“It wasn’t sure, your way,” he said. “I’ve had enough waiting! I’ve waited thirty years! I’ve tried the slow way and now I’m through with all that. Now they know who’s master! If anyone’s left alive when I’ve finished with ’em, they can bow down to La Boucherie and thank me for saving their lives! I’ll show ’em who runs this planet before I’m through!” He choked on his own laughter and his face turned a deeper crimson as he swayed in the creaking chair.
BEHIND him the radio sputtered again and then said;
“Reno Leaders calling martial law until Council sends down emergency orders. Weather Patrol over Reno reports storm under control there. Council promises relief within hours.”
La Boucherie’s thick-voiced laughter halted abruptly. He swung to the radio just as static blanked out the voice again.
“Mart!” he said sharply. “The Council—what is it?”
“You know as much as I do,” Havers heard himself saying.
“You were there, in Reno. You talked with the Leaders. You must know who really heads the Government. What is this Council?”
“I only know they never make mistakes,” Mart said. A faint flicker of enjoyment was beginning to sound in his voice. Wryly he added, “You and I are only fallible humans. We’ve wrecked the country. Now the Council’s taking over. I wouldn’t give a nickel for your life or mine from now on, La Boucherie.”
Suddenly, for the first time in many years, he remembered what the name La Boucherie really meant. The butchery—the slaughter-house. This man had made the whole continent a slaughter-house under the blows of the elements, but a reckoning was on its way. He found he was laughing.
Ponderously La Boucherie heaved himself out of the chair.
“Mart!” he said.
Mart Havers did not hear. His laughter was half-hysterical and he knew it, but he could not stop. Not until a searing pain hissed past his face and something crashed against the wall behind him. Then he caught his breath and stared. Half-swallowed in La Boucherie’s huge hand, the little gun looked innocent enough. But it glared with white fire as Mart saw it and a second pain seared his other cheek.
“All right!” La Boucherie went on. “We’re going out. You first, Mart.”
“But where? Why?”
“We’re going to Reno. You know your way around there. You’re taking me to the Council!”
It was a Weather Patrol rocket-job which Havers flew, with La Boucherie beside him, the little gun digging into his ribs all the way. One of the stolen ships. One of the ships in which his friends among the Freemen and his friends among the Patrol were at this moment battling one another with thunderbolts and cloud masses above the stricken Earth.
A rocket flies fast. High and fast. They could not see much of the curved Earth from this stratosphere level, but through a rift in the clouds now and then, too far below to have meaning or relevance, the planet’s ruined face looked up at them.
Sunlight glinted on vast moving sheets of water where cities had been only yesterday. White snow fields blotted out the green of whole states. Mountain ranges reeled past below, sheathed in dazzling ice.
And La Boucherie chuckled, chuckled as the ship jetted on.
CHAPTER XVII
Madman’s Last Effort
THERE they were comparatively safe from the elements they themselves had loosed upon the shaken world. But presently the jagged peaks below them took on familiar shapes, and Mart knew that Reno lay below the cloud blanket.
Rain lashed with the fierce velocity of hail against the ship’s sides as they broke through the ceiling and the white tower which housed the Council pointed its tall, pale finger at them. Thunder rolled as they slanted down, and a violet lance of lightning shook threateningly across the gray sky.
Mart never saw the ship that shot them down.
He knew, of course, that guard ships constantly patrolled the area, but the waning storm was still fierce enough to blind him and his first intimation of attack was almost his last—the smashing impact that knocked him out of his seat and cracked his head against the curved wall.
Rain in his face roused him. Someone was shaking his shoulder and crying, “Mart! Mart!” over and over in a faraway voice.
“Daniele?” he said, then opened his eyes and was looking into La Boucherie’s face, streaming with rain.
He sat up, testing his limbs. Miraculously, he seemed to be unhurt.
“Mart, wake up!” La Boucherie’s voice was urgent. Fat hands helped him to his feet. “The plane’s smashed, but the rocket braked us. I’m all right. Are you? Hurry, Mart! They’re looking for us. We’ve got to get away.”
The white tower lifted high above them, rising only a little way off among debris that had been houses when Mart had last seen Reno. Hurricane and fire had come and gone here, and flood had put out the fire and was now beginning to recede a little.
Urged by La Boucherie, still half dazed from the fall, Mart scrambled over the ruins toward the tower.
Through the sluicing rain they floundered toward the back of the tower. Mart still had his key to one of the private entrances underground. He led La Boucherie down the stairs and into the little foyer, knee-deep now with rainwater, and fitted his key in the lock.
He was not quite sure yet what his own plans were. La, Boucherie—something certainly had given away in the big man’s mind, tried to the breaking point by thirty years of heartbreaking defeats.
And yet victory might be salvaged out of the terrible disasters still raging across the continent. No less than La Boucherie, Mart now wanted to confront the Council and demand an answer from whatever mysterious group he found at the height of the tower.
They could go only so high, Mart knew, without entering the public corridors. Private elevators went up five stories to the private quarters of the Leaders. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess how far they would get.
They got to the eighth floor. To work their way even so far was like fighting through a roar of heavy surf, for the whole great building was a vortex through which poured a pandemonium of activity. The halls seethed with hurrying men and women, their faces tight with sleeplessness and responsibility. The catastrophe which Mart had so lately unleashed upon the world was even now only beginning to slacken, and upon these men and women rested a heavy measure of the duty of combating its results.
The bright blue uniforms of the Weather Patrol made a pattern in the shifting crowds. The red cloaks of Guardsmen billowed out in the faces of passersby. Laboratory technicians in white smocks pushed through the jostling confusion with sheafs of reports in their hands. And now and then a tall Leader of Council grade hurried down a lane respectfully opened before him.
Many of the crowd wore tom and dripping uniforms, many had blood on their faces and clothing. La Boucherie’s disheveled look and wild, furious eyes were not the arresting sight they would have been in any circumstances. It looked as if all Reno was pouring in and out of this enormous building, and among the rest two illegal entrants seemed unlikely to draw anyone’s notice.
La Boucherie held Mart’s arm in the grip of a big hand like a padded glove, through which the iron tension of muscles and bone clamped painfully. It was always surprising to be reminded of what power lay in those puffy, ineffectual-looking fingers. Mart’s cloak, hanging in heavy folds between them, hid the little smash-gun engulfed in La Boucherie’s fat palm and pressing between them into Mart’s ribs.
“Where are you taking me?” La Boucherie demanded in the almost inaudible corner-of-the-mouth whisper that has been standard among fugitive minorities since men first began imprisoning one another. “Where is this Council?”
“Up somewhere at the top of the building,” Mart told him in the same Slaggenerated murmur. “I’ve never been there, but I know it’s near the top.”
“Don’t try anything. You won’t live long enough to regret it.”
MART shrugged. He was not sure enough of his own mind to have any clear idea what he really did want. Through hi
s own error, the attack on Cromwellianism had gone so far that there was no hope of redeeming the mistake.
Perhaps La Boucherie was right. Perhaps the only hope now was to smash all Leader authority from its very source and let fresh leadership arise out of the welter to which the continent had been reduced. He shook his head hopelessly. There had been too much strain on his battered mind in the past months. He couldn’t think except in circles and parables.
“Let the storm blow itself out,” he thought. “I sowed the wind. I’ll have to reap the whirlwind. Let it blow. It’s out of my hands now.”
They reached the eighth floor without difficulty. But this was the top, so far as the public crowds were concerned. And as they waited by the broad elevator doors while a swarm of cloaked and white-coated men poured out, the thing both had been expecting happened at last.
A red cloak swirled beside them and a Guardsman in a shining steel helmet, still miraculously bright in spite of the mud and rain on his shoulders, put out his gloved hand to bar their way.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Mart “Your pass, please.”
La Boucherie’s gun dug hard in Mart’s ribs. For a moment it seemed to Mart that the three of them stood in a little cone of absolute silence. All sound stopped around him while he waited for some idea to spring to lift in his mind. When it came he was not really aware of it.
“I haven’t got a pass,” he heard himself say, without any idea of what would come next. But it came smoothly enough. “I’ve lost my papers,” he went on in a calm voice.
It seemed plausible enough. Many men must have lost their papers in the increasing chaos that had engulfed Reno.
“But you must have got a pass at the door,” the Guard insisted, still politely, but with dawning suspicion in his eyes. “Whom do you want to see?”
“We came in a private way,” Mart said truthfully. He held out the distinctive key which only resident Leaders carried. “We’re on private business. Let us by, please. The elevator’s just going.”
He tried to push past the Guard The man hesitated That key had been a powerful bit of evidence, but he was still uncertain.
Mart saw the half-conviction on his face, and clinched it. He leaned forward and murmured in the Guard’s ear, a code sentence by which as Weather Patrolman and Leader he had got entry into proscribed areas before.
There was a tense instant when La Boucherie’s gun ground its warning snout into his ribs on one side in mistrust of this secrecy, and the Guard’s mistrust on the other hand still held him rigid. Trapped between them, Mart waited.
Then the Guard relaxed, nodding his brightly helmed head.
“All right, sir. Go ahead.” He stepped back.
Together Mart and La Boucherie crowded into the elevator, linked by the stiff bond of hand-grip and gun. The door slid shut, the Guard’s watching face vanished, the shaft sighed beneath them as the car rose.
When the door slid open again six Guardsmen were waiting for them.
There was a flurry of excitement as the packed elevator emptied itself into the hall and the red-cloaked men shouldered forward to close in upon Mart and La Boucherie.
“You did it!” La Boucherie snarled at Mart’s shoulder, and the gun muzzle wavered against his side a little as a fat finger tightened upon its trigger.
Something in Mart’s face must have warned the Guards, for in the instant that Mart pivoted on his right foot and smacked his hand down over La Boucherie’s gun wrist, swinging away from the muzzle as it scraped across his ribs, the foremost Guardsman lunged forward and flung his arms around La Boucherie’s enormous shoulders, pinioning his arms from the back.
There was a period of heaving, stamping struggle. Someone had a stranglehold around Mart’s neck, and the air swam red before him with his own suffocation and the streaming cloaks of the Guards. There was a great deal of shouting and confusion as the crowd swirled around the fight in its center.
But no soughing of a smash-gun sounded, and Mart knew after a moment or two of waiting for it that La Boucherie did not have a chance. Not without his gun. As for. Mart himself—he was not fighting hard. He had been waiting equally for success or capture, uncertain which he hoped for, ready to accept either. Now he had his answer.
Few people paid any attention to the little group of Guards and the two prisoners as they marched down the length of the enormous room toward the desk at the far end. It must be an Operations Center for this whole area, Mart thought, glancing up at the three tiers of balconies rising above the thronging floor. Everywhere were desks, report boards, televisor screens, hurrying men.
IT OCCURRED to Mart suddenly that this room was probably the first relay station that received orders handed down by the High Council and distributed them abroad over the whole continent. He was conscious of an overwhelming desire to see the Council itself, or the man who represented the Council. Whatever or whoever it was on the topmost floor of this building, guiding the destinies of the Cromwellian world in this most perilous hour.
A man whom Mart had never seen before sat at the desk to which they were led at last. Curiously, it was La Boucherie who identified him. The fight in the hall seemed temporarily to have calmed La Boucherie a little, and now he murmured out of the comer of his mouth as companionably as if he had not been trying to kill Mart a few minutes before.
“Williams,” he said softly. “Chief of the Continental Police. Belongs at Washington. They must have moved the whole organization right here. That means the High-Council’s here too, Mart. We’ve got to escape!”
The Guard who had first stopped them-was talking to Williams now.
“And when he gave me the Leader code phrase,” the man said, “I remembered the alarm we had about a renegade Leader, and—”
“Yes, yes, thank you.” Williams cut him off impatiently. He looked down at Mart, his brows meeting in a scowl that might be anger or only deep thought. “You’re Havers, aren’t you? Renegade Weather Patrolman. What are you doing here?”
Mart shrugged and was silent. What could he say?
“I think you may have a lot to tell us about what’s been happening,” the police chief went on after a pause. “If you don’t feel like talking now, I believe I’ll—”
He broke off and flipped the switch of his visor-screen.
“Leader Vaughan,” he said. “Leader Vaughan!”
The screen darkened and then Daniele’s blue eyes and pale, tired face looked out at them.
“I have a man here who worked with you for a while,” Williams said. “There’s been a report out on him. Will you step down here for a moment?”
Daniele’s gaze shifted from Williams to the group before the desk. Only Mart would have known that she was startled. That little flutter of her lower lip caught for a moment between her teeth was all the sign she gave, but her eyes dwelt upon his for what seemed like a long second before she said;
“Of course, Leader Williams. Right away.”
She did not speak to Mart when she stood at Williams’ elbow, looking down, but he thought she had not taken her eyes from him since she first came into sight, threading her way among the desks. She listened in silence to all Williams had to tell her.
“I’d like to suggest something,” she said, when he finished. “Mart Havers was under treatment at Mnemonics when he had his—relapse. I’d very much like to have Leader Llewelyn see him. And this other man, too, since they were taken together.”
She stared hard at Mart as she spoke. He felt sure she was trying to say something with that silent stare, but what, he could not guess. Perhaps even she did not yet quite know. Bewilderment was in her eyes, and something like surprise.
“If I may,” she finished, glancing for the first time at Williams, “I’ll go along too. I—I think I have something to say to Leader Llewelyn about this man.”
They could hear the storm roaring outside when they came out of the elevator and crossed Llewelyn’s private foyer. Rain pounded at the tall windows and slid down the g
lass in sheets so heavy the windows were opaque.
La Boucherie was up to something. Mart knew it by the changed tempo in the big man’s breathing, in the way he walked between his guards. That violence in him which had built up for thirty years and broken at last with almost the force of the storm itself was not to be held in leash for long. But he timed himself with great cunning and control.
Daniele was speaking into the door-visor, announcing their arrival, when La Boucherie’s enormous bulk lurched suddenly sideward as if he were falling. It looked so much like a fall that the Guard at his elbow put out his both hands to help. That was an error. La Boucherie’s tremendous weight came down like an avalanche of solid flesh upon the Guard. La Boucherie’s deceptive-looking hand flashed out, slipped the man’s smash-gun deftly from, its holster and folded lovingly around it.
La Boucherie struck the floor on one padded shoulder, rolled completely over and was on his feet with incredible lightness. For an instant the muzzle of the gun menaced them from the curtained doorway, La Boucherie’s skull-like smile as menacing as the gun above it. The Guard, scrambling to his feet, for a moment gave him the shield he needed, and by the time the way was clear La Boucherie had vanished soundlessly.
It was hopeless, of course. He could not possibly get far in a strange building swarming with Guards and communication devices. Mart saw the leader of the Guards speaking into his glove-visor and knew the alarm was out already. Then the two men who gripped his elbows pushed him forward and he went into Llewelyn’s private apartment again, Daniele walking before him.
CHAPTER XVIII
Top Secret
NO SINGLE detail of the story Mart told to Llewelyn was left out.
“And that,” he finished, “is all that happened. All of it. It was my own fault and I’m ready to take the consequences, because I’ve got to. The thing was out of hand thirty years ago, I suppose, when La Boucherie had his first major setback and started on the path that led to—this. Certainly it was out of hand the moment I let myself fall asleep in the cave. I’m not excusing myself, Leader. I’m glad I did what I did. It’s the sin of omission that worries me, and even that’s too late to worry about now.”
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