Eight Against Utopia

by Douglas R. Mason

  Tania was sitting close to Shultz on fine silver sand. The sun was just warm enough to be comfortable. She said, “Are we leaving tonight?”

  “That was the plan. A reversal of the old Greek system of hopping along the coast by day, and beaching the swart ship up a handy creek by night.”

  “What will you do if a Strikecraft comes before we leave?”

  “It isn’t very likely, is it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “As far as we know, there are only eight of them and there’s a lot of coast to search. The statistical likelihood can’t be much better than a chance. But then you will know as much about that as I do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You work for Byrsa.”

  “Worked.”

  “You don’t still?”

  Long training and a natural quality, which, in anyone less beautiful, could be called deadpan, made Tania’s face difficult to read. She did not answer and simply rolled back against the slope of the dune and closed her eyes. He waited for a reply and it did not come. Then, without haste, he gathered a double handful of sand and poured it slowly over her throat, continuing in a thin dividing line down the center of her chest.

  Pride kept her still and silent. When the patient hourglass had run out, she said, “What is that supposed to prove?”

  “Just a personal thing like touching every other post. I bet myself that if you did one thing you would be telling the truth, if another, not.”

  “Which way did it come out?”

  “You know the answer. I think I know. Time will reveal all.”

  “I suppose so. It’s all it has to do.”

  She stood up, without making any effort to stop sand running where gravity led it and walked over to the beached ship. Watching her swing lithely through the port, held Frank Shultz’s attention for a count of four. On the count of five his psychokinetic forces were redirected belatedly in the direction of the dune at his back.

  Each of the three civil guards coming over the ridge had chosen a target. Shultz was looking squarely at the large service P7 of section leader Hans Leyden and he knew the man well enough to make it absolutely clear that he intended no resistance at this stage. Leyden’s grin was inviting it. It would have pleased him to drop the three men on the spot and return to base with the two women.

  Shultz kept any urgency out of his voice and advised the rest of the party of their good fortune.

  “Well, that’s a coincidence. Take it carefully one and all, but we have some spectres at the feast. How is every little thing with you, section leader?”

  Wayne and Swarbrick took the hint and came round to meet their own escorts. Wanda, over on Lee Wayne’s right and not specifically in line, was moving forward. He snapped out, “Leave it, Wanda,” and she stopped, hands hanging helplessly at her sides. She looked more disappointed than anyone.

  The guard on that side, a heavily built man, bulging in his close-fitting tunic, said, “He’s right, blondie. Just be a sensible girl and who knows what you might get.”

  Leyden’s grin was a fixed thing and seemed to bear no relation to anything he said. He took up the conversational ball with, “There’s a third woman. The psychologist Tania Clermont. Where is she?”

  An overalled figure appeared in the hatch. She had come to answer the roll call herself. “I’m Tania Clermont.”

  “We have instructions to take care of you. You were taken forcibly on this expedition, but naturally they will want to talk to you at headquarters.”

  “Naturally.”

  Frank Shultz was watching her very closely. The calm face was giving nothing away. But one way or another she would have to show her hand.

  The interest of the developing scene kept both sides from notice of the more distant sounds of an approaching car. By the time Leyden lifted his head and announced, “Very nicely judged. That’s our pick-up, right on the nose. You’ll be snug in Byrsa before it’s properly dark.” The Strikecraft was less than a hundred meters away and sweeping in fast.

  It went over at ten meters, raising a minor sandstorm which momentarily shrouded the groundlings in a shoulder-high mist. Leyden’s voice fairly cracked out with, “Don’t move,” and brought Shultz to a stop before he was fairly under way.

  Wanda’s admirer was spluttering with inhaled dust and in a nasty humor. He said, “That crazy, bald, bastard Keegan wants seeing off. I’ll kick his tail through his spine.”

  The shuttle had gone on, as though its pilot was sizing up the situation and looking for a place to land clear of actors. It found one over the dune and came down in a final flurry, just out of sight.

  Leyden said, “Just move up this way. Easily now. Remember, I don’t mind at all if I have to report in that some deviants got themselves dead.”

  Shultz looked up over his head and came out with, “Well, Gaul. Am I glad to see you!”

  It was a classic case. Leyden congratulated himself on his early training in not falling for simple distractions. His grin was tinged with a genuine pleasure as he brought up his P7 to shoot Shultz with finicky exactness between the eyes.

  This fastidious craftsmanship lost him the set. Gaul had no time to waste and the omnipresent nuisance of the civil guard was making him very irritable. He practically buried a spanner in the section leader’s skull and turned to take fatso from the side in one continuous blend of action.

  Lee Wayne surged up the dune and dived the last meter and a half to take the man round the knees. Peter Swarbrick’s guard saw action from the tail of his eye and half turned to see what was going on.

  Cheryl, lower down the slope grabbed up a smooth, fist-sized piece of coast and sent in an underarm bowling shot which took him in the throat. Before he had properly analyzed what was o’clock, Swarbrick had him in a very old-fashioned grip.

  Jane Welland, who was looking speculatively over at Tania, said, “Well, it’s nice to know that you’re a welcome guest.”

  It was completely dark before every useful item of equipment had been torn out of the ambulance shuttle and housed in the Strikecraft. Even the jury mast and its sail were transferred, ready for the time when energy ran out. Lee Wayne, with knowledge gained from the dismantling of the power pack, felt reasonably confident that there would be no second surprise leak.

  Hans Leyden’s literally fixed grin had become a nuisance and he had been dumped on the far side of the dune with his two guards to keep a wake. When they were ready, Gaul said, “We’re leaving now. You can have this empty shuttle. No doubt you’ll be picked up tomorrow. Tell Gruber to get off my back.”

  Wayne took the car up to ten meters and went south, following the shore of the creek. As it closed in, he took them above treetop height, with the searchlight beam probing ahead as if on a vivid green seascape. When they were well clear, he altered course north again and they began to follow the coast—a vague white blur below and to starboard.

  Although he had been brought up to date on the events of the last stages of the break-out, Gaul Kalmar had not had much time to sort it out with Tania. She was on the back seat with Shultz, when he remembered and left his seat behind the driver. He stood in the aisle with one hand braced against the roof and one on the chair back.

  She looked at him without change of expression. But he knew without any doubt that what he had been told was true.

  “Why, Tania?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me anymore, but at the time you didn’t know that. You would have had us all destroyed. Not just me, Lee and Wanda, friends of some years.”

  “Rehabilitated.”

  “Don’t give me that. You know what that involves.”

  “I should remind you that I didn’t ask to come. I was brought along.”

  “I hope Frank knows what he’s doing. He’s realist enough to know that you’ll be over the side if you do anything further to threaten the group.”

  Shultz said, “That’s all right, Gaul. I’ll look after her. She’ll be sens
ible.”

  Kalmar went back to his seat. There was a tiny area of uncertainty about the situation, which niggled away at the back of his mind. He knew Tania well enough to know that she was extremely good at masking emotion. In fact the whole history of her activity as a Byrsa agent among them was proof of that. He felt there was still something behind the smooth oval mask; but it was difficult to see what she could possibly do now. His mind went off on the tack that it was very curious that he now found her very perfection a sort of irritation. Looking at her now produced no affective tone and his judgment was purely cerebral. Given its head, the computer came up with a raspberry.

  Subdued interior light from a cobalt-tinged roof panel gave a blue rinse to Wanda’s hair and turned Jane Welland’s to dark-luster copper. Nine motionless figures in the hurrying car.

  Dead ahead at the limit of the beam, and then expanding like a gray balloon, a single pointed monolith brought Lee Wayne into a sudden frenzy of activity. The shuttle fell back at a sixty-degree angle as he clawed his way over the top.

  Wanda’s head rolled clear of his shoulder and she said, “Keep still, Lee.”

  Gaul Kalmar said, “Drop to zero, Lee, and edge back there. We ought to see what it is.”

  The car settled slowly. Floor panels in the nose gave a view below to the extent of two white beams falling like shafts from underslung light housing. At ten meters, it was clear that they were coming down onto a paved square. At five, the color had sorted itself out into the local detail of some vast mosaic. High-lighted in two circles, with a joining area of partial light, were the stylized head of a dolphin and coming into the other circle, long, elegant hands carrying a dish. Then they touched down and only the dolphin’s head was staring up at their feet.

  The searchlight sent its concentrated beam a hundred meters ahead and then was lost in darkness without hitting any vertical surface. Lee began to turn the car and the long lance of light probed round like the spoke of a wheel. For ninety degrees it met nothing. Then, at only fifty meters, it splashed whitely on the foot of the monolith.

  This immense structure went up into darkness, a hint of black shadows against a black-violet sky. Where it was visible it was now seen to be in a state of dilapidation with long fissures and depressions in its face. It was also seen to be man-made; indeed, it should have been obvious from the first that nothing that size could be quarried as a whole stone. It was an elaborate piece of ferroconcrete with some structural ribbing now bared to the outside.

  Turning farther, the beam lost itself again in the distances of the piazza. Two thirds of the way round, it began to pick up the footings of broken walls with wide gaps where avenues had made their inlets. Then he had completed the turn and Gaul said, “Take it round again, Lee, until you meet the pillar.”

  When it was done, he went on, “It means nothing to me. Whatever explanatory footnote it had, seems to have gone. But I think we could stay here until first light and have a look round. Lights out. Anchor watch.”

  “We should stay inside.” Tania’s clear voice had no particular stress in it.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I have a feeling about this place. An intuition if you like.”

  Shultz said, “Always respect a mind-bender’s hunches.”

  Lee Wayne was still sorting through the bank of subsidiary switches on his console, to find a control for a centrally mounted revolving light. They got a spectrum shift of color on the interior panels and a quick run through a climatic range from mild refrigeration to equatorial steam heat before he hit the spot and a kind of lighthouse beam began its slow rotation. All it added was the stroboscopic appearance of movement in the dun outlines of the great mosaic. After half a dozen circuits, he threw out the key and they were left again in subdued blue light.

  All seats except the pilot’s folded back. The blank floor carpeted with thick cellular insulation needed no mattressing. A row of three and a row of four filled the space like so many nesting spoons. Sleepers were in an acoustic booth; not even the sound of quiet breathing reached the two watchers on the front bench.

  Cheryl said, “There’s something very peculiar about this place. Put the light out, Peter. Then we can see better outside.”

  The black violet lightened perceptibly. Dead ahead, the column was defined against a star map. Nothing moved.

  “What’s peculiar about it?”

  “For one thing every other ruined place we’ve seen has been cracked wide open by plant life. This is clear.”

  “Built on rock. Like the plateau outside Carthage.”

  “Every other place has been drifted up with blown sand and trash. This square is clear and the colors in the mosaic look fresh.”

  “Some feature of the prevailing wind. Everything blows off and piles up somewhere else.”

  “That column is the best preserved piece of building we’ve seen outside Carthage.”

  “It was built to last. It’s terrifically strong. But the worm is taking its toll. Come this way in another hundred years and it will be a ragged stump.”

  “How do you get to know such a lot?”

  “By being exceptionally quick and intelligent. Just now, for instance, I have had a typically germinal idea. Kneel on the seat facing the seven “sleepers.” Her shadow moved in the darkness. “Now just fall slowly this way.”

  Her face was a pale blur turned up towards him. Long muscular fingers massaged the nape of her neck and ran on under silky hair.

  “Comfortable?”

  The inquiring mind made a last bid. “Suppose though, some people actually…” His mouth came down firmly as an effective gag. She struggled in the cause of free speech for a praiseworthy three seconds, then her arms crossed behind his head.

  When she opened her eyes, she could see over the back of the seat and over Swarbrick’s shoulder along the side of the car. Eyes, adjusted to the light level, could now make out the frames of the ports and the outside, faint starlight. She closed her eyes again and the after-image of what she had seen remained for critical analysis.

  The center one of the five ports was in some special way different from the rest.

  She opened her eyes and stared directly at the middle window. There was no doubt about it. The ragged shape which made a vague statement of its form from the sill to the far upright was in fact part of a head.

  Trying to break free was getting her nowhere. Sensibly treating life as a unity, Swarbrick carried over the fine points of his wrestler’s expertise into his art of loving. Finally she went outside the code, grabbed both his ears and heaved backwards with surprising strength for such a slender figure. In the second’s respite of this surprise move, she said, “There’s a face at the window.”

  Swarbrick was chiefly glad that he could still hear, but recognized the wider implications of what she had to say. Courteous to the last, however, he steadied her onto an even keel, before leaning forward to flip on the revolving light.

  A number of things happened at once.

  From the ports it seemed that the great mosaic was coming to life. The square was full of movement, all of it directed towards the car. Human or animal, it was hardly possible to tell.

  “Get them up.”

  It was almost unnecessary. A violent hammering on the car’s panels would have wakened them in any case. It was now certain that the visitors were human, tool-using, door-conscious. Efforts were being made to prise open the entry port.

  Gaul Kalmar was at the console before anyone else had rolled over. He had flown the craft long enough to be fairly at home with the controls and slammed everything on for a lift-off. Response was sluggish and the motors developed a new note of protest as they attempted to move a clinging mass of supercargo.

  Then the force of the jetting air had its way and some were swept off. The effect was cumulative as the car began to rise. Some dropped clear and the power pack sounded happier. He went into a steep-angled, turning climb to miss the monument and make forward progress, and the last
port was suddenly clear.

  Totally awake, the crew had reorganized the seating facilities and looked ready to carry on. Gaul said, “That should teach us to keep our eyes open. Things are not going to be so simple. Take over, Lee. We’ll keep on along the coast. Just over the sea. We’ll make our next stop in natural light. That’s in about three hours.”

  Jane Welland said, “Did anyone get a good look at them? What were they in fact?”

  “Heavily furred.” Tania was speaking as though she was thinking aloud. “Smallish skull, low cranial capacity—possibly under a thousand cubic centimeters, forehead sloped back with a pronounced bone ridge over the eyes, heavy jaw, and little or no chin. Long arms. Muscled to carry weight. Homo habilis, in fact.”

  “Very impressive. I’ll settle for that as a good look.”

  Shultz said, “Evolution in reverse. Or the environment going into reverse made for the selective survival of primitive types.”

  Swarbrick said, “A food-gathering economy. That answers your questions about the square, Cheryl. They’ve taken it over for its magical and fertility aspects. Pictures to trap the spirit of the beasts and a first-class phallic symbol.”

  Tania was going on with the professional spiel. “Regression or progression, there’s no standing still. Carthage was trying to stand still.”

  Jane Welland thought that the last bit of analysis came badly from anyone who had tried to shore up the system.

  Shultz sensed a possible hotting up of the cold war between the two and tactfully changed the subject.

  “If Pete’s right, there’s a whole religious cycle to be worked out. They’re very lucky when you consider it. Yahweh started as a much smaller pillar. This could be a break-through. Centuries yet before any kind of sophistication sets in.”