She began to laugh. It was a high cackle and brought a flush to Cameron’s cheeks. She slapped her hip. She bent double.
“Never saw anything,” she gasped, “like you hanging on to that weed.”
Cameron rose with what dignity he could muster, brushed himself, and stepped back from the mark which indicated that deadly screen.
“You’re Cameron, I suppose,” she said. “Well, you’re my prisoner.” Her wrinkled old face, which looked something like a pair of old civilian shorts, lost its previous amusement. She laid a clawed brown hand on a weapon at her belt. “I mean it,” she said. “You’re no use to us as long as you’re against us, so I won’t mind killing you like . . . like that poor little bunny. March up to my shack.” She waved toward the forest edge, high on the rim of the hill.
Cameron obediently scanned the hillside. The old lady’s tone had an edge to it. She meant what she said. Or so Cameron felt, so strongly that he did not care to gamble his life on the chance of her bluffing. He looked at the hill.
“I don’t see any shack.”
“To the right of the path, about thirty feet.”
He saw it, then, cunningly blended into the trees, and started toward it. She followed briskly, skinny legs which seemed to rattle around in her shorts moving with the energy of youth.
“You can call me Gran,” she said, “like the others do. I’m Pier’s grandmother, and you probably know about me saving his father when Jorg was killed.”
Cameron blinked. The revolution had occurred more than a hundred years ago.
“You can’t be,” he said. “You’d be a hundred and . . . what. . . . thirty, fifty . . . years old.”
“Hundred and forty,” she said crisply. “But don’t get any ideas about escaping again. Don’t let these white hairs—what’s left of ‘em—mislead you. I’m plenty spry, and I’ve seen all the tricks. Used ‘em, too. So behave. I won’t fool with you.”
Cameron believed her. He walked carefully along the path to the door of her “shack.” This was of unglazed plastic, rising to a transparent dome level with treetops. He waited while she blew a two-tone whistle behind him and the electrosonic door slid upward, and obeyed her command to step inside.
A gray squirrel chattered angrily at him from a swinging perch and a fat white cat, curled on a cushion in the far corner, opened one green eye for a second’s scrutiny.
“Oh, shut up!” Gran Duvain said with fierce tenderness to the squirrel. “Into the elevator, Cameron. Face the wall.”
Cameron followed instructions. She entered behind him, closed the door, and they rose to the observation and control room of this sentry shack.
“Sit there in the corner,” she commanded. Cameron sank into the chair, watched her touch various buttons on the panel below the seaside window. “Now,” she went on, “the screen is between me and you. As long as you sit still you won’t be hurt. But don’t get out of the chair. Wait a minute though. Might as well make it visible.”
She twisted a dial, touched a glowing stud here and there, and a transparent green curtain formed before Cameron. It hung unsuspended, not quite touching ceiling, walls, or floor, but completely hemming him in. Cameron’s short hairs stiffened and a little chill touched the back of his neck. He did not intend to move.
“I think you know what will happen,” the old lady said pleasantly, “if you try to jump through that screen. I want you to sit still and listen. Pier and Harvey vex me now and then. Turning you loose, indeed! They can’t imagine anybody wanting to get away from here. They don’t understand your conditioning. They didn’t think you’d make a run for a projection.”
“Projection?”
She waved a withered hand out the window. “Look!”
Cameron saw the pier, the sleek, shining boats. Her hand moved, touched a stud on the panel. The boats vanished. Cameron caught his breath.
“Did you think we’d actually anchor anything out there?” Gran Duvain demanded. “I played a hunch you’d run for it. Told ‘em so. Wish you hadn’t flushed that rabbit, though,” she added sadly. “One of my favorite pets.”
“If I hadn’t” Cameron said, “I’d be dead now.”
“But I’d still have my pet,” she countered. “Well, since you’re here, might as well make something of you. Don’t interrupt now.”
“I’m no child!” Cameron protested.
“Are to me!” she snapped. “At least three times your age. Going to tell you what’s happened in the last two hundred years. Make your own choice then. Got any brains you’ll throw in with us.”
“I’ve read a lot of history,” Cameron said. His tone was resentful. He didn’t like a useless old woman pushing him around.
“Read!” she scoffed. “Sonny, I’ve made it. And watched it, too,” she conceded. “I wasn’t the only one making it. When I snatched Pier’s father, Jaques, from a firing squad, though, I started history in motion. You don’t know about Jaques. He turned out to be an artist.”
That she would admit such a fact about her son shocked Cameron. His expression must have indicated his thought for her mouth became an invisible line among the wrinkles.
“Was a time,” she said fiercely, “when artists were honored. Didn’t know that, huh? Shut up now! Don’t care what your views are on anything. Know who Randolph Williams was?”
Cameron searched his memory. “There was a General Williams—”
“Right! First military dictator of the United States. Wasn’t there, myself. Don’t know whether it was justified or not. Guess it was, though. Country in a mess after another world war they managed to stir up every twenty-five years or so. Know what he told ‘em, though? The people, I mean?”
Cameron blinked through the green veil. “Why, uh—”
“Be still! I’ll show you.”
She opened a wall closet, took out spools of film and a projector. She fitted one into the other with firm and expert hand, and drew a dimensional screen over the far wall.
The three-dimensional, four-color image was that of a big man with a jaw, in khaki and medals. He thrust the jaw forward, put one brown hand on the gaudy chest display.
“This is a Democracy,” he asserted. “Always has been, always will be. Martial law, which I declare here and now, is necessitated by an emergency. You will hear charges of dictatorship flung at me. I will be called Randolph the First. These charges will be silenced, their makers imprisoned if necessary. I give you my solemn promise as an officer and a gentleman that as soon as the present emergency has dissipated, the same government will be restored that has guided this nation in her glorious past. I—”
Gran Duvain stopped the projector, blanked the screen.
“Rest of it’s the same bunk,” she said. “Know what General Graham said? He was the next, after Williams drunk himself to death one night—or was poisoned.”
“Well—” Cameron began.
“Same thing,” she interrupted. “And so on down to Jorg. He wasn’t dictator when I married him, but he was headed there. And you know what? He believed all those others. He thought they meant what they said. And when he stepped in he started to restore the Democracy, started to return the power of government to the people where it belonged. Well, you know what happened to him. The Four Companies got him.”
Cameron frowned but said nothing. Her story did not coincide with history as he had learned it, but he was silent. There was something about her that commanded attention.
“You don’t know about them either,” she went on. “They began to grow shortly after the first dictatorship and developed into the Centers, excepting Luxury. The big power companies merged into one and formed Power Center, from Canada to Mexico on the east side of the Mississippi. Textile took the east coast, Plastic west of the Mississippi, south of the Lakes. The farm combines took the rest, except a little spot on the West coast where they shipped all the artists.”
“May I ask a question?” Cameron asked.
“Sure, sure. Maybe you got sense, after all
, showing an interest. What is it?”
“You say the Four Companies got your husband. Wasn’t the military in power then?”
“Then? Never has been. Isn’t now. Who do you think runs the Centers?”
“Why, the courts and—”
“Tosh! Listen, sonny. Let’s see, you’re from Plastic. Martin Grueter and the other mill owners are Plastic Center.”
“But they’re only executives.”
“Only? Listen. Right after Randolph Williams went in, wasn’t long before the Supreme Court died off or was retired and General This and Colonel That replaced ‘em. Same all over the country. The army took over the judiciary and administrative functions of government. Who do you suppose ordered it?”
“General Williams, I suppose.”
“And who put him in the saddle? The Big Four. Now wait,” she cautioned as Cameron opened his mouth. “I don’t say the emergency didn’t justify it. From all reports the country was in the worst mess in history. But the emergency passed, three hundred years or so later. But by that time there were only two classes, and the executives didn’t want the government restored to the people. So they knocked off Jorg and split up into independent Centers. Not so independent, at that. Each has something the others need, so they got an armed truce. You got anything to say to all this?”
“Emergencies don’t just pass,” Cameron observed.
“You know what I mean,” Gran said impatiently. “The country settled down, there wasn’t any war. But the people had got used to being ordered around. First thing you knew they figured that was the way things ought to be. They accepted a rotten condition as natural. Thought they still had Democracy because they could elect a Congress that did nothing but criticize. Congress don’t have any more to say about conditions than I have. Not as much, because I’m going to change ‘em.”
Cameron sat thinking of what she had told him, searching for a way to use her and the outlaws to his own advantage. She was quiet, also, looking at the sea and the rising fog through which could now be seen far peaks on the mainland.
Somewhere inside the shack a tone sounded. Gran Duvain peered toward the path which led back to the outlaw capital, vented a short grunt and went to the elevator door.
“Company,” she said. Then, with a look of diabolical amusement, “Guess you’ll stay put. Yup,” she chuckled, “you’ll be there when I get back.”
“Don’t fall and break a leg,” Cameron said with mock alarm. “I’d starve.”
“You can always walk into the screen,” she said lightly, and shot the elevator down.
One burning thought was in Cameron’s mind: by one means or another, he must get back to Plastic Center and spread the warning. Pretending to join with the outlaws was not enough, for he would be merely another member of the band. He must offer some plan whereby the opportunity he sought would arise.
If he could take Pier Duvain captive— He smiled almost rapturously at the thought. He could name his price for the most wanted man in the nation. If he could also get hold of the mechanism which formed this death screen—
He made a careful scrutiny of the laboratory. He tried to remember what Gran Duvain had done when she made the screen. Her wrinkled old hands had moved among the maze of studs, dials, and buttons, but there were so many. That little plastic box atop the panel shelf looked sinister and efficient, but surely it could not generate enough power. You could hide it pretty effectively under a jacket.
The weapon was portable in some degree, he knew, for Pier’s plane had one installed. Therein lay its greatest danger to civilization.
Cameron shuddered when he pictured the terrible destruction the outlaws could loose upon the Centers. Not only by the killing at will of any number they chose, but destruction of the entire cultural structure. By throwing this screen around each Center, they had only to sit back and name their terms. The Centers must capitulate eventually, or die, for they were not self-sufficient. Each needed some product of the others in order to maintain life.
There lay the weakest point of defense against such a weapon as this, Cameron reflected. All Centers were dependent upon Food Center, of course. But without commodities from Power, Plastic and Textile, Food could not operate efficiently enough even to feed its own citizens.
Yet, the outlaws seemed independent of any. Their buildings were not from Plastic, their roads not from Textile—and he didn’t know about their food, though he hoped to soon. He was beginning to be hungry.
Did they manufacture their own necessities? This control room seemed to indicate it, for each article differed in varying degrees from its counterpart in civilized America.
It occurred to him with a slight shock that the outlaws were dependent, after all, to some extent upon Plastic Center. They had raided Plastic freight planes for years, taking their cargoes of Baltex. Why? Perhaps that was an attack point upon them.
He shook his head in exasperation. So much to know before he could form any plan of action.
The elevator’s muted hum brought his attention back to his present circumstance. What was he going to tell Gran when she stepped back into this room ? He felt certain that he must come to a decision —or appear to. Whatever he decided, he must sound sincere. The old lady was shrewd.
It wasn’t Gran who stepped out of the elevator. The legs which extended from a flared tunic of executive purple were one of Nature’s greatest artistic achievements.
Executive purple? Rescue? Cameron raised his eyes to the face and gasped as amused eyes, a slightly darker purple than the uniform, twinkled at him.
“You can’t slug me this time,” Ann Willis said. “Hello, Josh.”
“Then you really are the spy,” Cameron said. “Somehow, I didn’t quite believe it till now. I’m sorry, incidentally, for hitting you.”
She shrugged compact shoulders. “I didn’t expect it. I should have. It was your only out. But I couldn’t play any other role. I had to pretend until I was sure you were safe.”
“Why didn’t you just turn me in? Or, I mean, why wouldn’t you? I would have in your place.”
“Two reasons,” she said as she sank into Gran’s chair and lit a cigarette. “Somebody might listen to your story, even after you were arrested, because of what you’d been. Secondly, we were friends. I don’t betray friends.”
“How about Grueter, and all the citizens in Plastic?” Cameron’s question was not quite a sneer but it cut.
She gave him an amused glance through the green veil. “I’m not betraying them. I’m solidly with Pier on the question of conquest without violence. That’s why I’m here by the way. When you disappeared, Grueter started rooting around. You said you’d been discharged on false evidence, and when he examined the evidence he ran across your statement that it wasn’t you who informed the outlaws. He’s busy now examining those who knew of the shipment. It won’t be long before he discovers it was I. So I lit out. We’ve got to act quickly.”
Cameron considered this. He must act quickly then. But he needed information. A plan was full formed in his mind, provided that certain conditions obtained.
“Ann,” he said casually, “this screen isn’t necessary.”
She frowned doubtfully. “Gran said to keep it there till she got back. That may be hours, though. The High Council is going to decide on a plan of action and put it to a vote among the membership. That will take time.”
“I won’t try to escape,” Cameron said easily. “I don’t want to now.”
She narrowed her eyes. She looked at him for several seconds. “Do you mean that?”
“Honestly.”
“I believe you,” she said. She went to the little box, touched a button and twisted a dial. The screen vanished.
In the process of adjustment she moved the box an inch or so, and Cameron’s spirits surged. It was portable. It was small enough to steal.
He and the girl smiled at each other when she was seated again. Cameron was full of confidence. He saw the way clear.
�
��Gran gave me the true facts of history while she had me caged in here,” he said. “It changed many of my views. But I’m not clear on a few points. You came along before she could answer my questions. Where do the outlaws get their power?”
“We make it, the same as Power Center. Gran stole the formula when she lit out with her son. We pirate a shipment of Baltex now and then and convert it into energy for our various camps.”
“I see,” Cameron said. “That clarifies several things. One more question. Do you manufacture your own products?”
Ann Willis’ face glowed. “Gran did that, too. She figured out efficient manufacturing units. They had to be portable because the camps are nomadic. They’re really wonderful. Our roads are easier on your feet than Textile’s best. Our plastic is lighter and stronger than the Center’s most expensive.”
Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Page 38
