Worlds Apart (20 page)

It was clear. Toni's face sobered. She had never gone long without sleep. No one did -- there was no reason for anyone to do so on Mundis. But she guessed Phyllis was right, and that it was certain. How long could she last?

"Now we must go back," said Phyllis with real regret. She had been leading the way back to the flat stone where she had left her clothes. She put them on, and Toni's spirits sank as the nymph in play clothes became the grim Clade again. She could not believe that Phyllis had talked as she had.

From her black frown as they made their way back to the Clades, apparently neither could Phyllis.

3

Three of the founder colonists committed suicide that night. One cut his veins, one hanged himself, and the third shot himself with one of the old guns.

However, they were three of the weakest, least valuable people in the community. That was a callous view, but it was the kind of view everyone was taking about everything just at the moment. They were men who couldn't face the idea that a compulsion which still remained in their minds would have to be battered down.

Only guesses could be made new about the purpose of the compulsion. In general it was clear enough -- the crew of the Mundis had been meant to make sure the planet was habitable, get over all the early hurdles, and then dismantle the ship. The atomic engines were not to be used, for radioactivity, which had been the end of Earth, was not to be the end of Mundis too. Yet they were not to be destroyed, for they might easily become necessary again.

Perhaps the compulsion, the conditioning, the post-hypnotic suggestion, whatever it was -- perhaps it had been too strong, or had grown like a cancer in the mind. For even when the founders needed the atomic engines again, they could not admit that the engines were safe, carefully buried in a hillside, and could be dug out in a few hours.

Or perhaps the compulsion had concerned itself entirely with the use of atomic power for offense. The colonists might have been commanded never to resurrect the engines unless it was necessary to leave Mundis and seek another planet.

In any case, now that they had them there was something that might be done, however wild and hopeless.

"I don't think there can be much argument," Rog said. "We evacuate Lemon, of course, and get as far away as we can in a short time. If the Clades find us on the way, it's too bad -- we can't do anything about that. When we're well clear of here we dig in and somehow build defenses."

Some of the Mundans didn't go to bed that night. They were on the hillside, digging. Others took over from them as soon as it was light. Soon after dawn all twenty-four engines were lying out in the open.

Rog had been sticking close to Bentley. Bentley was a very important man now, the only one among them who really understood these engines. Slowly, gradually, Bentley was becoming his usual self again.

He stood with Rog in the early-morning light and surveyed the machines. There was hardly anything to see; they were covered in completely so that they were nothing but big black boxes, seven feet long, five feet breod, four feet high.

"Is this all?" he asked. "Get the digging started again, Rog."

"More engines?"

"No, these are the engines, but as they are they're no use to us. There must be cables and transformers there. The power these things generate is so vast and raw that it's never used direct."

He wasn't going to say more, for Rog didn't pretend to be a technician. But Dick joined them then, and for the first time Bentley began to give information on this subject instead of blocking it.

"If the shielding in that casing had been developed twenty years earlier," he observed, "Earth might have had its cake and eaten it too. That shielding might have made it possible for us to use atomic power as we liked, safely. It's a sort of blotting paper for gamma-rays and neutrons -- about equivalent to ten feet of lead and quite a few fathoms of water. But probably it wouldn't have made any difference. It wasn't that radioactivity couldn't be shielded, but -- "

"Cables and transformers, you said?" Rog interrupted. He stepped forward and spoke to Brad, who was directing operations.

Pertwee had been traveling almost night and day, and he slept for eighteen hours. By the time he got up, Lemon was almost on the point of evacuation. An amazing amount of work had been done.

He marveled. The old people, who had had to leave practically all their possessions behind once before, were going round and pointing out to the young Mundans that they couldn't possibly take /that/. An advance party, he was told, had already gone on. In the square, Bentley and Dick and Brad and Fred and everyone else who had the slightest ability as a craftsman of any kind were working. . . .

Pertwee hurried to Rog, who was watching the work in the square.

"I don't want to see any more," he said. "I'm going away so that I won't."

Rog turned an inquiring gaze on him and waited.

"I'm not coming with you," said Pertwee. "Toni's with the Clades. I had to come back and warn you, but now that I have I'm going to wait for them and let them take me again."

"That probably won't do Toni any good,". said Rog~

"Perhaps not."

"But you're doing it just the same?"

"I can't see anything else I can do, or want to do. Besides, we're working on the basis that the Clades will find this place, and soon. Unless someone stays behind and throws them off the scent, they may find you the next day."

"We're going to . . . " began Rog.

"Don't tell me anything. What I don't know they can't get from me. I don't see what you can hope to do, and I'm not going to ask."

"Bentley!" Rog shouted.

Bentley looked up, said something to Dick, and came across to them. "Well?" he said.

"Pertwee's waiting to let the Clades recapture him," said Rog. "What should he tell them?"

"I thought perhaps you might, John," said Bentley quietly. "It's what I'd do if it were Mary. In fact, I've even thought out what seems to be the best answer to that question. Remember when we were approaching this system, decelerating, twenty-odd years ago. Remember the dead world?"

Pertwee nodded.

"Tell them we've gone there. Explain it how you like. But convince them somehow there's no urgency -- you said they thought that anyway. Get them to go to -- what did we call it?"

"Outpost."

"That's it. Take them out there, delay them as long as you can -- then, when you can't delay them any more, let them come looking for us."

"How long do you want?"

"As long as we can get."

"But what, as a minimum, do you absolutely have to have?"

Bentley considered.

"We might do something in two months."

"Two months! Then there's a chance!"

"Oh, yes. If you can get them to go to Outpost."

"I'll try." Pertwee put out his hand.

He didn't protract his farewells. Mary, Brad, Jessie, Kate, Frank, Ruby -- these were all who mattered. Ruby mattered most, and he had least qualms about leaving her. She didn't say anything -- she was never very communicative -- but he felt that at the parting they had reckoned up and settled everything between them. Ruby was young to be responsible, but she had taken responsibility under Rog Foley. She was going to take her part in building the new Lemon.

He went east; not far, for he was only leaving Lemon so that he wouldn't see what happened there. He waited a day, two days.

When he returned there wasn't a living soul in the valley, and most of the houses had been destroyed.

IX

1

Every morning, now, Phyllis took Toni out in the open, well clear of the ship, and talked with her in complete freedom. Always, to increase the illusion, Phyllis wore Mundan clothes. It worked as it was probably meant to work -- Toni had so thoroughly identified the grim, cold Lieutenant Barton with the uniform she wore that Phyllis in a ket or cuffed shorts was accepted easily as another person.

Every day Toni's eyes smarted more and she was stiffer. Fatigue got into her bones and into her very blood. Time moved jerkily; it would glide along rapidly, imperceptibly, and then draw up with a crash and a jar. Thinking of the last time she was in bed was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Behind her stretched the morning and the long, silent night with three guards sitting up with her, making certain she didn't doze even for a moment. Behind that the day, always a slightly less tired day than this one, and before that the morning and another long, silent night. And so back to the time when she was being tortured, but could have spent fifteen hours a day sleeping if she wished.

Sometimes it was hard to talk, but for the most part she made the effort. It was more pleasant, if possible, to keep herself interested and awake than to succumb and be jarred into wakefulness.

And she had learned a lot of interesting things about the Clades. There were a lot of things she knew now and wished she could tell the Mundans.

The Mundis had been supposed to he the last interstellar ship that could leave Earth, and it very nearly was. It was made while Earth's dvilization was still functioning, while communications were good, while one only had to order a piece of equipment and get it. As Phyllis spoke about this she echoed a certain bitter jealousy which must have animated all Clades when they thought of the Mundis.

The Class was built in a collapsing culture -- or rather, after all culture had collapsed. It was built amid violence and ruin and murder and famine. When anyone engaged on its construction refused to obey an order, it was routine to shoot him. Life was dirt cheap on a world that had billions, of whom only a paltry three hundred could be taken on the Cladss. Disappointment was routine too. The flat statement that there wouldn't be any curium had to be overturned somehow, or meant wholesale conversion to the use ef americium or plutonium. Heavy hydrogen was a problem at another time; there just was not, and never would be, any more heavy water. The technicians went back to graphite, which had been used at any earlier stage for the same purpose.

And while atomic power made low-voltage electric power look pretty silly, it could be more than merely infuriating when the electric power cut out altogether and the Clades technicians had to waste a valuable six months making the construction base entirely self-contained.

Yes, the men who built the Clades had a right to sneer at the men who built the Mundis. They did, too, and perhaps that was the real start of what was now to be a war between the two ships and their people.

Phyllis reported all this secondhand, more or less indifferently, merely because Toni expressed interest. She hadn't been concerned in it herself. She had been born in space.

Those who had remained behind on Earth had been in no doubt of what the purpose of this last mighty ship would be. Men knew again that survival mattered before all else. Survival of self, group, nation, race, humanity, animal life. The Clades was sent after the Mundis to make sure. Two chances were better than one.

And two chances woald continue to be better than one.

"This isn't what's taught among us now," observed Phyllis. "It's what" I heard when I was a child. We were supposed to contact the Mundane, that was all. We were to see if you'd succeeded -- if you had settled down, if you were safe. The contact was to be very slight, and only to see if you needed help. Then we were to go on colonizing other worlds, making sure that never again would the destruction of one tiny world threaten the whole race of man."

"But you didn't," said Toni. "Why?"

The Clades didn't because that was only the view of those who stayed behind. For those who went, things had a different aspect. There was no doubt of survival any more. If there were, why, certainly they'd rather the Mundane survived than no one at all. But as it was, the Mundans were only the obvious first item in the Clade list of conquests . . .

"Do you agree with this?" Toni demanded.

Phyllis shook her head impatiently. "You don't understand. If someone says a uniform is magenta, and you know you'll be shot if you say it's anything else -- it's magenta. You don't tell yourself you'll call it magenta, but it's really green. If you do that, some time you'll make a mistake and say it's green."

"Yes, but that doesn't /make/ it magenta."

"It does to a Clade. If he wants to live, that is."

"You mean you /must/ agree to conquer Mundis?"

"Not quite. My agreement isn't called for. Asking for agreement is giving a person a chance to disagree."

Toni thought of saying, but didn't, that from the very way she talked it was clear that Phyllis had never done what she said every Clade must do. She didn't believe the uniform was magenta. She might build up an unshakable response, but her calculations on the subject were based on the fact that it was green. . . .

"Go on," said Toni. "If we were your first conquest, why did you wait all these years?"

The President of the United Nations, when the Clades took off, had been a dictator. He had to be, in the world he lived in. There was no authority but supreme authority.

If a totalitarian system is to work properly, and keep on working, there must be no time when there isn't a leader. It is: "The king is dead: long live the king" There must be no instant when there is no supreme leader.

The Clades left Earth, however, with Commodore Corey in command, but answerable to the President. And Corey didn't become supreme commander until twenty-eight years later, when they /knew/ the President no longer existed.

Meantime the Clades had landed on Secundis and found it habitable. They had built a colony, overhauled the ship, spent twelve years growing stronger and training and preparing. They never went to Mundis, for if they did they would lose a possible future advantage of surprise. As it was, the Mundans couldn't know there had been a second ship, and when the Clades were ready --

"I can take it from there," said Toni. "You do what you're told instead of what seems to be the right thing, and your supreme leader had told you not to interfere with us. Not until you had /another/ leader, who wasn't answerable to anyone, could you change that and act in another way."