Doronin was fascinated. ‘An absolute authority? Unquestioned?’
‘On higher levels it is continually in question. Among individuals rarely; we are their security.’
‘That places a different aspect on your errors of handling us. What seemed arrogant authoritarianism was simple bad manners.’
Inwardly Campion winced. ‘Have you been ill-treated?’
‘Physically, no.’
Raft said, ‘You seem to have lost some sense of individuality despite your talk of minorities. Your people insulted me personally by taking over my ship without explanation and without so much as a visit from an officer of any seniority. You impounded our records, which may have been your legal right but should have been explained. And the impounding of our private papers was theft.’
Campion chose words slowly. ‘For these things I ask your pardon. I assume the blame.’ This was unfair to himself but the concession was wise. ‘Understand, please, that the world is superficially in harmony but basically unstable, to some extent deliberately so; it is a world in building, arising out of planetary disaster. We don’t know yet where it is going or in which direction stability lies, and the work of Security may be assumed as holding it together until the direction becomes plain. This involves swift decisions, sometimes so swift that the ensuing complications have to be taken on chance for the sake of an immediate result. And so with you; you were unexpected.’
Lindley crowed, ‘Forgotten!’ He was becoming raucous; Raft placed a hand on his arm and he shook it off. ‘While the world licked its stinking wounds the greatest voyage in history was forgotten!’
‘Why not? Who wants the stars? We have no use for them yet and much else to do. That is a measure of the catastrophe. Some knew of you – archivists and astronomers – but in general you were forgotten. The archivists gave notice of your return and some routine preparations were made for receiving you home. Then something else occurred.’
He was not sure he could make the seriousness of this clear to them, but at least he had their attention. ‘A whisper began to circulate that an obscure biologist of your era is still alive, though it seems unlikely. Whisper became rumour, springing up in many areas simultaneously; there was something messianic about it, a promise of a better world, but vague. The youngsters seemed impressed, but among them there is always unrest and a readiness to follow smoke dreams. Security was alerted because it bore the earmarks of a planned campaign, but the mystical quality and the absence of definite statement makes it difficult to find a starting point for investigation. Then an archivist discovered his connection with Columbus’
‘John.’
‘Your Heathcote. Search of old newspapers indicated an element of mystery; it seemed likely that he had been hidden from sight by the Australian government of your time and his name allowed to be forgotten. And it seemed that this resurgence was fomented by a clandestine group for a purpose we can only guess at, so when you contacted us from space we acted quickly. Unwisely perhaps. Confronted with faceless danger you don’t always behave competently.’
‘Suspicion!’ Lindley again, barking, unappeasable.
‘Can you imagine what it means to be the guardians of a world in traumatic fear of its own past? Even Security exists only by sufferance and a record of successful activity; a strong concerted action could destroy us, and what then? If Columbus contained clues we wanted them, and at once.’
Matthews laughed in spiteful delight. ‘Forty-two years of documents to search! Hundreds of miles of film and computer tape, millions of scribbled words! Poor little black crows!’
‘With a corps of trained archivists it was not difficult. We found Commander Raft’s remarkable speech in a matter of days. And became more afraid.’
He watched their eyes centre on Raft; the Commander appeared thoughtful. Campion had the irrelevant idea that Raft might make an able Security man.
Kulayev stirred in his chair. ‘Joachim and I are biologists but we are not professionally blind. We have discussed the implications of cloning; we see that unregulated, or controlled by a power group, it could be used to ruin a civilisation and rule the ruins. Given time, that is; it is not an instantaneous process. But it has an advantage over conventional violence in that it would leave the physical world intact for takeover, destroying only its individuality, its genius.’
‘So we think. At least some of Heathcote’s original clone have survived; there is at least one member in Melbourne Town, Commander, and more are dispersed across the world. We are still searching.’
Lindley said with a new mildness, almost tiredly, ‘And so to gaol, children. It’s called protective custody.’
Campion snapped, ‘We aren’t idiots. There will be surveillance which under the circumstances you can hardly object to, but you will be turned loose to live your own lives. We want to see who talks to you, contacts you. Particularly you, Commander. If a conspiracy in fact exists, you could be used as a symbolic rallying point.’
Raft said, ‘I would not agree to be so used. I never cared for John’s research once I had begun to think deeply about it.’
‘Drugs. And other forms of indoctrination. You would agree.’
‘We were able to do that sort of thing; perhaps you can do it better. Stay with me, Jim; I shall need friends.’
Lindley nodded, a calculating life back in his eyes.
Campion held out his hand, seeing the moment for it.
‘You will need me, too, Commander. I am not the enemy.’
Raft hesitated but took it.
3
The size of the shuttle’s cabin, as a ratio of its overall dimensions, was greater than Raft had guessed; the motor must be of awesome efficiency and small size. As he sank into the couch, whose backrest and footboard shifted to accommodate him, he fancied that whatever Earth offered in uneasy social problems there would be a keen technology to stimulate him.
Taking flight was no more ceremonious than starting an automobile. A word from Campion, an acknowledgement from the black-clad pilot, and the shuttle pressed him into the seat as it moved. A faint resonance sounded in the metal walls but he could detect no distinct engine roar. Fusion power? Was that practicable on so small a scale? The required masses of shielding decided him it was not. But with new methods of shielding, such as magnetic deflection? He would do better to wait until he met those who could inform him in technical language.
Meanwhile he pondered the fact that the shuttle held not the three he had predicted but all the complement of Columbus and their baggage, while the second craft had taken off the Tech guards. Casually, the starship had been left uninhabited.
Acceleration built rapidly to about 2g. The shuttle nosedived towards the limb of atmosphere just visible in the forward window when he craned his neck. The trip was swift, powered and controlled every downward mile. Reentry was a delight – a single braking half-circuit of the globe. (No observable heat shield and no rise in internal temperature!) There was a gliding approach at an impossible landing speed and three tremendous jerks – tail chutes? – before the shuttle grounded, lumbering and bulky but controlled.
So the starmen came home.
Columbus, stripped, dark, empty, flashed through her orbit in a spot roughly over the tip of South Africa.
Twenty-four-hour orbits, close to the fringes of atmosphere in a space more crowded with matter than the outer miles, are notoriously unstable. Sooner or later she would slow, veer, dip and begin the long tumble towards Earth and brilliant dissolution in the upper air.
Raft thought about it and cared.
No one else seemed to. He could hear Streich and the Russians chattering at each other and Matthews being small boy excited; Lindley was bitterly silent. As if, Raft mused, any modern England could ever have been ‘home’ in a meaningful sense. Psychiatric expertise did not bar out emotional unreason.
4
With the tail down the nose was raised above the horizon; Raft could see only summer sky, hot summer blue, with a wisp
of cloud. But there was sound, human sound, muffled and meaningless, the sound of voices.
Campion, leaning over the pilot’s shoulder for a view of the ground, made a wordless sound of disbelief and remained transfixed.
Matthews called out, ‘Where the hell are we?’
Campion turned his head slowly, frowning, abstracted. ‘On a landing field outside Melbourne Town. There’s a crowd, a big crowd … something’s happened …’ His voice breathed down into puzzled thought.
‘Sure thing. We’ve happened.’ For an uncomprehending Campion, Matthews ticked off his fingers. ‘We are the astronauts, the only genuine, original astronauts. We have circled Barnard’s Star. We have come home.’ He bellowed, ‘You bloody nit, they want to see us!’
‘Why?’ The flat enquiry would have silenced fanatics. ‘You don’t think—?’ He shook his head. ‘I explained to you.’
Lindley crooned maliciously, ‘Change and decay in all around I see—’ He let it die in a chuckle. ‘This is fame!’
Raft sat upright and the chair moved obligingly to help. ‘So the space dream is really dead.’
Campion answered roughly, his mind not on them. ‘We have observatories and laboratories and a few specialised factories on Luna, communication and weather satellites – useful things.’ He tapped the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Open up.’
The entry porte slid into the wall cavity and the sound of humanity crashed through it.
It was loud, blatant, continuous, but did not seem very close; it could not compare with the surf-thunder of a football crowd; it was more like the inchoate restlessness of a street mob. It was a noise of shouting, words indistinguishable but not welcoming, a confused, angry but basically organised noise; it had meaning and direction. Yet it did not sound like the voice of a throng great enough to give pause to the authoritarian Campion whose dark form filled the opening.
The starmen rose together, stumbling over the politely adjusting chairs. Round Campion’s shoulder Raft caught a glimpse of people behind a low, lightly built post and rail fence, perhaps a hundred yards distant from the shuttle, before the Security man thrust him back. ‘Keep out of sight until I understand this.’
He was pushed too easily back, reminded that this was Earth, which proposed tricks to be relearned; permanent gravity was a more serious matter than unadventurous muscle toning in Columbus’s centrifuge. He supposed, beneath a muddled wonder at the brouhaha outside, that he would tire quickly and move clumsily until he regained the habit of weight.
From outside the shuttle a thoroughly Australian voice called, ‘Get the blasted steps down, Ian; I want to get in there.’
The pilot touched a control; steps rattled to the ground; the mob yell strengthened. Someone mounted, grunting effort and cursing in terms unchanged in centuries. Campion leaned to help him up and ushered in an apparition.
He was in his sixties and stick-thin, bareheaded and utterly hairless. His skin was a colour neither sunburned nor pigmented yet something of both; it was discoloured. To Raft a slight thickening of lips and splay of nostrils suggested some aboriginal blood. His faded eyes scanned the starmen briefly, rested a longer instant on Raft, passed to Campion’s face and away again.
Matthews breathed, ‘Shades of the hippies!’
The man wore what appeared to be a single length of cloth, deep blue and decorated with a pattern of red and orange whorls, folded and draped to leave one bony shoulder bare; Raft could not decide whether it resembled most a sari or a toga. From beneath it an advancing foot was shod more familiarly in a point-toed but bright red shoe. One wrist carried a red leather decoration like the forearm section of a driving glove, from whose upper end a primrose handkerchief peeped modishly.
Campion asked, ‘Dad, what the hell’s going on?’
The old man – old spectre, old clothes-horse – swung his gaze back to Raft and said with strength, ‘I am not his father, but what is he to you?’
Raft settled back into his chair. ‘Who asks?’
The old eyes flickered approbation. Campion placed a hand behind the bare elbow. ‘This is my Ombudsman, Mister Stephen Jackson. He is a man of great authority.’ (Raft fancied a gleam of sardonic amusement in the pale old eyes.) ‘Commander Raft, you must speak freely with the Ombudsman. What he hears is … I have no expression with the right meaning for your time –’
Jackson said, ‘ “Confessional” is the word, though it is no longer used in that sense. Don’t be offended, Mister Matthews; Catholicism is not altogether dead, but the forms have changed. Now, Commander!’
‘The Commissioner is not of my clone. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘Hoped. Can you be sure?’
‘Quite sure. Must I explain again?’
‘I have heard your tape. I do not accept it fully.’
Across Albert’s angry reaction Kulayev threw his own little firework. ‘Nor do I. I believe Albert; he never lies, but he may not realise that he is wrong. The resemblances are too distinct over a gap of two generations.’
Matthews grunted, ‘Likenesses happen.’
‘In novels. In life most rarely. Put reported resemblances together and the likeness becomes vague. This is nearly twin likeness. Probability suggests a faulty cloning procedure.’
Raft muttered, ‘We’ll be back where we started in a moment.’
Lindley was harsh. ‘We’re already there. Your certainty was always open to question.’
Jackson raised his voice. ‘Shut up, all of you!’
Campion protested, ‘I’m damned if I will. Where does all this leave me?’
Only Matthews had an unfeeling answer: ‘Up shitter’s ditch, Commissioner.’
Jackson gave him a cracked chuckle. ‘I haven’t heard that said in forty years. Your position is regrettable, Ian, but it will have to rest there a while. This crowd is ugly and we must get away from here.’
‘I don’t know yet what’s going on out there.’
‘Nor in detail do I. The situation has not clarified much. Transport is here, so – out!’
Matthews asked patiently, ‘Why don’t we just fly to another field?’
Campion’s irritation yelled at him, ‘Because we need a booster to get this thing off the ground and it would take hours to get one.’ He continued more calmly, ‘Leave the gear here; it can be picked up later.’
So the shuttles were not completely self-contained; that explained something of their smallness.
Jackson led the way down the steps. They seemed to have landed at the head of the field for there were buildings clustered there – low, with a prefabricated, temporary air. For the rest Raft saw trees wherever he looked, and felt at last the reality of home.
The crowd was even smaller than he had judged, perhaps no more than a thousand, but rowdy enough for twice the number. Still, it was not his idea of a large and menacing mob, nothing at all to a man who remembered the Energy Crisis riots and the police strikes of the eighties. They were too far from him for detail to be clear but they were certainly a colourfully dressed, humming-bird group and they seemed mostly young. Their noise was meaningless except in its animosity – against whom? Himself? Man, what a homecoming.
Black uniforms loitered here and there on the field side of the fence but they were outnumbered by figures in grey. Civil police, perhaps? They seemed only to stand facing the noise and displaying patience; they took no action.
Between one downward step and the next he recognised the nausea in his stomach; it had been there since the landing but submerged in the pressures of arrival. With it came a conviction of being surrounded by eyes. Not the eyes of the mob but special eyes looking with special intensity. His skin crawled.
He called to Campion, ‘They’re here,’ and the Commissioner answered, ‘I wondered.’
He tried to ignore the preliminaries of physical sickness.
The transport brought for them resembled a small, low-slung, streamlined bus with no indication of where its motor might be. It would carry about twenty;
already the guards from the other shuttle were seated. Campion practically pushed him into the bus and climbed in beside him.
To heightened awareness the menace of the crowd became nervously tangible, infiltrating and reinforcing his body’s discomfort. The nearness of clone-members caused the instinctive aversion he might feel for a snake; he tightened his teeth against a need to vomit.
As the bus moved towards a break in the fence Jackson’s voice urged, ‘Speed, man, speed!’
The vehicle picked up pace and there was a corresponding movement in the crowd. With a concerted ripple, a serpentine flow, it heaved together from both sides of the gap; in seconds a hundred bodies crowded the passage through which the bus must move.
The driver slowed and Jackson howled, ‘Drive through them! They’ll shift.’
But the driver hesitated and the horde poured through the gap. As they closed in Raft searched without success for his own face; they could be anywhere, hidden by numbers.
On either side of the break there came a sudden, orderly bending of backs and a united effort, and twenty-yard sections of fence were lifted out by the posts and flung flat. Campion swore, ‘That was rehearsed.’ A gun appeared in his hand; a real gun, not a gas toy.
The mob swept across the field and their target was not the bus but the men in uniform. It surrounded and engulfed them in a planned, cold ferocity. Police and Security men were lifted and tossed by a mass grasping of hands; black and grey rose momentarily as though squeezed up by the pressures upon them; then they submerged, clawed, kicked, beaten in a storm of fury that had seemed only noisy animus a heartbeat before. Taken whole by the unexpected, they were too slow in defence. They vanished, enfolded and swallowed by a savagery sprung full-powered from a merely unruly mob of youngsters.
Campion was right; this had been planned, organised, rehearsed.
As he saw his men attacked the Commissioner was already half out of the bus, bellowing to his Techs to defend the starmen. In a flash of prescience Raft tried to stop him. Campion lashed at him with the gun butt and was off, running.
Raft’s premonition was justified; this was what had been designed.
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