Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (69 page)

At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and levellers. Then the words came up clearly – the words of the Forbidden Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips – poor Pat Macdonough’s Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague – every silly word of it loaded to sparking point with the Planet’s inherited memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago – innocent, contented little Chicago – was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few generations ago!

‘Once there was The People–Terror gave it birth;

Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!

(Then the stamp and pause):

Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!

Once there was The People–it shall never be again!’

The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the melting walls.

De Forest frowned.

‘I don’t like that,’ he said. ‘They’ve broken back to the Old Days! They’ll be killing somebody soon. I think we’d better divert ’em, Arnott.’

‘Ay, ay, sir!’ Arnott’s hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of the
Victor Pirolo
ring to the command: ‘Lamps! Both watches stand by! Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!’

‘Keep still!’ said Takahira to me. ‘Blinkers, please, quartermaster.’

‘It’s all right – all right!’ said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap. I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in absolute darkness.

‘To save the sight,’ he explained, and pushed me on to the chartroom divan. ‘You will see, in a minute.’

As he spoke, I became aware of a thin thread of almostintolerable light, let down from heaven at an immense distance – one vertical hairsbreadth of frozen lightning.

‘Those are our flanking ships,’ said Arnott at my elbow, ‘That one is over Galena. Look south – that other one’s over Keithburg. Vincennes is behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet’s in position, sir’ – this to De Forest. ‘As soon as you give the word.’

‘Ah, no! No!’ cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man tremble. ‘I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to be a little kind to them below! This is horrible – horrible!’

‘“When a Woman kills a Chicken,

Dynasties and Empires sicken,”’

Takahira quoted. ‘It is too late to be gentle now.’

‘Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!’ Dragomiroff began hysterically.

Pirolo must have put his arm round him.

‘Hush,’ he said, ‘I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.’

‘I’ll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,’said Arnott. ‘She don’t deserve it, but we’ll allow her a minute or two to take mamma to the cellar.’

In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard Macdonough’s Song from the city beneath us grow fainter, as we rose to position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as though the floor of Heaven had been riddled, and all the inconceivable blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.

‘You needn’t count,’ said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing. ‘There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full power, please, for another fifteen seconds.’

The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.

‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?’ Dragomiroff cried, and fell across our knees.

‘Glass of water, please,’ said Takahira, to a helmeted shape that leaped forward. ‘He is a little faint.’

The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We could hear Dragomiroff s teeth on the glass edge.

Pirolo was comforting him.

‘All right, all ra-ight,’ he repeated.’ Come and lie down. Come below and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right. They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo’s leetle lights. You know me? I do not hurt people.’

‘Pardon!’ Dragomiroff moaned. ‘I have never seen Death. I have never seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is that already done?’

‘Oh, hush!’ said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.

‘Do we repeat, sir?’ Arnott asked De Forest.

‘Give ’em a minute’s break,’ De Forest replied. ‘They may need it.’

We waited a minute and then Macdonough’s Song, broken but defiant, rose from undefeated Chicago.

‘They seem fond of that tune,’ said De Forest. ‘I should let ’em have it, Arnott.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator keys.

No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the ruled foreshores of space.

‘That’s our pitch-pipe,’ said Arnott. ‘We may be a bit ragged; I’ve never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.’ He pulled out the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.

The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully, a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself – there is no scale to measure against that utterance – of the tuneto which they kept time. Certain notes – one learnt to expect them with terror – cut through one’s marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in indescribable agony.

We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two hundred and fifty beams shifted, reformed, straddled and split, narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and we heard one single, devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a bowl.

‘Ah, that is my new siren,’ said Pirolo. ‘You can break an iceberg across, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by squadrons now. It is the wind through pierced shutters in the bows.’

I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling feebly, because I had been delivered before my time to all the terrors of Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection were hailing me naked across the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres.

Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott’s helmet with his open hand. The wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow swooped past us, and returned to her place above the lower clouds.

‘I hate to interrupt a specialist when he’s enjoying himself,’ said De Forest, ‘but, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been asking us to stop for these last fifteen seconds.’

‘What a pity!’ Arnott slipped off his mask. ‘I wanted you to hear us really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.’

‘It is Hell – Hell!’ cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.

Arnott looked away as he answered:

‘It’s a few thousand volts ahead of the old shoot-’em-and-sink-’em game, but I should scarcely call it
that.
What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?’

‘Tell them we’re very pleased and impressed. I don’t think they need wait on any longer. There isn’t a spark left down there.’ De Forest pointed. ‘They’ll be deaf and blind.’

‘Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten minutes.’

‘Marvellous!’ Takahira sighed. ‘I should have said it was half a night. Now shall we go down and pick up the pieces?’

‘But first a small drink,’ said Pirolo. ‘The Board must not arrive weeping at its own works.’

‘I am an old fool – an old fool!’ Dragomiroff began piteously. ‘I did not know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with them in Little Russia.’

Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.

‘All right!’ shouted Arnott into the darkness. ‘We aren’t beginning again!’ We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.

It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see, made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.

‘You stchewpids!’ he began. ‘There is nothing to fuss for. Of
course,
your eyes will smart and be all red to-morrow. You will look as if you and your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again as well as before. I tell you this, and I –
I
am Pirolo! Victor Pirolo!’

The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.

‘Pirolo?’ An unsteady voice lifted itself. ‘Then tell us, was there anything except light in those lights of yours, just now?’

The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.

Pirolo laughed.

‘No!’ he thundered. (Why have small men such largevoices?) ‘I give you my word and the Board’s word that there was nothing except light – just light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down – never!’

‘Is that true? We thought – we heard – somebody said—’

One could feel the tension relax all round.

‘You
too
big fools,’ Pirolo cried. ‘You could have sent us a call and we would have told you.’

‘Send you a call!’ a deep voice shouted. ‘I wish you had been at
our
end of the wire.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t,’ said De Forest. ‘It looked bad enough from behind the lamps. Never mind! It’s over now. Is there anyone here I can talk business with? I’m De Forest, US – for the Board.’

‘You might begin with me, for one – I’m Mayor,’ the bass voice replied.

A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us, where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.

‘I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?’ said he.

‘Yes,’ said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.

‘Hello, Andy. Is that you?’ a voice called.

‘Excuse me,’ said the Mayor; ‘that sounds like my Chief of Police, Bluthner?’

‘Bluthner it is; and here’s Mulligan and Keefe – on their feet.’

‘Bring ’em up, please, Blut. We’re supposed to be the Four in charge of this hamlet. What we say, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?’

‘Nothing yet,’ De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting, reeling men.
You’ve
cut out of the system. Well?’

‘Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,’ Arnott whispered to an orderly at his side.

‘Good!’ said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. ‘Now I suppose we can take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer us direct?’

‘Not if the Board can avoid it,’ De Forest laughed. ‘The ABC is responsible only for the planetary traffic.’

‘
And all that that implies.
’The big Four who ran Chicago chanted their Magna Charta like children at school.

‘Well, get on,’ said De Forest wearily. ‘What
is
your silly trouble, anyway?’

‘Too much damn democracy,’ said the Mayor, laying his hand on De Forest’s knee.

‘So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.’

‘She has. That’s why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last night?’

‘Locked ’em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing ’em,’ the Chief of Police replied. ‘I’m too blind to move just yet, but—’

‘Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch ’em along,’ said De Forest.

‘They’re triple-circuited,’ the Mayor called. ‘You’ll have to blow out three fuses.’ He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in the paling darkness. ‘I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I’m an administrator myself, but we’ve had a little fuss with our Serviles. What? In a big city there’s bound to be a few men and women who can’t live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of pipes they don’t own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the year round. They say it saves ’em trouble. Anyway, it gives ’em more time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call ’em Serviles locally. And they are apt to be tuberculous.’

‘Just so!’ said the man called Mulligan. ‘Transportation is Civilisation. Democracy is Disease. I’ve proved it by the blood-test, every time.’

‘Mulligan’s our Health Officer, and a one-cycle man,’ said the Mayor, laughing. ‘But it’s true that most Serviles haven’t much control. They
will
talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may arrive – mayn’t it, De Forest?’

‘Anything – except the facts of the case,’ said De Forest, laughing.

‘I’ll give you those in a minute,’ said the Mayor. ‘Our Serviles got to talking – first in their houses, and then on thestreets, telling men and women how to manage their own affairs. (You can’t teach a Servile not to finger his neighbour’s soul.) That’s invasion of privacy, of course, but in Chicago we’ll suffer anything sooner than make crowds. Nobody took much notice, and so I let ’em alone. My fault! I was warned there would be trouble, but there hasn’t been a crowd or murder in Illinois for nineteen years.’

‘Twenty-two,’ said the Chief of Police.

‘Likely. Anyway, we’d forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting in the Old Market yonder.’ He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The Negro in Flames. ‘There’s nothing to prevent anyone calling meetings except that it’s against human nature to stand in a crowd, besides being bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we—’