Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

Eva reported.

  "Move everybody in, then,” Johnny said.

  They went in. Half an hour later, without being stopped, they were all within the Territory, with Johnny's, Mikros’s and Eva’s groups spread out around the otherwise deserted Conservatory, surrounded by office buildings, that lay before the Secretariat. The pool in the center of the Conservatory was black and still.

  “What if they aren’t in the blast shelter under the Secretariat Building?" Eva asked as with Tommy and Mikros they moved toward the entrance to the Secretariat followed by the members of their groups.

  "We just have to hope they are and we don't have to search. Where else could they hold a hundred and twenty-nine people?" answered Johnny. "But if they aren’t, we'll just have to search."

  Leaving Mikros in charge outside, Johnny and Eva, with a dozen of the ex-Cadets, went into the building and down the regular ramp escalators to a special old fashioned, mechanical elevator in a sub-basement. They descended the final distance in this; and it let them out into a guardroom filled with Closed Congress soldiers, half-dressed and wholly unready to fight.

  The soldiers submitted without protest.

  They were lined up and disarmed. The inner doors to the blast shelter were broken open and the captured ex-Cadets poured out.

  "That's good," said Johnny to Eva. “Now, get them upstairs as quickly as we can.”

  He was turning back to the elevator—when the dull, heavy sound of a sonic explosion from above rattled the elevator in its shaft.

  For a second no one moved. Then Johnny snatched his swim mask out of his pocket, thumbed the controls and spoke into his intercom."Mikros?" he said. "What happened?”

  Mikros's answer was broken, blurred by the buzzing of a distorter.

  "...soldiers up in the buildings!"

  "Take charge," said Johnny to Eva. He leaped into the elevator, rode it up, then ran up the humming escalators to the ground floor.

  Through the glass front of the building, he could see the Conservatory, lush with flowers, trees and other plants. Looking up through the foliage, Johnny saw most of the dome lights were out. In the dimness, the sea people had taken cover where they could behind hedges and ornamental trees surrounding the pool. From the buildings on three sides of the plaza military gunfire was reaching for them.

  Mikros was not to be seen. The springing of the trap that had been obviously laid for them had evidently caught him somewhere out of sight. The ventilation was off; and as Johnny watched, smoke drifting out of the building on Johnny’s right began to thicken and fog the air in layers that did not move. An explosion or something like it had splashed water out of the pool, darkening one of the terraces as if the concrete of which it was made was itself bleeding. But of actual blood, there was no sign; for the sonic and vibratory weapons that were being used wounded and damaged internally.

  “Yes." Johnny climbed automatically to his feet. He glanced along the Secretariat’s front and dimly, through the smoke, saw an armed figure waving to him and pointing aside. For a second Johnny stared, recognizing only from general signals about the figure that it was one of the sea-born. Then he forgot about making an identification as memory clicked in his head from the sketches Walda had made. The passageway down which the figure was pointing, a passageway between two of the buildings, led toward the river.

  "Follow me," he snapped to Eva.

  "Bring everybody."

  He ran toward where he had last seen the figure but it had already disappeared in the smoke. However, when he reached the passage entrance and looked down it, the smoke here was light enough for him to see it was clear of enemy.

  He snatched his swim mask from his pocket, pressing the sending control.

  "Everybody out!" he shouted into it. "This is Johnny Joya! Take the passage north of the Secretariat. I'll be standing just outside it. Look for me.”

  He was suddenly conscious of Eva standing at his elbow.

  "Everybody out!" he repeated to her, and pointed to a flowerbed beside the passage entrance. "Explosive! There!”

  Eva ran to the flowerbed and dropped to her knees on the soft earth. From under her own loose lander shirt she fumbled a number of the yellow cubes of explosive jelly the sea-born used for deep-sea mining. She scooped a hole and tumbled the cubes in, pushing earth on top of them. Sea-people began to throng past, running, staggering by them through the smoke. Gradually the escaping figures thinned out and Ceased.

  Mikros loomed up out of the smoke and stopped before Johnny.

  "Are they all out?" Johnny asked.

  "All but you and me,” shouted Mikros, hoarsely.

  Johnny, putting on his mask, glanced at the flowerbed and saw Eva, too, was gone. The passage loomed empty except for smoke haze.

  "I’ll be along in a—"

  The swelling impact of another explosion shuddered through the square. Johnny looked and saw Mikros’s lips move, but he heard nothing.

  They were deafened. Johnny waved Mikros on toward the river, saw him leap up, then run off through down the passage.

  Johnny waited. Mikros did not appear.

  There was no more time. Johnny turned and ran, pressing the detonator transceiver at his belt.

  Behind him the smoke billowed and swirled in an explosion he could not hear. He ran for the river.

  "All over, into the water,” he shouted into his mike; but he could not even hear himself. He felt an unexpected fear. If they could not hear him...

  But then he reached the balcony, fifty feet above the river; and all was going well. The unhurt ex-Cadets were going over feet-first. The wounded were being slid down escape chutes of plastic. The small-Homes were waiting in the water below. He could see little of this in the smoke, but he knew it was so. Suddenly he seemed to hook in on a network of awareness. It was as it had been when he had stood in the conference room and felt the hundred and twenty-nine prisoners as if he held them like Tomi, between his hands. In this emergency some new instinct of the third generation was taking over; and they were all a unit.

  “Keep moving," he said automatically. With his new awareness he felt they had heard him.

  Then he realized that also his own numbed hearing was beginning to recover. A little moving air off the river cleared the smoke from the balcony. Only Mikros was standing with him. He motioned Mikros over, then turned to go himself. Then he felt one of the People still coming from the direction of the plaza.

  "Who—’’ he said, turning. Through the smoke he saw the figure that had waved that the passage was clear. Then another breath of air cleared the smoke for a moment and he saw that it was as it had been earlier—Patrick with a soldier’s vibrator rifle in his hands.

  "You, Pat?" said Johnny, staring. Suddenly it broke on him. Suddenly he understood a great many things. "You told the Land we were coming!” Pat stopped a few feet from him. The rifle wavered in his grasp, pointing at Johnny. Then, with a sob Patrick threw the gun from him, grabbed Johnny and, stooping, threw him back over the balcony. Johnny turned instinctively like a cat in the air. And the water smashed hard against him.

  He caught himself, readjusting his mask, six feet under. Below him he saw the small-Homes waiting. He turned and swam down to them.

  Chapter 7

  There was no way to assess the cost of the expedition until they were once more safely and deeply at sea. The individual small-Homes waiting in the river fled each on its own toward open ocean, with whomever they had crowded aboard them. Finally, they rendezvoused with each other eight miles out in the Atlantic and below the four hundred fathom mark of depth. There, at last, they combined once more into a single unit and headed toward Castle-Home.

  Johnny walked through the individual small-Homes in which the wounded and the untouched had sorted themselves out. There was a thick feeling of numb disbelief that wrapped about him like a heavy blanket.

  In spite of the necessity of what they had needed to do, in spite of his own personal effort to privately anticipate the worst that could happen,
the thought of the dead and possibly the wounded they had left behind, as well as the actuality of the wounded sea-born around him now, left him stunned.

  Troubled as the world had been for forty years, it had not experienced organized fighting and killing in all that time; and this had been organized fighting and killing. It had been war—war he himself had set in motion. Around and around in his head as he went from small-Home to small-Home, from bed to bed of the wounded, the question hammered at him of what he could have done differently to avoid it all.

  Always, the question returned unanswered. There must have been something he could have done. Anything would have been preferable to this. But every time he went around with it he came back to the fact that he would have been forced to the same decision again.

  Simply, it had been a choice between death and submission. If they had let the land get away with arresting the hundred and twenty-nine ex-Cadets, they could no longer have called themselves free. And, being what they were—what their sea-birth had made them—they could not survive otherwise than as a free people.

  And where was Patrick now, back on the land? What did the landers feel about him, now that the sea-born had rescued their own? Did the land know how he had helped the rest of them to get away . . . ?

  Unexpectedly, Johnny's mind cleared a little; and he suddenly understood the two contradictory things Patrick had done this day. A lifetime of growing up with his cousin had made it almost possible for him to think the other's thoughts.

  No more than he could have, himself, could Pat have given the land the information of where and when they were coming ashore if Patrick had known of the manner in which the land would be waiting for them. When Patrick had seen the armed landers, when he had heard the firing and seen the sea-born dying, that was when Pat must have changed sides again, somehow cleared the soldiers from the passage along which they had escaped, and led the rest of them to safety down it. Then, having done that, he had—as might be expected of someone like him—refused to return to the generation he had betrayed. He had stayed ashore instead, to face the landers, alone, with his betrayal of them.

  Grief for Patrick stirred powerfully in Johnny, to blend with other grief for the dead and wounded sea-born. He paced back and forth through the combined small-Homes, until Mikros and Eva Loy came and forced him to go back to his own small-Home and lie down.

  He had not dreamed that he would be able to sleep. But sleep he did, almost immediately.

  A sodden, dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.

  "Don't hang to your father," said Sara to Tomi, when Johnny was once more back in the small-Home with them.

  "But—"

  "Not now,” Sara said. "They're waiting for him in the Conference Room. Daddy just came by for a minute, and we have to talk. Go swim outside."

  Tomi hesitated, standing on one foot, face screwed up.

  "You go!" said Sara. Her voice had a hard note in it Johnny had never heard before. Tomi’s eyes went wide and he left.

  Johnny watched him go numbly. The Lander subs had chased them out into open sea. The decoy they had made out of the small-Homes had drawn them off. On automatic controls, it had led the subs three miles deep to the Atlantic ooze and then blown itself up, taking at least one sub with it. A Lander sub carried over two hundred men. There had been more than a hundred of the ex-Cadets who had not come bade.

  Riding home after that in the rest of the small-Homes, those that returned had begun to sing "Hey, Johnny!” And the song had spread over the radio circuit from ship to ship until they all sang. Johnny had turned his face to the rushing blue beyond the transparent wall of his craft to hide the fact he could not sing along with them.

  Patrick's voice had sounded again in his ears."You're a ringleader—”

  "...I've got to talk to you about Tomi," Sara was saying.

  "Now?" he said dully.

  His real reason for detouring by here on his way to the Conference Room was that he had wanted to hide for a few moments. At the sound of his son’s name he shivered unexpectedly. The dark eye of the killer whale had come back to his mind. But now it gazed without change and without pity on the still shape of the young ex-Cadet he had seen die in the conservatory ashore.

  "I've never told you why I didn't let you know about you having a son, all these years. Do you know why?”

  “Why?” He focused on her with difficulty. “No—no, I don’t.” He became aware, for the first time, that her face was stiff and pale.

  “Sara, what is it?”

  “I didn’t tell you,” she said as if she were reciting a lesson, "because I didn’t want him to be like you."

  He thought of Patrick and the men who were now dead.

  "Well,’’ he said, "I don't blame you.”

  "Don't blame me!” Without warning she began to cry. It was not the easy, relief-giving sorrow of the People. Her tears were angry. She stood with them running down her cheeks and her fists clenched, facing him. "I knew what you were like when I fell in love with you! I knew you'd always be going and pushing things through. No matter what it cost, no matter who it hurt. You say things and people do them—it's something about you! And you just take it all for granted.”

  He put his hands on her to soothe her, but she was hard as a rock.

  “But I wasn't going to let you kill my baby!" she thrust at him. “I was going to hide him—keep him safe, so he’d never know what his father was like and want to go and be like him. And go away from me, too, without thinking of anything but what he personally wanted to do, and get himself killed for nothing.”

  "Sara—" he said.

  "And then you came back. And he told me about the business in the killer whale corral. And then I knew it was no use. No use at all. Because he was born just like you, and there was nothing I could do to protect him, no matter what I did. My child . . .” and with that, at last she broke down. All the hardness went out of her; and he held her to him as she cried.

  For a moment or two he thought the crisis was over. But she stiffened again and pulled away from him.

  "You've got to make me a promise," she said, wiping her eyes.

  "Of course," he said.

  Not of course. You listen to what I want.

  You make me a promise that if anything happens to me, you’ll take care of him. You'll keep him safe. Not the way you would—the way I'd keep him safe. You promise me."

  "Nothing's going to happen to you."

  "Promise me!"

  "All right,” he said. “I promise I'll take care of him the way you would.”

  She wiped her eyes again. "You'd better go now. They’ll be waiting for you. Oh, wait."

  She turned and hurried from him, back into the bedroom. She came back in a second with a tangle of smashed plastic and dangling wires.

  "Patrick left it for you,” she said. "He said you'd understand."

  Numbly he took the ruined banjo.

  When he finally reached the Conference Room,

  it was full of Council members.

  "It's war," said Chad Ridell, looking at him bleakly. “We got their announcement of it an hour after you landed at Jones Beach—an hour before one of our gull-cameras picked up this—"

  He touched a button on his chair. The end of the room blanked out. Johnny saw a gull's-view image of the Atlantic surface in the cold, gray-blue light of early dawn. His sea-instinct recognized the spot as less than a hundred miles south.

  Look,” said Chad. There was a flicker in the sky, and a hole yawned suddenly, huge and deep in the ocean's face. For a moment the unnatural situation lasted. And then leaping up through the hole moved a fist of water. It lifted toward the paling sky of dawn like a mountain tom from the ocean floor; and a roar like that of some huge, tortured beast burst on the Conference Room.

  The fist stretched out into a pillar, broke and disintegrated. A cow biscay whale drifted by on her side, trying to turn over, blood running from the comer of her mouth.

  "Sonic explosion," said Johnny
. “Big enough for all Castle-Home."

  "They meant that announcement of war," said Chad.

  But why bomb empty ocean?" Johnny said.

  "Castle-Home was there three hours ago," put in Eva Loy, who was standing close by Chad. "They must have spotted us from a satellite and thought we were still close. We can stay deep from now on, though."

  Johnny nodded. Castle-Home had been at a hundred fathoms when the expedition had comeback. He remembered what he was carrying.

  "No,” he said, "even that won't work.” He handed the tangle of broken plastic and wires to Chad, who stared at it, blankly.

  "It's Patrick's banjo," said Johnny.

  "Pat went in with us. He was the one who tipped off the Congress soldiers so that they laid that trap in the plaza for us. He's on their side now.”

  "But Patrick—” Eva Loy stared at him across Chad. "Patrick's third generation! He can find Castle-Home as well as any of us.”

  "That's right,” said Johnny.

  "But I don't understand it!" Chad got up abruptly from his chair. He faced Johnny.

  "Why Patrick?—Patrick of all people?"

  "I don't know,” said Johnny. "He thinks we're wrong to fight the land. It’s what he believes, I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders unhappily. "Maybe I was wrong.”

  "You don't believe that," said Eva.

  "No, I guess not." Johnny tried to smile at Eva. His promise to Sara was still strong in his mind. “At any rate, the only thing that seems to make sense to me, now, is for me and anyone else who wants to come with me to give ourselves up to them." He glanced at Chad. "If they get what they call ringleaders, maybe—"

  Cutting through what he was going to say, came the sudden, brazen shrieking of the alarm bell.

  "Missile!" cried a voice from the wall speaker of the room. “This is the Communications Dome. Missile approaching! Missile—”

  A sound too great to be heard folded all around them. Johnny felt himself picked up and carried away at an angle upward. He ducked away from the ceiling, but the ceiling was no longer there. For a second, still moving, he was in a little box of air, with water all around him.