The Yellow Fraction
Page 14
A soldier came down the line dealing out the regular fruit juice and saying, “You are advised to have a light breakfast this morning.” Perhaps life was different for a girl, Len thought.
Lucinda, who looked pale but composed, said, “There is no reason why any two girls or two men who wish should not share one of those rocket cabins we saw when they took us there for rehearsal.”
The soldier was still in earshot, so she too had to sound innocent about it when she spoke of their one and only highly-organized visit to the rocket a few days earlier. Ropotsky, who was passionately in love with Susan, looked at Lucinda as though she had gone mad. Len, for his own good reasons, just wished Lucinda would not refer at all to their rehearsal departure from the space school, which had been complicated from his point of view by certain matters.
After all, he thought, they only had Mary Johnstone’s word for it about the preparations the Information Office was allegedly making at the radio telescope to give them a quick journey and the ability to land at Vista, while the colonel had told them from the first something entirely different
When the soldier went away, he hissed, “Lucinda!”
“If anyone wants to make an arrangement to share a cabin with someone of their own sex when we are free to do as we like,” Ropotsky said, “he can count me and Susan out”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Lucinda said to Len, looking at him in a composed way, and as though she could with difficulty, deal with other things too, as well as having her love-life complicated by rocket travel.
“Don’t,” Len pleaded, looking at the somewhat fish-like and in some cases startling appearance of everyone along the table. “Because of these suits we knew we would have to wear today, I went to an enormous amount of trouble.”
Duncan, who took the cabin arrangements he had made with Penny as completely obvious and no one’s business, frowned. “Everyone will cooperate, Len, but it will be completely unnecessary,” he said.
“I’m for Len,” Salford said. “I don’t trust anybody.”
“I’m sure Mary Johnstone was genuine,” Ropotsky said. He looked out of the window, where the blue early-morning sky showed no sign of a cloud that might delay the blast-off, then got up from the table. “Anyway, it’s too late to do anything else now, isn’t it?”
It was quite a ceremony on the parade ground, with both suns up over the hill, the shadows starting to shorten, a line of trucks drawn up, and about a hundred men in front of the truck facing their little fish-suited line of twelve.
Colonel Classon walked between the opposing lines and addressed them. While he talked, Len looked past him at the space school gate, which stood open that day, and wondered if history would have been different if it had been kept open earlier. Suppose we could have just walked out, Len thought.
“Your training has covered everything you have to do,” Colonel Glasson said, facing the space crew with the guard of honor behind him. “I don’t have to tell you now about taking up your stations in the rocket well before blast-off time. Your success is up to you. Blast-off is automatic, and you will be under radio control until halfway to Vista, so you can’t do that wrong. There will be some maneuvering of your space vehicle by the radio telescope before you are put on a course for Vista, and you must expect that. We wish you good luck. May you have a happy life in your rocket, and your children will no doubt consecrate a monument to you when they get back to Arcon. Farewell. Dismiss.”
As a speech, they found it barely adequate.
They talked about his suggestion of unexpected maneuvers as they went across the dust of the parade ground to the waiting trucks. “There shouldn’t be anything like that,” Ed Greet said. “Every single thing that’s going to happen should all have been done and rehearsed beforehand.”
It was only a chance conversation as they mingled and broke ranks and crossed to their girls to get in the separate trucks with them. The soldiers were to ride with them, and it was no surprise that they were held to an exact schedule for their ride down to the rocket, and were under heavy guard on that day.
“I told you it was a mistake,” Salford said.
“It’s as well Len is taking a few precautions,” Ropotsky said.
Len said, “Shut up.”
The space school wall slipped back, and because of the plume of dust the convoy was kicking up, it looked as though they were descending the hillside on the trail to the rocket at dizzy speed. Len watched the rocket growing and beginning to reach up into the sky as they came down toward it. There was not much to see. Outwardly, and with its sheathing still on, it looked like a series of long, smooth-faced cylinders. The difference was that this time there was a feather of vapor from one of the higher vents, and fewer men and transports around the base of it Lucinda sat down in the truck and looked at the soldiers who rode with them.
“I saw it when they brought us down before for rehearsal,” she said when Len sat down with her. “It looks about as beautiful as an oil-rig.”
When they left the trucks under the big concrete wall of the launching pad and were walking the fifty yards to the wire-cage elevator that ran up the gantry to the platform and gangway to the space capsule entry, Lucinda fell. It was those half-buried pipes, which, along with the fuel valves and wheels and conduits, all part of the control system, made the rocket site look untidy. The soldiers had been standing back, letting them walk to the rocket in their own way, but some of them went at once to help Lucinda. The party split. One half went on toward the elevator cage beneath the gantry. Salford and Duncan chose that moment to wander off to look at some item of equipment Soldiers at once started after them, and the sergeant began to call those who had gone on ahead to come back. His orders were to keep the party together. For about ten seconds Len was out of sight behind a wheel-valve and a transformer stage where the lines came in from the distant bunkers. The returning half of the party picked him up on the way back and he was right in the middle of them from the moment he was in view from behind the transformer housing.
Smooth.
Lucinda was on her feet again and looking down at her leg. “You can’t hold up a rocket because a girl has twisted her ankle.” She had unfastened one of the side-zips down her hip and thigh, and the flesh was showing. The soldiers were looking at it. Lucinda’s eyes were flickering around, noting the exact position of everyone. It was only a few tiny items that were being passed from hand to hand anyway, from Len.
He had decided to move the stuff down to the rocket at rehearsal. Even in the girls’ suits it would have been hard to conceal anything from the soldiers in the trucks. It had been a risk. He had had enough trouble causing loss and damage in the school electronics laboratory anyway.
The party, moving together, and with Lucinda limping, moved on in a more crowded way. They were supposed to move separately, with plenty of air and view all around them, but they had to help Lucinda.
“It isn’t going to do much good anyway,” Len said when the first six of them were in the cage and traveling up the gantry, watching the diagonals of its skeleton frame go by.
“What do you want it for?” Ropotsky asked.
“I just get nervous when other people do things."
As they went upward in the elevator, the mountains around the valley sides seemed to shrink, and the more distant peaks came up behind them. They were high in the air when they reached the gantry platform, about four hundred feet. The guards who had been stationed up there to see that they got in the rocket were looking over the edge. "What was the holdup down there?” one said, coming toward them suspiciously as the cage arrived and they stepped out
“Is that the gangway we have to cross?” little Penny said, pointing. “That settles it. I’m not going. I’d rather die than cross that.” She went back into the cage again, and had to be dragged out. Penny was not carrying anything, and Duncan, who was, could not help her. It had been decided that Penny was too small to conceal anything, even a small transistor.
This sho
uld have been a poignant and dramatic moment, Len thought, looking out over the view from the rocket gantry platform. The horizon was hazy in the direction of Davis City. Lucinda, coming close to him and looking in that direction too, said, “I suppose it is our last view of Arcon.”
“We don’t aim to interfere with that,” Len said. “In fact it’s far too late now, and I don’t think we can interfere with anything.” And they went on, across the gangway.
In the distance, they could see a car driving away from them across the desert as they went in through the circular door. The sensation of dizzy height stopped across the threshold, and they might as well have been in a skyscraper, instead of in the nose of a four-hundred-foot rocket except that the machine-deck where they came in was full of pipes and plumbing and the big cylinders of Ropotsky’s bio-tanks with their air and fluid pumps. With a metal spiral staircase leading up through the center to the two higher decks in the crew capsule, the spaceship had something of the appearance of the interior of a submarine.
There was a period of waiting while the second party came up in the elevator and across the gangway, so they stood in the doorway and looked out at the wastes of Arcon. “Did I do well?” Penny said. “They’ve forgotten something. They should have married us all before we left, by the marriage rites of Arcon.”
“We’ll get married according to the Vista rites,” Duncan said. “When we have decided what they are.”
“This is a psycho-social matter,” Lucinda said. “Duncan can marry all the other couples when we are in space, except Penny and himself. They are the two who will have to stay unmarried.”
“To hell with that,” Duncan said. “If I can’t get married, the rest of you will have to manage as best you can without it”
Sorensen came in last, and stood by the door and looked at Duncan. Duncan nodded, and Sorensen operated the hydraulic lever, so that the circular door began to close, cutting off the view of Arcon. As they watched, the circle became a crescent, and the crescent became an arc. At first they could see the men on the gantry platform operating wheels and pulling levers, and the gangway they had crossed was lifting and tilting as it swung away from the rocket’s side, then that view was lost to them and they could only see the sky and the car far away in the desert, still heading away from them and the rocket and pulling its little plume of dust behind it. That too was lost then, and with it the daylight, so that they were left in the rocket’s own interior artificial lighting with the bio-tanks and the pumps of the machine-deck.
It was different then, with them turning a little oddly to stand and look at one another on the metal deck, surrounded by the metal walls. The air, which they had noticed when they came in, had a slightly artificial oil-and-machine smell, but they would get used to that soon, Len thought, and that would seem like normal air. Some of them moved, and began to ascend the spiral stairway, to the higher cabin-deck and the control dome in the nose of the rocket, at present covered by protective sheathing, where Duncan and Salford and Susan and Len had their blast-off stations and blast-off couches, but Len turned and found Lucinda beside him, and put his arm around her.
They kissed for a moment before they went up the spiral stair to the higher decks, and there was some of that going on too among the other couples. “Come,” Len said, taking Lucinda to the spiral stair. “Let’s go and choose our cabin—even if they are all identical.”
XL
From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:
I felt the need to kill.
It seemed entirely logical and reasonable that I should decide to murder C. Q. Lankowitz that night, as I sat at his desk looking at the rocket plans. It was not so much a decision. It was just something that emerged out of the whole of my life as I had lived it.
I found myself looking back over the fifteen years I had worked in the Information Office to the time when, beginning to express Yellow opinions to my young friends in Davis City, I had been “investigated” by the Information Office, arrested, taken down to the cells, interrogated, and eventually recruited. I wondered if there were any other Yellows like C. Q. Lankowitz in our office who, like Lankowitz had to be, were just a fraud. I knew that I dared not stay too long in his office, but I made sure before I left that the rocket project was just a trick that he had perpetrated onus.
Maybe things were like that, I thought as I began to use my ray-detector and work my way back to the door and the outer office. Maybe it was inevitable that the leadership of an organization like the Yellow Party should be twisted, but that did not mean that genuine workers like myself were going to stand for it when we discovered how we had been misled. It was not just the twelve young people who were due to fly in the thing, though I knew I was too late to save Len Thomas. It was the party.
Or was I too late to save Len Thomas? I saw Lankowitz’ secretary’s engagement notebook on her desk, and the idea that I might still do something, perhaps even stop the rocket, was the first weakening of my purpose. My clear mind became confused. It was no longer a simple matter of me and Lankowitz and what was good for Arcon. I began to think of time, and all the time from then on, when I left Lankowitz’ office, then my office, and then the Information Office building to cross the city, I was thinking and counting the hours I had left, in which to stop the rocket.
I had to discover if it was possible first, and the secretary’s notebook was the clue to that. It depended if he had any appointments scheduled for the following morning. I worked my way to her desk, and opened the book, and saw he had a full list of engagements for the sixth, starting at nine a.m. That meant he would almost certainly be back at his flat in Parkland Towers at some hour that night. I felt the spray-gun in my armpit holster and knew, or rather believed, that I had no alternative after that but to threaten him and force him to stop the rocket. I was not sure, but I believed that he could do it on some pretext or another by one telephone call to the desert outpost. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the only course open to me was to go to Parkland Towers and make him do it.
I was surprised at my certainty as I left his office and walked down the interior corridors along which I had come with such doubt and trepidation little more than an hour before. But then I had only suspected, and feared that I was suspecting our leader unworthily. Now I knew. All of us were responsible for some part of the rocket project, but he was responsible for the whole, for putting the parts together. It did cross my mind that what I should do was call a party Council to emergency session, and accuse Lankowitz and put my case, but I could not even act on that until the next day, and even if, by assembling a few loyal men such as Gorlston, I put Lankowitz under- arrest in the meantime by a kind of palace revolution, it would take up to five days to assemble the delegates, and by then the rocket would be well on its way to Vista.
I do not know if I actually doubted whether the Council would stop the rocket after it had been sent off. My mind slid over that and the question of whether their actions would be determined by humanitarian considerations or policy. I just went to my own office, closed up everything and put things to rights in the normal way, and then went down through the building and took my car to cross the city. As I went out into the night at nearly midnight what I was going to do seemed quite clear to me once again.
Facing the first city lights and the sparse traffic, I told myself it was not the first time that an Information Office man, even an agent, though not usually a captain, had gone out into the city either to kill someone or force him to do something he did not wish to do. There were stories in the past of sudden deaths of leading members of the hierarchy, and though I had thought, as everyone does, that that kind of thing did not belong to my generation, I now saw that it did belong, as much as to any others. It was a matter of purification, I told myself. Any authoritarian organization is like that. When the leadership becomes too sophisticated and begins to play with the essen-tail and vital matters of party aims as though they too were toys, then force and assassination were the cleansing weapons.
What I did not quite realize I was doing, was going man-to-man to confront C. Q. Lankowitz.
It began well enough. When I came down from the dark expressway, it was into the quiet, creekside midnight of the city’s best residential area. I took an operator’s natural precautions, stopping at B-block and walking the remaining distance. I entered C-block without being seen from the private gardens, and took the private elevator—not the public one—to the select upper floors. I was in the corridor on the landing where his door was, seeing the view of the city lights from the window and wondering how it would look from his roof garden, before I found the need to determine my actions more precisely.
A feeling swept over me then, but I conquered it.
When I rang at his door, I turned away and stood a little sideways. I had to watch the landing and, at the same time, if his servant answered the door, it was important that I should take him before he recognized me, since I did not want to have to kill him. When the door opened, I swung around with my gun in my right hand and my left arm up across my face. The man who faced me at the door was Lankowitz.
We went in. From the start, he could have had no illusions about my intentions, and I asked him about the servant. He told me that since he had been out of town he had given the man leave of absence. Once the outer door was closed, I opened other doors and made sure that he was not lying. He was perfectly composed. He went ahead of me into the living room, with me pushing doors open as I went, and he stood in the middle of the room,