forming an army, Peter told himself silently. So he does know his powers are limited!
He was so elated by the realization that the master could no longer intend to handle his opponents out of his personal resources that he was taken by surprise when the weapons-bearers came to him and asked him the monotonous question. “Can you handle firearms?”
He couldn’t lie, he knew. And in any case to say no would mean receiving a cutting weapon that could not run out of ammunition. What was the least deadly of firearms? He said cautiously, “I can handle a .22 pistol.”
It was the truth. He could also handle machine guns, carbines, repeating rifles and many more deadly weapons. But the weapons-bearer did not stop to ask questions. He thrust a little target pistol and a box of shells into Peter’s hands and pushed past.