“What do you think I’ve been driving at all this time, but an army of my own—a Contacts army which’ll go on growing and getting more effective until the Combat Services can’t do without us? Until we get so good at last, that the day comes they let us go in first, to see if we can’t make it without fighting at all.That’s what I’ve been working for all these years. That’s when I’m going to need the sort of men this race of ours has only written philosophies about before. That’s why I want you—for my right hand man, to take over for me when the time comes—just as I planned it from the first time I discovered you.”
The twilight line was under and past them, now. It was all a dark world ahead.
“It’s no use,” said Cal. He leaned forward and passed his manila envelope to Scoby. “I’m discharged with prejudice. Not recommended for reservice.”
Scoby slammed the envelope to the floor of the flyer. “Bonehead!” he snarled. “Department, I said. Not Service! You had so many coats of varnish you think that if the Services turn you down, the Civilian Departments can’t hire you either?” Cal lifted his head, startled.
“I thought—Government—” he began, and got stuck.
“Oh, the personnel don’t like hiring Service bad cases. They don’t like hiring ex-cons or reformed alcoholics, either. But I’m in charge of my Department. And I say you’re hired. And you’re hired!”
Cal sat, letting some of the sense of it sink in.
“I want men!” Scoby was muttering furiously. “Men, not recommendations on paper! ” He was simply blowing off the last of his head of steam. As proof of the fact, he was glaring not at Cal, but ahead out the windscreen of the flyer. “Christ! it’s hard enough to handle things as it is. It’s hard enough to do the job I have to do—and that’s double the job I ought to be doing at my age—with the sort of men I want, anyway. Let alone...”Cal looked ahead out of the flyer’s windscreen, himself. Annie was sitting close beside him and had slipped an arm through his left arm. He felt the living and continual warmth of her body,close. A sort of hope stirred in him. The thrumming vibrations of the flyer hummed through him down to the furthest tips of his fingers. He could feel the lift of the ship’s wide wings, spread now at this altitude to their greatest, hawk-like, soaring dimensions, bearing him up. On those wings they here in this ship sailed against the night, at speeds of which no flint-axed caveman had ever dreamed.
Far up ahead, on the darkened horizon, a sprinkling of lights rose into view around the curve of the world. They rose and multiplied as the flyer dropped toward them, until they looked like jewels of all colors scattered more and more thickly upon a cloth of black velvet. Together, the spectrum of their many-colored rays made up the white light of a city. It was the city toward which he and Annie and Scoby—all of them together in the flyer—were now heading above the primitive darkness, as to an inevitable destination.
And to that city, now, they stooped.
Naked to the Stars Page 15