Revolt on Alpha C

by Robert Silverberg

  He turned to show it to Heitor. But Heitor was sitting again, wiping the moisture from his cheeks.

  “Up, Heitor. Come on. Look—that light ahead is the clearing.”

  It was another five hundred feet or so to safety, he estimated. They had just about done the impossible by traveling for a mile through the jungle without accident. Larry was not going to risk it now. He pulled Heitor to his feet.

  “Just another few steps, Heitor.”

  “I can’t, Larry. Just let me sit here.” The insects and the heat and the mile hike had combined to leave him almost exhausted.

  Larry saw there was no use dragging him. He would give him a minute or two to rest and then they would continue.

  The sounds of the jungle seemed to be getting more intense. The great deep roaring of the dinosaur somewhere in the heart of the jungle—did it seem nearer ‘ Larry decided it was just his imagination.

  Two more small reptiles rushed past them from behind. Why were they running only in that direction? he wondered. Was there something behind them?

  “Let’s go, Heitor. Up, boy.” He was going to say something else, but it was drowned by a sudden great snarl.

  The trees behind them began to whip wildly about, and the snarl grew to a bellow that filled the jungle. Larry looked up and saw a giant reptile standing over them, roaring as it advanced through the jungle. In the split second before he could move, he saw that it was at least a hundred feet high and all teeth. Then he began to run, shouting wildly for Heitor to follow him.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ROAR OF the dinosaur seemed to fill the jungle. Larry felt oddly calm as he ran. It was only five hundred feet to the clearing, and just a hundred yards or so from there to the protecting wall. And it seemed too much like a dream tor him to feel really afraid.

  Once he looked back. Heitor was chugging along a few feet behind him, his face contorted with exertion. And behind them, trampling everything in its way, came the dinosaur. Its head was high in the trees, and Larry suspected it was not hunting them in particular but just out on a foraging expedition looking for some succulent titbit as a snack.

  Heitor slipped and fell. Larry reached out and caught his arm and dragged him along till he clawed his way back to his feet.

  Go ahead,” Heitor gasped. “Go on—run!”

  Larry said nothing, but continued to pull Heitor onward. The dinosaur had paused to investigate something hiding in a treetop.

  A hanging vine whipped around Larry’s face. He disentangled himself, kept running, and burst into the clearing. The wall of London Colony rose high into the air a hundred yards away.

  Larry heard Heitor’s frantic panting not too far behind, and knew that Heitor had managed to get out of the jungle on his own power. The earth seemed to shake under the pounding of the dinosaur’s tread as it, too, emerged from the jungle.

  Larry reached the gate of the wall breathless and looked back for Heitor.

  The other cadet had fallen from exhaustion and was sprawled out on the ground. The dinosaur had paused and was looking down at him with curiosity.

  For a second Larry thought of dashing out, grabbing Heitor, and dashing back, but he let that thought drop. Heitor was at least a hundred feet away, and the dinosaur would simply snatch up both of them. No; some less foolhardy plan would be necessary to save Heitor.

  The huge reptile was bending over Heitor now and poking him tentatively with the tiny kangaroolike arms which it used as hands. It squinted its great saucer of an eye in an attempt to get a better view of the strange-looking creature on the ground in front of it.

  Apparently it had not made up its mind what to do about Heitor, Larry saw. Heitor was still alive and making feeble attempts to crawl away, but he was overcome with exhaustion and seemingly paralyzed with fright.

  Larry saw one way to save Heitor. He picked up the largest rock he could see, danced out to within ten feet of the great beast, and hurled the rock at the dinosaur’s face.

  The ’saur emitted a tentative growl, as if it were not suite sure it had been hit. Larry found another rock and threw it at the dinosaur.

  The fact that there was a second creature, this one menacing him, slowly trickled through the dinosaur’s tiny brain. Heitor, Larry saw, was reviving and was aware of Larry’s strategy, for, while Larry was distracting the animal, Heitor began slowly to crawl toward the gate.

  The bewildered dinosaur shook its massive head from side to side as it tried to puzzle out the situation. Larry danced back and forth agilely, throwing stones from different sides of the dinosaur’s head. A rock thrown from Larry’s left told him that Heitor, who had reached the gate, was adding to the dinosaur’s confusion.

  Larry saw no further reason to provoke the animal, which would probably solve its dilemma by striking out at anything in its reach, and he ran backward till he reached the gate. The dinosaur continued to weave back and forth in indecision, looking now for Heitor, whom he had almost forgotten, and then for Larry. Finally, trumpeting a cry of rage and desperation, he charged at the wall.

  Larry and Heitor backed inside the gate, knowing they were now in perfect safety, and watched as the dinosaur crashed into the wall with a mighty impact. It drew back again—neither the dinosaur nor the wall showed any sign of damage—and hit the unyielding wall. It clawed futilely at the wall with its two small forefeet, bellowing its anger against the small animal which had cheated it of its prey. Finally, in pain and outrage, it ceased belaboring the wall and turned and strode off into the jungle.

  They turned to enter London Colony, and walked straight into the arms of a group of men in green uniforms, one of whom was Harl.

  “Come to visit us?” Harl asked.

  Larry stared at him coldly, but then remembered he was planning to pretend to be a turncoat.

  “I’ve come to join the revolution,” Larry began, struggling for breath after the escape from the dinosaur. “But we got a pretty unfriendly reception from one of your watchdogs.”

  “Yes,” said a tall man. “We saw the dinosaur come out and that attracted our attention.” He turned to Harl. “What do you think, Ellison? You know them.”

  “I’m inclined to suspect this one,” Harl said, pointing to Larry. “He’s always been so loyal to Earth.”

  “And now you want to join us?” said the tall man.

  “Yes,” Larry said.

  “I think he’s lying,” said a short, rotund colonist. “I think he’s a spy!”

  “So do I!” someone else shouted.

  The tall man, who seemed to be in command, frowned. “Suppose we lock them up for a while,” he said. “Then we’ll find out whether they’re with us or against us.”

  “Lock ’em up!” the short man said. There was general agreement at this, and the tall colonist nodded and directed the others to take Larry and Heitor inside the colony.

  It looked just like Chicago Colony, except for great banners strung in the streets.

  Freedom for Alpha Centauri

  No Taxation Without Representation

  We Demand Independence

  Sever the Bond with Earth

  A green and red flag hung from a flagpole which stood high in the street. The pole was newly cut, Larry noted; the wood was fresh, and he suspected that just a few days before it had been a proud jungle tree.

  The flag was dotted with four lightning bolts, apparently the new flag of the colonists.

  They bundled the cadets into a car—an old model, Larry noticed again—and drove off to an impressive building located on the other side of the colony, near the great wall. The tall man introduced himself as Carter, head of the provisional government at London Colony.

  They mounted the steps of the building, Carter and Harl and a few of the green-uniformed colonists, with Larry and Heitor. “This is the capitol of the Free World of Alpha Centauri IV,” Carter announced.

  The inside of the building was almost bare.

  “Sorry we couldn’t furnish it better,” Carter said, wit
h a genial smile. “But the previous occupants took most of the decorations with them when they moved to Chicago Colony. Give us time and we’ll have it properly fixed up for guests.”

  He pointed to a staircase, and the cadets descended silently.

  “Next floor you’ll find your apartments,” Carter said.

  They went down further. It was dark and damp below.

  “Down this corridor, please.” Carter led the way and Larry and Heitor followed, with two colonists bringing up the rear. Larry began to curse the whole foolhardy business of going to London Colony.

  “I think it would be best to give you chaps private rooms for a while,” Carter said. He turned to one of the colonists. “Take this one and put him in Block A.” He tossed a key to him.

  Are we going to be locked up indefinitely?” Larry asked.

  “Until we’ve determined your loyalty,” Carter said. “You may very well be genuine converts like Ellison. But if you’re not, and if you’re equal to walking through the jungle to get here, it might be dangerous to let you roam around.”

  The colonist led Heitor off with him down a winding corridor. Larry heard a cell door creak open, and the colonist said something. He heard Heitor say something in protest, but the echoes distorted it so he couldn’t pick out the individual words, and then the cell door closed with a clang.

  “Come,” said Carter. “Let me show you your room.” He led Larry off down another corridor. Larry wondered why he was taking all this so calmly, and realized it was probably because he would be doing the same thing as the colonists if he were in their position. Besides, after the escape from the dinosaur, this imprisonment seemed comparatively unimportant.

  “You realize there’ll be trouble for you on Earth for this,” said Larry.

  “I’m hardly in a position to care,” said Carter. “In here,” he said, opening a cell.

  Larry entered.

  “Sorry the accommodations aren’t all that could be desired,” Carter said as Larry sank down on the cell’s hard bed. “I hope they’ll be temporary.”

  Larry leaned back on the bed. “All right, Carter, Just lock up and go back upstairs.

  Carter laughed, clanged closed the door of the cell, and walked away.

  Larry sat quietly in the darkness thinking hard. It was almost a dream. Only a few weeks before he had been a top-ranking cadet at the Space Academy, and now he was caught up in a revolution and imprisoned.

  He smiled despite himself. It was hard to believe that this was all really happening. Perhaps he would wake and find himself back at home, instead of in a dank prison on Alpha C IV.

  But it was no dream. He thought of Harl, who had given up everything to join the revolution, wearing the green uniform of the revolutionary army instead of the Grays of the Patrol. And O’Hare, too—did they have a uniform here to fit his giant frame?

  Suddenly he leaped off the bed and ran to the gate of the cell, trying to peer out through the bars into the darkness. For he could hear, coming toward him in the dark, the steady beat of footsteps.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DARKNESS WAS too thick for Larry to see anything but dim shadows. The footsteps continued until they reached his cell. He heard the tapping of something on the metal of his cell door.

  “Larry!” someone whispered.

  “I haven’t gone anywhere,” Larry said.

  “It’s me—Harl.” The other figure lit a match and Larry saw the face of the Martian.

  “Hello, turncoat,” Larry said.

  “I thought we’d been through that before.” The match flickered and went out, and once again they were left in darkness. “They sent me down here to talk with you.”

  “Go ahead,” Larry said. “Talk.”

  “They’ve decided that you and Heitor are spies. They intend to keep you here.”

  “Why won’t they believe we’ve honestly changed sides?”

  Harl laughed. “Quit it, Larry. They asked me and I told them. I know you’re still working for Reinhardt.” A moment passed in silence. Larry stared impassively out into the black, trying to discern Harl’s features, and wondering why he was unable to hate Harl the way he knew he should.

  “You are still on Reinhardt’s side, aren’t you?” A note of doubt seemed to tinge Harl’s voice.

  “Yes,” Larry said resignedly. “Yes. He sent us here as spies. I suppose there’s no point in trying to bluff it any more. I never thought they’d believe us.”

  “No. We never did.”

  Larry noted Harl’s use of ‘we’. He was fully on the other side, then.

  There was silence again, and Larry began to suspect that Harl had vanished into the darkness. But after a moment he spoke again.

  “Tell me, Larry: just why do you stay loyal to Reinhardt and his bosses? Give me a sincere answer. Have you ever thought it through carefully, or are you just following blindly along because you think it’s the right thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Larry said.

  “Whereabouts on Earth are you from?” Harl asked. “Appalachia. New York City, in the State of Appalachia. Western Hemisphere—North America.”

  “I know,” Harl said. “I studied geography. That means you come from what used to be called the United States of America, before the Consolidation.” That’s right,” Larry admitted. He stared glumly ahead; his eyes were getting used to the darkness and he could almost see Harl’s face.

  “Man, man! You re from America, and this revolution doesn’t mean anything to you? flow can you be so dense?” Harl’s harsh whisper rose to a rasping halfvoice sound. “Don’t you know how your own country got its start? The very same way the Centaurans are doing it! Tell me: what was the main slogan of the American Revolution?”

  Larry thought. It was all so long ago—he had studied it in Medieval History, though.

  “No taxation without—without—” He paused as the force of what Harl was saying struck him. “No taxation without representation.”

  Exactly!” Harl said triumphantly. “Now where have you seen that slogan anywhere else, Larry? Think hard,” he said sarcastically.

  “The banners in the streets of London Colony,” Larry said in a small voice. “They said the same thing.”

  Harl chuckled. “So here we are. You now find yourself taking the side of Great Britain against the Americans. Now let’s see you justify your refusal to help us. How can you remain loyal in the face of all this?” Harl demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Larry said. He was very confused, and all the arguments he’d had with Harl now seemed to have gone for naught. He had been wrong and Harl had been right, and he should have admitted it long before.

  “You don’t know,” Harl mimicked. “But you still stick with Earth, because it’s what your father and grandfather did. Why, you may think you’re nineteen or twenty or so, but you’re just an old fossil. You’re as stodgy as they come!”

  “Harl—Harl—how could I help the revolution? What could I do?”

  “You don’t mean you’re considering joining us, do you? What would Commander Stark say if he found out?”

  “Just answer me,” Larry said quietly. “What could I do—me, in particular—to make it worthwhile giving up Earth?”

  “President Carter had a plan all worked out. You could be very useful to us.”

  “How?” Larry asked. His eyes had now become accustomed to the dark, and he could see Harl’s face watching him earnestly.

  “We planned to let you go back to Chicago Colony as if we had never caught you and let you sabotage the Carden’s radio. That way Reinhardt won’t be able to get the reinforcements here until we’re all set up.”

  The thought made Larry shudder. Sabotaging a Patrol ship’s radio! Suddenly he realized that his conditioning was too deep—that, though he was almost fully sympathetic with the revolution, that he could never force himself to do such an outrage. But he decided not to tell Harl until he had heard the rest.

  “Go on,” Larry said. “What happens after
I smash the radio?”

  “Well, once we’re safe from armed Patrol forces, we can proceed with our plans. We grab Reinhardt and hold him as a hostage, along with all the other Earthmen and pro-Earth colonists. This gives us a bargaining edge, and we begin setting up our defenses. We build camps in the jungle, fortify them against the animals. In the meantime Centauran agents now on Earth arrive with the warcraft we’ve been purchasing with our export profits and any other money we could scrape up. We settle down for a lengthy defense of the planet—or, as we hope, Earth won’t even bother to go to the expense of sending ships here to get involved in guerrilla warfare, and they’ll let us go. But it all depends on whether or not we can get Reinhardt out of the way and his radio silenced

  “I see,” Larry said. That means I’m a key piece in the machine.”

  “Just about,” Harl admitted. “Carter went wild when he heard me say that you were the radio operator. He saw it was our best chance of knocking out that communications set. What do you say?”

  “Let me think about it a minute,” Larry said. He sat down on the hard bed in one corner of the cell, and tried to balance all the factors.

  He knew now that the revolutionaries were more right than wrong, Earth more wrong than right. Neither side was completely right nor completely wrong, but Earth was definitely not being fair. It was hard for him to accept the concept of Earth’s being in the wrong, but Harl had driven it home so many times that at last he acknowledged it.

  But still—even if the revolutionaries were right, why should he get involved? If he could get out without joining them, he could go on to become an officer in the Patrol—his fondest dream as long as he could remember—and possibly someday have enough influence to help the Centaurans that way. If he joined then now, it would mean giving up the Patrol after years of dreaming and years of hard work, all to be thrown away in a moment. All to live on a wild, primitive planet and fight against Earth.

  The revolutionaries were right. But sabotage a Patrol ship’s radio to help them? What if the revolution failed and he were brought back to Earth in disgrace, to stand trial in a court which might include his own father? Larry thought of the commander, how at first he would be unable to believe what his son had done and then how he would calmly wipe all memory of Larry from his mind, as if he had never existed,