"Well, how about getting them to take their helmets off of their own accord? Couldn't you send out some sort of radio ray or something?"
"That's been thought of: plans for blowing out the electrical circuits in the helmets; plans for heating up the wires to make them too hot for comfort; plans for interfering with their operation by static. Static doesn't seem to affect them, and we simply don't know of any form of ray or wave that would accomplish the other objects. Take the heating idea. It would require enormous power to heat up all those millions of helmets, and the amount that actually comes into your receiving set over the aerial is so slight you can't feel it. The biggest broadcasting station in existence doesn't send out as much power as the engine in one of the hoppers' two-wheel cycles develops. How are you going to erect a station to send out thousands of times as much power, without their knowledge?"
"Hm-m-m . . . it does seem hopeless. Maybe if you put on one of the helmets it would give you an idea."
"That's been tried, too. I tried it once. It worked fine for about three minutes, and then I got the worst headache of my life; it lasted a week. The hoppers' brains are cruder than ours; they aren't damaged by such treatment. You can't do it to a man's brain, though, at least not with our present knowledge. Perhaps we shall be able to some day, when we've shaken off them."
They sat silent for a while, smoking. Sir Howard said: "If you don't mind my asking, where did you get all this information? And where did these books come from?"
"Oh, using my eyes and ears over many years. I might add that I'm an accomplished burglar. The books, together with much of the information about the hoppers, were partly stolen. The rest of them were picked up here and there, mostly by Thurlow Mitten before I joined him. The hoppers couldn't be expected to go into every corner of every attic and cellar of every old house in the country, you know, as thorough as they are."
Sir Howard said, "Some of your statements remind me of things my brother Frank used to say."
Elsmith raised one eyebrow. "Sally told me about him. That's . . . I'm sorry." Something in his tone gave the knight the idea that Elsmith might know more than he cared to say about his brother. But he had too much to think about as it was to inquire any more just then.
9
"Well, he throws his knife at me, and it pins my big toe to the log so I can't get it out nowhow. But I says, 'Mike Brady,' I said, 'I was goin' to beat the gearin' out of you, and I still be.' So I took after him with my peavy. He runs, and me after him. But you know you can't run fast with a twenty-foot log of hard maple nailed to your foot—musta weighed nigh onto six hundred pounds—and after the fust mile or two I seed he was gainin'! So I throwed my peavy, so the point goes into a tree on one side of his neck, and the cant dog goes into the bark on the other side, and there he was, helpless. So I took my knife and cut his guts out. Wow,' I says, 'that'll be a lesson to you to sass Eli Cahoon.' He says, 'Okay, I guess I was kinda hasty. If you'll just put my guts back in I won't sass you no more.' So I put 'em back in, and we been fine friends ever since. I still got the scar on my toe."
"That a fact? I remember one time out in Wyoming, when me and a fella was shooting arrows. We was shooting at horseflies. Pretty soon a mosquita comes along. He says, 'Bet you can't hit that mosquita.' I says, 'What'll you bet?' He put up a hundred clinkers, and I shot the mosquita. Then another mosquita comes along. He says, 'That was too easy. Let's see you hit this mosquita in the eye.' 'Which eye?' I says, not stopping to think—"
The speakers were talking softly and casually in the firelight. Sir Howard looked up from his book. "Mr. Elsmith," he asked, "what does this fellow mean? 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people.' What people?"
"—and that's how I lost a thousand dollars, through getting the right and left eyes mixed up. But I remember when I won this watch on a bet. Fella named Larry Hernandez owned it, which is how it has the same initials as mine. We wanted to see which could ride his horse down the steepest slope—"
Elsmith spoke. Sir Howard wondered what there was about this mild little man that gave his dry, precise words such authority. "It means that all the adults vote to select those who rule over them for a limited time. When the time's up they have another election, and the people can throw out their first set of officials if they don't like them."
"All the adults? You mean even including the commons? And the women? But that's a ridiculous idea! Lower-class persons—"
"Why ridiculous?"
Sir Howard frowned in concentration. "But they . . . they're ignorant. They wouldn't know what was good for them. Their natural lords—" He stopped in confusion again.
"Would you call me ignorant?" It was very quietly said.
"You? But you're not a—"
"My father worked in an iron foundry, and I started work as a Postal Telegraph messenger boy."
"But . . . but . . . but—"
"I admit that with a hereditary ruling class you get good men occasionally. But you also get some remarkably bad ones. Take Baron Schenectady, for example. Under this 'government of the people' idea, when you find that your ruler is a scoundrel or a lunatic, you can at least get rid of him without an armed insurrection."
Sir Howard sighed. "I'll never get all these new ideas straight in my head. Thinking about them is like watching your whole world—all your old ideas and convictions—go to pieces like a lump of sugar in a teacup. It's . . . sort of awful. I should have come up here ten years ago to get a good start."
"No."
"Aw, come on, Sal; you like me pretty well, don't you?"
"That isn't it."
"Well what is it?"
"It wouldn't be—expedient."
There it was; one of those damned dictionary words again. He felt a surge of anger. Remembering Warren Kelly, an outrageously stinging remark formed in his mind. But his natural decency choked it off before it got to his lips.
"Well, why?"
She was baiting her hook. The boat rocked ever so slightly under the lead-and-snow cumulus clouds that towered over Little Moose Mountain and small Sly Pond.
"It's . . . this way. Maybe you haven't noticed, but we work hard at our job. Our job is the Organization, and we think that's literally the most important job in the world. Between that and keeping ourselves fed, we haven't time or energy for—personal relationships."
"I'm afraid I'll never understand you, Sally." He didn't either. She didn't act like a lower-class girl. He ought to know; base-born girls were pushovers for him. On the other hand, the upper-class girls he'd known would be horrified at the idea of baiting a hook with an active and belligerent crawfish, let alone skinning and cleaning a mess of bullheads. But there wasn't any question of her being anything but upper-class. He wouldn't have it that she was anything but upper-class. If necessary he'd stand the feudal system—for which he was feeling less reverence these days—on its head in order to put whatever class she belonged to on top.
"Another reason," she went on. "Uncle Homer tells me that you'll probably join us in a day or two. Officially, that is. I may say that I hope you do. But—this is important—you mustn't join us for personal reasons. And if you have any ideas of joining for such reasons, you can give them up right now."
"But why? What's so awful about personal reasons?"
"Because if you changed your mind about the personal reasons, you might change your mind about the other things. You idiot, don't you see? What's one girl more or less, compared to the human race—everybody you've ever known and millions of others?" The reel sang for a second before she heard it. She caught up the rod in a smooth, practiced movement and in a few more seconds had another bullhead in the boat. Sir Howard had already stabbed his hand on one of the fin spikes of the ugly brutes. But her hand gripped the fish's body as surely as his held a sword hilt. "Damn them!" she said. "They swallow the hooks, clear down to their stomachs. Some day we'll go out on Little Moose Lake and troll for bass."
As they walked back to the camp with the fish, th
ey passed Lyman Haas. He took one look at the gloom on Sir Howard's blunt features and grinned knowingly. Sir Howard thought afterward that he minded that grin more than anything.
Sir Howard asked: "Hasn't your organization any name? I mean, you just call them 'us' all the time."
"No," said Elsmith. "It's just the Organization. Names are handles, and we don't want to give them any more handles to take hold of us by than we can help. Now if you'll just roll up your sleeve, please." He held a hypodermic up to the light.
"Will that have any permanent effect on me?"
"No; it'll just make you feel slightly drunk and happy for a while. It's what the hoppers use in their third-degree work. It's much better than torture, because you can be sure that the prisoner is actually saying what he believes to be true."
"Do I have to take an oath of some kind?"
"You don't have to. We go on the theory that a man's statement of his intentions, provided he actually says what he thinks, is as good an indication of what he'll do as any oath. People sometimes change their ideas, but when they do they almost always find excuses for breaking their oaths."
"Tell me, was my brother Frank one of you?"
Elsmith hesitated, then said: "Yes. He didn't go by that name in the Organization, of course. We didn't have a chance to warn him. His immediate superior, who would normally have reported the state of affairs to me, had disappeared a couple of months previously. We knew what that meant, all right, but we hadn't succeeded in re-establishing communication with your brother."
"This is the center of the whole business?" Sir Howard's eyebrows went up a little incredulously. Nothing much seemed to happen around the camp; certainly nothing that would indicate that it was the headquarters of a worldwide conspiracy.
"Yes. I see what you're thinking. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the number of times recently that you were tactfully lured away from the camp? There were conferences going on."
The knight was slightly startled. He'd never thought of that. He began to appreciate the enormous pains to which these people went. You couldn't improvise something of this sort; it took years of careful and risky work.
"How do you feel? asked Elsmith.
"A little dizzy."
"Very well, we'll begin. Do you, Howard van Slyck—"
"You came through the test with flying colors, my boy. I'm glad of that; I think you'll make a good worker. I may add that if you hadn't, you would never have left here alive."
"What? Wh-why? How?"
Elsmith reached inside his shirt and brought out a hopper's gun. "This, by the way, is the gun carried by the hopper you killed. We have some others. You didn't notice Sally take it from the body and hide it in her clothes, did you? You wouldn't. Sally knows her business.
"The reason I'd have used it, if necessary, is that you knew too much. Ordinarily it's only the old and tested workers who are allowed up here. Sally would never have brought you and Haas—who joined up last Tuesday, incidentally—if it hadn't been an emergency. You had to have a place to hide out, and you had too much good stuff in .you to be allowed to fall into their hands. So we took a chance on you. If we'd been mistaken—well, we couldn't risk setting the Organization back years."
Sir Howard looked at his toes. "Would that have been right? I mean, according to your ideas. If I hadn't wanted to stay."
"No, it wouldn't have been just. But it would have been necessary. I hope that some day we can afford to be just. It's treacherous business, this excusing injustice on grounds of necessity. People have justified or condoned the most atrocious crimes that way."
"Try it again, Van Slyck."
Sir Howard obediently turned and walked back across the room. He felt very silly indeed.
"No, that won't do. Too much swagger."
"You can hear him clank," said Sally Mitten, "even when he hasn't got any armor on. I don't know what it is; something in the way the lower part of his leg snaps forward at each step."
"Maybe I know," said Haas. He was sitting with his feet in a bucket of hot water; he had gone for a hike with Cahoon, wearing ordinary laced boots instead of the high-heeled Western foot-gear he was accustomed to. As a result what he called his atchilly tendons had swollen up, to his acute discomfort. "How's used to toting fifty pounds of stovepiping and other hardware with him. Maybe if you put lead in his boots it'd hold 'em down to the ground."
"Look," said Elsmith, "relax your knees, so they bend a little at each step. And drop your whole foot to the floor at once, instead of coming down on your heel. There, that's better. We'll teach you to walk like a commoner yet. Practice that up." He looked at his watch. "They're due here any time. Remember, you're Charles Weier to members of the Organization. They'll be introduced to you as Lediacre and Fitzmartin, but those aren't their real names either. Lediacre is a Frenchman, however."
"Why all the secrecy?" asked Sir Howard.
"Because, my dear Weier, if you don't know what a man's real name is, you can't betray it under the influence of veramin. The only people whose real names you're supposed to know are those directly below you. There's nobody below you yet, and for the present you're acting under my direct orders."
When Lediacre and Fitzmartin arrived, they accepted their introduction to "Weier" without comment. Lediacre was as tall as the knight himself, though not as heavy; well-built, handsome in a foxy-faced sort of way, and exquisitely polite. He made Sir Howard feel like a hick. The other was a dark, nervous little man with a box to which he seemed to attach great importance. When the rest were crowded around, he opened it and began to assemble a contraption of pulleys, belts, brass rods, and circular glass disks with spots of metallic foil on them. Sir Howard gathered that these men were important in the Organization, and was pleased to think that he was being let in on something big.
"Turn on the radio, somebody," said Fitzmartin. "The forbidden hopper wave lengths, can you?" When the set had warmed to the sinister chirping of a hopper station, he began turning a crank on his apparatus. Presently a train of blue sparks jumped from one brass knob to another in rapid succession. With the crack of each spark there was a blup from the radio, so that the twitterings were smothered. A program of dance music on one of the legal frequencies was similarly made unintelligible.
"You see?" said Fitzmartin. "With an electrostat with wheels six feet in diameter, we can jolly well ruin radio reception within a radius of ten or more miles. If we cover the dashed country with such machines, we can absolutely drown the bloody hopper communications with static. They don't use anything but the blasted radio. They absolutely abolished all the wire communications centuries ago, and it would dashed well take them months to rig up new ones. Absolutely months."
Elsmith puffed his cigar. "Then what?"
"Well . . . I mean . . . my dear old man . . . if we could absolutely disorganize them—"
"It would take them about twenty-four hours to hunt down our static machines and restore their communications. And you know what would happen to us. But wait—" Seeing the crushed look on Fitzmartin's face, he put out his hand. "This is an excellent idea, just the same. I admire it. I merely wanted to remind you that the hoppers wouldn't commit mass suicide because of a little static. We won't build any of these yet. But we'll have a plan drawn up for the large-size machine, and we'll have a hundred thousand copies made and distributed to regional headquarters all over the world. Baugh can handle that, I think. Then, when we have something to give the hoppers the final push with, we'll have the machines built, and put them to work when the time comes. They'll be an invaluable auxiliary."
The men stayed on several days. On the second day Sir Howard got a slight shock when he saw Lediacre and Sally Mitten strolling along a trail, apparently on the best of terms, and so absorbed in talk as to be oblivious of other things. He watched their figures dwindle, still talking, and thought, so that's it. He decided he didn't like the polished Monsieur Lediacre.
The next day he came upon the Frenchman smoking and looking at the view.
"Ah, hello, my friend," said Lediacre. "I was just admiring your scenery. It reminds me of the Massif Central, in my own country."
"Are you going back there soon?" asked the knight, trying not to make the question sound too pointed.
"No—not for three or maybe four months. You see I am in business. I am a what you call traveling representative for a French company."
"Mind if I ask what sort of company?"
"Not at all, my dear Weier. It is perfumery."
Perfumery! Good God! He didn't mind ignoble birth any more, but perfume! Out of the tail of his eye he saw Sally Mitten come out of the camp. Now if there were only some way he could show this perfume salesman where he got off. He had a reputation for prowess in the more spectacular forms of horseplay. Fencing, jousting, and steeplechasing weren't practical.
He said: "I haven't been getting enough exercise lately; they've kept me so busy learning to jimmy windows and talk dialect. Do you wrestle?"
"I have not in a few years, but I should be glad to try some. I also need the exercise."
"O.K., there's a grassy spot up the trail a way."
When the Frenchman had peeled off his shirt and boots, Sir Howard had to admit that there was nothing soft-looking about him. But he knew he'd be able to squash this commoner chap like an undernourished mosquito. They grabbed at each other; then Lediacre went down with a thump. He got up laughing with the greatest of good humor. "I am getting stupid in my old age! I learned that hold when I was a little infant! Let us have another, no?"
Sir Howard tensed himself to grab Lediacre's left knee. He never knew quite what happened next, except that he found himself flopping in mid-air, balanced across the Frenchman's shoulders. Then he came down with a jar that knocked the breath out of him. In a flash he was pinned firmly. His big muscles strained against the lock, but to no avail. It made him no happier to note that Sally Mitten, Lyman Haas, and Eli Cahoon were interested spectators.
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