The Old Man of the Stars

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The Old Man of the Stars Page 12

by John Burke


  “Who?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I was too far away.”

  “Go on.” He glanced in the direction of the river. The shore was shrouded in mist, and the line of the hills above the bay was only faintly blacker than the sky behind. “What did you see?”

  “Someone was standing on the bank, on our side. And he seemed to be...well, pulled in. It was as though someone in a boat had come quietly up below him. Someone...or something.”

  In a matter of minutes a small group was formed. Armed with knives and jagged pieces of wood, some of the burliest men in Southerden made their way towards the river. There was not a sound.

  Apprehensively, the leader peered over the edge. I came up beside him.

  “I’m sure it was here,” I said. “One minute he was there; the next, he was gone.”

  “You think someone came over and got him?”

  “Someone,” I repeated, “or something.”

  I could sense their uneasiness. The robots on the other side were hated. The uncanny, inhuman movements of those efficient creatures made the hackles rise. The thought of some deadly, remorseless, soulless thing being sent across the river for some reason, and for some reason dragging one of our own people in....

  It was a nightmare. Senseless, irrational—yet compelling, like a nightmare.

  “Maybe,” said Tom Bentley, “it wasn’t one of our folk who got pulled in. Maybe the figure you saw was one of their own people on this side.”

  Either way, the thought was a disturbing one. The Community wanted nothing to do with human beings from the other side, or with their inhuman creations.

  We went back to Southerden. And by morning it was realized that old Clayton was missing.

  He was never found. His body must have been swept out to sea by the swirling tide in the narrow estuary. That was how I imagined it; but I did not mention this to anyone. They muttered among themselves about the Newmen, who had come over and captured one of us.

  “But why?” asked my father in an argument. “What point would there be in that?”

  “We don’t know what the Newmen are up to,” said Tom Bentley darkly.

  “They wouldn’t want to kidnap one of us,” my father persisted. “They know all about us. They know we’re only men and women—we’ve got nothing to offer them.”

  “Except, perhaps, details of our plans to take back the country one day,” said Tom Bentley.

  The men in the small group turned to look at me.

  Henning said slowly. “If your plans have involved poor old Clayton in trouble—”

  “Clayton was never taken into our confidence,” I returned.

  And Tom Bentley at once said: “I wasn’t meaning to fix any blame when I said that. It was just an idea. And if it’s true, it shows that Peregrine’s been right all along. If they’re that sort of folk, we’re right to oppose them. We’re right to hit at them when we get the chance, all along the line.”

  They tried to discuss some way of establishing the facts of what had occurred. But it was a hopeless proposition. Where did you begin on a thing like that? The Community had, of its own free will, cut itself off from the Newmen. To appeal to the laws and judicial system of the Newmen would be to invite scorn.

  “But we’ve got to do it,” said Henning. “The laws of this country are still the laws of this country. We can send in a formal request for an enquiry. The government in London won’t let Newmen in this part of the country behave just as they like. Kidnapping—murder, maybe....”

  I said: “There have been deaths in other parts of the country at one time and another, and who has ever got any satisfaction from the Newmen?”

  They listened to me. They had none of them made any real contact with Communities in other parts of the country, so they had only my word for these things. I told them how communications from the Communities to the Newmen were ignored, how protests were laughed at, and how impossible it was to establish even formal relations with Newmen who lived, perhaps, only a mile away over a hill or beyond an adjacent river.

  “That’s the way we wanted it,” interposed Tom Bentley. “So I reckon we’ve got no grudge now. No more than we’ve always had, anyway,” he added grimly. “Being dispossessed—grown men having to leave the cities to escape children—we’ve always faced up to that, and this doesn’t make any difference. It only makes us more sure.”

  They followed his lead. They had to agree that there was nothing to be done. Nothing yet. The day would come, as I had promised.

  * * * *

  Sometimes I lay awake and thought about what Clayton had said on that last day of his life.

  It came back to me, nagging at my memory. It came back like his laugh, with a thousand echoes. Simpler people would have been able in time to blur over the words and forget them; but my mind could not relax its grip on anything like that.

  “Jealousy...,” he had said. “You want to rule this place instead....”

  “The one-eyed man, king in the country of the blind.”

  Was it true?

  I came in the end to a cool recognition of my own pathological condition. This ability to analyse one’s own faults was another attribute of the Newmen. I saw that the emotionalism I had inherited from my parents was driving me to behave illogically; but this realization did not in any way affect my determination. I had to accept the fact that I had certain obsessions. I knew that it was impossible to alter them. The ability to see them clearly did not mean that I could overcome them. I knew better than that. I knew better than the crude psychologists and religious moralists of earlier centuries.

  Perhaps it was true that I was jealous of the Newmen who controlled the advanced civilization of the cities. I sensed what delights they experienced in the exercise of their mental faculties. My own were clamped to the ground by circumstances. In the Community I could not use my abilities to their best advantage.

  But if I could not be a ruler in the cities, I would be a ruler here. I would lead a campaign.

  I would be all the things Clayton had accused me of being.

  And Clayton was not the only one to accuse me.

  The time for action was drawing near. We had been patient, and soon this patience would be rewarded. I had chosen the time of the Conference of All Nations—when that opened in London, we would strike.

  It was then that my father called me a madman.

  “A fanatic,” he cried in my face. “When the world is at peace, you want to make war—”

  “Only on the false civilization,” I said.

  “It is world-wide now. As long as we are allowed to live out our lives in peace—”

  “Will there be any peace in your mind if you allow the Newmen to take over the Communities? Are you going to be resigned to the dying out of the Communities? We know what we must do. And it shall be done.”

  World peace. That was true. But to me, and to the men who were my followers, it was a detestable peace. The boasts of the Newmen had been fulfilled; and that was an intolerable state of affairs. The spread of memory and skill inheritance throughout the world had enabled men to grapple much more intelligently with international problems—the development of an international language speedily settled many difficulties of communication, and the leaders of different countries thought and spoke on a higher plane than ever before. The World Federation was formed with a speed, which would have been incredible to politicians and pessimistic diplomats of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

  And the President of the World Federation was a boy of ten.

  * * * *

  We did not have telescreens in the Communities, and we did not receive daily newscasts. The Communities had repudiated the world of dominant children, and scorned their inventions and gadgets. But in preparing the campaign I had been forced to establish some contacts within the cities, which would supply news. Important social and political information reached me by a special messenger service. We used nothing in the way of radio transmission—dealing with
a world of technicians, we did not dare to use equipment that could be tapped, traced, and eavesdropped on.

  I knew about the election of the President. He was Juhan Larsen, the youngest member of a family that had given a dozen distinguished scientists to the world in the last hundred years. Even before the introduction of the Newmen radiation, the name of the Larsens had been held high in world opinion. Devoted, serious, living secluded lives and working in the interest of abstract truth, they were the paragons of civilization. Little was known about their private lives—all of them kept out of the public eye. But now when a World President was needed and that man had to be of unimpeachable integrity and brilliance, it was essential that a Larsen should be drawn out into the blaze of day.

  Juhan Larsen, ten years old, would open the session of the Conference of All Nations in London. Surrounded by the Federation Government who had chosen him—like a college of cardinals, I bitterly thought—he would preside over one of the greatest conclaves of representatives of nations at peace that had ever been assembled.

  He would be in London; and he would die in London.

  “You’re a fanatic,” said Henning to me yet again. “What will the murder of a boy achieve? If the Newmen have been able to bring world peace, let us leave them alone.”

  “They will not leave us alone,” I said. “Not much longer.”

  “You can’t defeat them. They’ll outwit you.”

  “No.” I was sure I knew their weaknesses and knew how to defeat them. The implacable urge was not to be denied.

  “What can you hope to achieve?” Henning went on desperately. “You say you’re fighting against the Newmen. You claim to represent the concept of the dignity of the older generation as against the dominance of children. But you yourself have dominated the councils of the Communities. You’ve become one of the Newmen in thought as well as....”

  He fumbled for words. He was lost in complexities with which he could not grapple.

  I said: “Whatever I am, and whatever I do, it is your legacy to me.”

  Myrna put her face in her hands and wept. She was very emotional, and absurdly naive. And unreasonable—for it was true, was it not, that my feelings towards the Newmen were inspired by her and Henning? Because of them, I was a weapon designed to attack and demolish the Newmen. I had been fashioned only for that. In every fibre of my being I felt it.

  Abruptly, from out of nowhere, a memory surged up into my mind. It was a picture of Southerden—a small village in the sunset, with a fishing boat coming into harbour.

  The breeze from the sea had a salt tang, and made a faint whistling sound as it blew between the houses. I was conscious of happiness—and tranquillity.

  The memory was one of Myrna’s. It came from her early days in Southerden. It gave me a picture of Southerden that I rarely saw nowadays. I rarely looked at the village itself—it was merely the place in which I worked and schemed.

  I felt strangely moved. This was how it ought to be. In years to come, when we had defeated the mechanistic system of the Newmen, and all people were free to live as Nature meant them to live, it would all come back to this—I would sit in my old age in a cottage, and watch the sun on the water and the children playing as children were meant to play along the shore....

  It was a thought of sweet simplicity.

  But I was not simple. I could never be like that. This was the ideal for which the Communities had been formed, and it was this ideal which I preached when I organized resistance to the Newmen. But for me it was not enough.

  I did not yet know what would be enough.

  The vision faded. I had no time for sentimentality. The road ahead was plain. It led inevitably towards the death of Julian Larsen. After that, the pattern of life would shape itself; after that, the roads would have to be built anew.

  * * * *

  On that bright, cold October day we struck.

  The timing was perfect. Southern Group Five entered the power station south of the Thames and demolished the generators. There was no opposition. It was a day of festivity, and there were no guards on the power station.

  In point of fact, there were no guards anywhere. The Newmen had grown overconfident, it seemed. World peace had become such a certain thing that precautions of the most obvious kind were no longer taken. The power station rocked and crumbled under the impact of carefully placed explosive. The radiation blanket over London died.

  In the provincial towns and cities, similar attacks were being made simultaneously. They were equally successful.

  At the same time, my forces pounced on radio stations and took over telescreen transmitters. At the very moment that President Julian Larsen was entering the Council Chamber of the World Federation Hall, erected on the site of the recently demolished Old St. Paul’s, telescreens went blank for a moment. Then vision was switched on again.

  All the technical details were in the hands of city-bred rebels. I had chosen carefully. I knew whom I could trust, and they did not fail. Older men who had worked for years in the radio offices all over the country now assumed control.

  The Newmen had believed too firmly in their imposed peace. They were not ready for assault

  “They’ve grown smug,” I said to Michael Martin, a young man from the north whom I had chosen to act as my lieutenant in the opening campaign. “They are too complacent. They never expected a revolt from the despised country-dwellers!”

  In the grand assembly, no word could reach the delegates. They were too deeply engrossed in their solemn ritual of speeches and declarations. Their faces and voices were carried out to telescreens all over the world. Even the technicians on the spot did not know that their headquarters staff had been replaced by rebels.

  I watched the President on the monitor screen in Radio House, in the heart of London. It was strange to see that boy mouthing platitudes and to know that very shortly he would be dead.

  In the middle of his speech of welcome, he stopped abruptly. A strange expression crossed his face. He put his right hand up to his ear as though feeling a momentary pain.

  There was a murmur in the Federation Hall.

  His silence lasted for a second only; but it seemed a long second. Then he looked up, and it seemed that his eyes were peering out of the screen into mine.

  Something had gone wrong. But how? It was too soon for him to know yet. He had no way of knowing.

  He said: “I have just received news of a misguided attack on our government. Guerrilla forces have made concerted assaults on our main cities, and seized the radio stations.”

  The fretful murmur in his audience rose like the roar of a descending wave, then splashed into fragments and rustled away.

  “There is no cause for alarm,” said Larsen glibly. “We had not prepared for such wanton outbreaks of war; but we were not altogether unprepared, if I may put it that way.” His thin, confident smile was infuriating. He was talking nonsense. “Although it has been against the principles of the Newmen to maintain armed forces since the signature of the World Covenant, we have always borne in mind the possibility that unruly elements might take advantage of the new enlightenment.”

  Martin muttered in my ear: “Excuses, that’s all.”

  “We have always based our policy,” Larsen went on, “on the assurance that the regime of the Newmen could not be overthrown within a matter of weeks. We could have only one enemy—the reactionaries who have been allowed to live in peace away from our civilization. If these barbarians”—again he seemed to be staring into my eyes—“chose to launch an insane attack on us, we have always known that we could afford to lose a few yards.”

  “A few yards!” I echoed furiously.

  “Things have happened as we foresaw. It is regrettable that force should once more have to be used. It is regrettable that strife should have broken out once again in a world that we believed to have been freed from the menace of war. But order will soon be restored. Already the radiation blanket, cut off momentarily by an act of sabotage, has b
een restored. A secondary station has come into operation—”

  “Cut him off!” I snapped. “Cut transmission, and put our proclamation on.”

  Martin snapped an order into the internal speaker. Almost at once Larsen faded, and suddenly one of our own men was on the screen, beginning to read the message we had prepared so laboriously.

  I hurried out of the room. Julian Larsen had caused a slight upset in our plans, but if we moved fast it would not be serious.

  Yet how had he received that message? He could not have known before he went into the Federation Hall, for the carefully timed attacks had not been unleashed then. Nobody had approached him while we had been watching him on the screen, and he could not have received radio warning—for the radio stations were in our hands.

  My commandeered helicar sprang from the roof of Radio House, and spun down like a madly windblown leaf to the landing ground by the spacious Federation Hall.

  Two men moved towards me from the main door.

  I tensed, then walked briskly to meet them.

  One said: “Have you got a pass?”

  “I’m from Radio House,” I said. “Urgent news from the Controller there to the President. It’s been taken over—”

  “Radio House as well? We heard something from inside, but—”

  “I’ve got to have a word with him.”

  If I had been an adult they might have suspected. They looked doubtful as it was; but they were in the middle thirties, and I was only a boy. I spoke in a voice of command—the tone they were accustomed to—and before they had time to wonder, or to argue, I was hastening into the Federation Hall.

  The corridors were almost deserted. At one corner I saw a uniformed attendant coming out of a door. As it swung open and then shut, the murmur from the conference hall buzzed out like the sound of bees, and then was put off.

  He glanced at me; but I went on, out of sight.

  I knew the way. It had all been mapped out. Admittedly things were not what they ought to have been—the alarm had been given—but there was still no reason why the pieces of our plan should not lock firmly together.

 

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