by C. L. Moore
Sam was in his tower. He was alone. For months he had superintended the installation of one-man apparatus. Some tasks he could relay, but the main job depended on him alone. It would be no easy task.
The slap-source message came from the Venusian seas.
"Ground your planes, Plymouth Colony! You can't survive atomic attack!"
Every listener thought suddenly of the memorial eidolon in every Keep; the black-plastic shrouded sphere of the lost Earth. Atomics on Venus—for warfare? Atomic power that could so easily become uncontrollable.
Visors showed infrared and radar jungle vistas as Sam's planes quartered landside and the sea, delicate instruments probing into the black secret fury of native Venus, searching efficiently for the marauders who called themselves the Venusian Provisional Government.
"This is an ultimatum. You have forty-eight hours. At the end of that period, one of the Keeps will be destroyed."
Atomics!
That was the old, terrible fear. That was the terror that had come down in the race through seven hundred years. And in the Keeps the years had meant nothing—had been as meaningless as the hourless days.
Forty-eight hours?
Time had come to the Keeps at last.
-
Two planes were shot down before they got too close to the fort. Tractor rays eased them to the ground, and there were no explosions. But the threat of the atomic warhead moved closer.
Sam said: "In our all-out effort, we have recalled our men already assigned to the colony expansion effort—our newest venture." His tired, strained face gave way to a view of a wide, cleared area on a seacoast, with its familiar jungle backdrop. Some huts had already been constructed, and others stood half-completed, the plastic layers only partly sprayed on the custom-shaped balloon foundations. Piles of equipment were neatly lined up. But orderly crowds of men were moving toward the motor-powered barges beached to receive them.
"The mutineers have not yet been located. Our planes are proceeding with their search—"
The patterns of radar gave place to depthless, infrared jungle, seen from far above. It shifted back to the radar matrix as the plane swept on, probing with all the marvelously keen sensory equipment technology had given it.
"Forty-seven hours. You have forty-seven hours. Plymouth Colony, ground your planes. We have atomic power and we will not hesitate to use it—"
Time ...
"You have forty-six hours—"
-
And fear swept the Keeps. Crowds seethed the Ways, gathering at the cloverleaves where the big visor screens were set up. Zachariah Harker said to Kedre:
"The body politic is more than a figure of speech. The Ways, you know, are like the circulatory system. When too many people gather, forming—well, blood clots—then there's danger of an aneurysm."
"Zachariah—" Kedre said.
He took her hand.
"I don't know. I don't know, my dear. I'm trying to think. We still have forty-five hours."
-
"You have forty-four hours."
-
"Another attacking plane has been shot down and eased with tractor beams thirty miles from Plymouth Fort. No atomic explosion resulted. This plane was radio-controlled. The robot-guide signals were relayed from constantly shifting areas at sea."
-
Hale looked at the Logician.
"Things level off," Ben Crowell said packing his pipe.
"It's all right for you to talk. You know the answers. I don't."
"Time to look for real trouble is when you don't see any," Crowell pointed out. "You might see some harmless-looking plants, little ones, and you wouldn't think there's a Man Underground root twenty feet long hiding 'way down, waiting for the right time. Right now—" He glanced at the Keep announcer on the nearest screen. "Well, you don't see me interfering, do you?"
"No. And you ought to be more excited, with atomic war threatened. Even the Free Companies outlawed atomics for offense."
"You have forty-three hours," the screen said.
-
"You have twenty-four hours."
-
"You have twenty hours."
-
"You have sixteen hours."
-
"Sam Reed speaking. We've found the skunks!"
-
The screens showed jungle, seen from high above—green, luxuriant, writhing with life. No more than that. Then the bombardment began, acid, flame, rays, and the fury of man's own weapons crashed against the fury of Venus.
The jungle green blackened. It writhed in torment. It flung up huge ropes of screaming vines. Clouds of flying things poured away from the center of that circle of awful holocaust. The towering, pillarlike neck of the thunder-lizard curved up; the red maw opened. The hissing shriek of the saurian rose high and keening through the dull, incessant roar of the blasting rain from above.
"Surrender! We'll destroy the Keeps—we won't hesitate—stop your attack—"
There was only raw, blackened, steaming earth now where there had been jungle.
The soil melted and crumbled. It flowed like lava. A white-hot lake began to grow. Pressure-jets blasted down, forcing the molten rock out from its lake in a flashing, incandescent spray. And something seemed to rise from the turgid steaming depths. As the molten level sank, a gray, rounded surface emerged.
Sam's face flashed on to the screens.
"You are seeing the secret headquarters of the mutineers," he said. "You will see it destroyed now."
A voice shouted: "We'll destroy the Keeps! Stop your attack—"
The gray dome stood sullenly in the white-hot lake.
The black torpedo shape of a bomb dropped. The gray dome was tough. But then another bomb dropped.
And another.
The first explosion had not mushroomed before the next missile hit. Then the next. And there was no cessation, no pause in the terrible regularity of the pin-point bombing. Hammer-blow after hammer-blow struck. Four—five—six—
Sam dropped forty-eight bombs, one for each hour of the deadline the Venusian Provisional Government had given him.
The screens showed smoke. When at last the smoke cleared—they showed such ruin as not even the fury of Venus's jungles could achieve. The Man Underground was rooted out at last.
And twenty submarines discharged extremely specialized torpedoes at the impervium domes shielding the Keeps.
-
Six hours later Zachariah Harker was speaking to the Keeps.
"The mutineers were destroyed by Sam Reed. But they had a suicide fleet. As they died, they had their revenge. The impervium dome above Delaware Keep has been radioactivated. The same holds true for all the Keeps. One moment—" He turned away, and presently returned.
"I am told that new messages have recently been received—the mutineers were not all destroyed. Apparently there were some survivors. They are harmless at the moment, but they comprise a permanent threat until they, as well as their organization, is eradicated. Completely. Meantime, their revenge is effective. Within a week the danger level will be reached, and the Keeps will be uninhabitable.
"Do not be immediately alarmed. There is no chance that the activated impervium will reach critical mass. But there is no way of halting the atomic reaction, and after a week has passed, the Keeps will be slow death traps. Only one solution seems practical. There is no time to build new impervium domes undersea—yet. But it may be done on landside. Here is Sam Reed; let him tell you his plan."
Sam's face appeared.
He said almost casually, "We did our best, but the skunks had the last word. Well, you've got to leave the Keeps—all of you—or die. I told you, I think, that we had been planning colony expansion. We've cleared a great deal of ground in preparation for that, and have already set up some equipment. It's yours. We'll stay in Plymouth or start new colonies. The land we cleared, and the equipment, is at your service. In this hour of disaster, we'll have to work together; we're one race.
"In a week yo
u can transport the materiél you'll need. It won't be an easy life, but it'll be life. We of Plymouth Colony stand ready to help you to the fullest extent. Good luck."
Someone else appeared on the screen; Sam and Zachariah began talking on a private beam.
"Can you evacuate the Keeps in a week?"
"Easily. Since we have to."
"All right. We'll have to work together—for a while at least. Kedre proposed that once, and I said no. But now I'm proposing it. We'll send special officers to advise you on what equipment will be required. In the cleared areas, the first problem will be medical. We'll supply medical administrative officers. You've got to stay alive and healthy, and you're not acclimated to landside life. Don't count too much on impervium domes. We haven't wiped out the mutineers, and what they can do once, they can do again. When you're under impervium, you're vulnerable. If the survivors get organized again—"
"Landside life will be hard on the old and infirm."
"The strong men will have enough to do. There will be plenty of maintenance jobs that won't require physical fitness. Jobs that have to be done. Give those tasks to the old and infirm; that way, you'll release the strong ones for work that takes strength. You'll have a lot of clearing and building to do."
"Our technicians estimate the half-life of activated thorium at twelve years. We can return to the Keeps after twelve years."
"But you'll have to live until then. And don't forget the survivors—the ones we didn't blast. They could reactivate the Keep domes, unless we catch them first. Twelve years is a long time."
"Yes," Zachariah said thoughtfully, looking into his grandson's oblivious face. "Yes, I expect it will be a long, long time."
-
And the Lord said ... Depart and go up hence ... unto the land which I swore unto Abraham ... a land flowing with milk and honey ... And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground, and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left.
—Exodus
Seven hundred years ago the last exodus of the race of man took place. Today it began again. The vast mass migration was too complex for any single mind to encompass, and the people who looked back on it later remembered only intolerable confusion of the mind—hysteria, near panic, blind rebellion against destiny, but concerted, obedient motion as an over-all pattern. The people of the Keeps had learned docility the easiest way of all. Now they did as they were told, grumbling, frightened, unwilling, but obeying the orders of anyone who spoke with enough authority.
No one would have believed, beforehand, that so tremendous an exodus could take place in the time allotted. No one, looking back, quite understood how it had been accomplished. But accomplished it was. That incalculable weight of inertia in a people contentedly settled for seven hundred years in one place required an even more incalculable weight in the scales to tip them over into action—
And they had that weight. The nucleon. Weightless by any comparable scale of physical values, still it tipped the balance as no other thing could. There was one old, old terror in the mind of every man who had ever looked up from the moving Ways and seen the globe of lost Earth hanging in the center of every Keep, shrouded in its symbolic pall.
They moved.
-
Kedre looked around her beautiful quiet room for the last time. It was a long look, quiet, like the room.
"We won't come back," she said. Zachariah, waiting at the door for her, said patiently, "Why?"
"You know we won't. And it's a good thing. I hate Sam Reed. He's always forcing me to face unpleasant truths for perfectly irrelevant reasons of his own. He isn't doing this because it's time and past time for the sake of the race. He's doing it because he told a monumental lie and couldn't think of any other out."
"I wonder if we'll ever be able to prove it?"
Kedre shrugged. "If we could, it wouldn't matter, now. We know Sam's methods. Once before when he was in a desperate spot he took desperate measures. We've expected it again ever since. I didn't give him credit for such misdirection, but Sam's learning fast. No, I don't suppose it ever can be proved."
"Are you ready, my dear? The lift's waiting."
"All right." She sighed, turning to the door. "I shouldn't feel as if I'm going out to die. I'm just now going to vindicate my own existence by starting to live! It'll be uncomfortable and I suppose dangerous, though I mind danger less. But it's something that's needed doing for longer than I like to think. Only—Zachariah, it's so horribly ignoble to be forced to do it!"
He laughed. "I feel the same way. I suppose the first invertebrates who crawled up out of the prehistoric seas felt just as we do—hating every minute of it. It's time mankind crawled out of the water and stood on dry land again, but even Sam Reed can't make us like it!"
"He'll be sorry." She buckled the cloak at her throat and crossed the room on lingering feet, pressing each step into the resilient flooring she would probably never walk again except out of curiosity, perhaps a century from now. "How strange it will all look then," she thought. "Dark and stifling, I expect, after so long in the free air. We'll wonder how we ever stood it. Oh dear, I wish Sam Reed had never been born."
Zachariah held the door for her. "Our plans will still go forward, landside," he said. "I checked about your ... your time-bomb. Parents and child are safe up there, in a sheltered job."
"I wish," Kedre declared, "that it had been a boy. Still—this may make a better weapon, after all. And it isn't our only weapon, of course. Sam has got to be stopped. We may have to use weapons as disreputable as the ones he's used against us, but we'll stop him. We have time on our side."
Zachariah, watching her face, said nothing at all.
-
"I knew you were up to something," Hale said, "when you let all those mutineers go. It isn't like you to let anything go you can use."
Sam looked at him under meeting brows. "You wanted to colonize landside," he said uncompromisingly. "Well, this is it."
"Robot submarines, robot planes, remote control—and a long-term plan," Hale said amusingly, and shook his head. "Well, you've done it. No one else in the world could have, but you did."
"After twelve years," Sam told him calmly, "they'll be pretty well acclimated. After another twelve—and maybe another—they're going to like it up here so well you couldn't drive them back. Remember you told me once what makes pioneers? Push plus pull. Bad home conditions or a Grail somewhere else. The Grail wasn't enough. Well—" He shrugged.
Hale was silent for almost a minute, regarding Sam with his steady stare that had seen so much on Venusian landside before now. Finally he spoke.
"Remember what happened to Moses, Sam?" he asked gently, and then, like a classic prototype, turned and went out of the room, not staying for an answer.
-
The race struck roots and grew. Slowly at first, reluctantly, but with gathering vigor. And down in the deserted Keeps, in the first few days after the departing thousands had gone, for a little while life still moved through the strange new silence of the dying cities.
There were those who did not choose to leave. Some of the old people who had always lived here and could not face life above water, some of the ill who preferred the slow, comfortable death that had been provided for them. Some of the drug addicts. Silently in the deathly silence they moved through the empty shells. Never before since mankind first colonized Venus had such silence dwelt beneath the domes. You could hear the slowing Ways sighing on their rounds. You could hear strange, vague underwater noises transmitted from the great sounding-boards of the city shells. You could hear sometimes the shuffling footsteps of some fellow wanderer.
But after a little while all footsteps ceased, and all sounds except the echoes from the seas outside.
-
The thick walls shivered in the thunder of bombardment. In Sam's hand the stylus danced upon the suddenly shaking paper. His desk top shook, and the chair he sat in, and the floor quivered rhythmicall
y and was still. Sam grimaced without knowing it. This was the third day of the bombardment, and he had shut his mind to the minor irritations of the unstable walls.
A young woman in a sleekly severe brown tunic bent forward, watching him write, her black hair falling in short, straight wings across her face. She pulled the page off the pad almost before his stylus had finished writing, and went quickly across the trembling floor to her own desk. There was a televisor on it, and she spoke rapidly, in a soft, clear voice, into the transmitter. In a dozen other visors scattered about the vast, beleaguered fort her tanned face was the target for intense attention as Sam's lieutenants received their latest orders. In a dozen visors her violet-blue eyes looked out narrowed with intentness, her velvety voice gave incongruously stern messages.
"All right," Sam said wearily when she had finished. "All right, Signa, send in Zachariah now."
She rose with a smooth precision of motion that was beautiful to watch, and went quickly across the floor. The door she opened led not directly into the waiting room beyond, but into a little space lock that could be bathed at a touch by searcher beams to catch the presence of any weapon a man might try to smuggle past it. Sam took no chances. It didn't seem to matter much now—perhaps he had too long mistaken personal safety for group safety. The bombardment roared again and for the first time a long delicate crack went flashing like slow lightning down one wall. The space lock would seem futile enough when the walls themselves began to go. But for a little while longer it must be used.
Two guards came in at Signa's beckoning, and paused perfunctorily in the lock and stood back for their prisoner to take his turn in the invisible bath of the beams. Two more guards came after.
Zachariah had a cut lip and a darkening bruise on one side of his ageless face, but he looked remarkably confident in spite of his manacles. Except for his tan he had changed little. He was still head of the Harker clan, and the Harkers were still the most influential family on Venus. But if Sam's coup in capturing the leader of the attacking forces meant anything, Zachariah did not show it.
Twenty years had not been a very long time.
The Keeps were still uninhabitable. The change-over to landside living had come very gradually, but it was complete by now. The signal for completion had been sounded on that day when instruments first showed that the atmosphere of Venus had at last shifted over to an ecology balance that matched Earth's. Crab grass and earth-native herbs with a high oxygen output had finally tipped the scale. From now on, this continent could be left to itself, botanically speaking. For the plants had changed the air. The heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere in which Venusian flora flourished would foster them no longer. What is normal for Earth-born plants is poison for the Venus-grown things that were so often neither plant nor animal, but a deadly symbiosis of the two.
