From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  “Well, the books say there were billions of men in the world before the Blast,” the Policeman said, spreading the fingers of his left hand, palm upward.

  The traveller’s scarred left hand mirrored the Policeman’s. “It’s a wide world,” he said, “as you must know and I surely do.” He drank, smiled again, and said, “You’re familiar with bombs it would seem, friend. I’ve heard talk in my travels that there was a stockpile of bombs in the mountains around here. Do you know that story?”

  Carter looked at Smith with an expression that was terrible in its stillness. “Modell,” he said in the silence, “it’s time to throw another log on the fire.” He paused; the innkeeper scurried to do as directed. “And it’s time,” the Policeman continued, “to talk of other things than the Blast. What sort of game do you find in the Hot Lands, for instance?”

  “Well, I snare more than I knock on the head with my sling,” Smith began easily, and the room relaxed a little.

  They talked and drank late into the night. Smith told of gnarly woods and following miles of trails worn no higher than a hog’s shoulder. The locals replied with tales of their farms in the river bottoms, managed for them by hirelings, and the wealth they drew from shares in the smelter’s profits. Few of them actually did any of the heavy, dangerous work of steel production themselves. Moseby was a feudal state, but its basis was the powerplant rather than land.

  When Carter finally left, only Scottie and another local remaining in company with Smith and Modell, the talk grew looser. Finally Scottie wheezed, “They drift in here to Moseby, up the river and down—you’re the first across the mountains, boy, I’ll tell the world. We put’em to work in the fields or the smelter, or they crew the barges for us. But they’re not Moseby, they’re not of the Assembly. It’s us who’ve got the power, under the Chief and the Police, that is. We keep the Light and the—”

  Modell touched the line of Scottie’s jaw, silencing him. Scottie’s surprise bloomed into awakened fright. “You’ve had enough tonight, old man,” the innkeeper said. “Pook, you too. Time for you both to get home, and for me to get to bed.”

  “And me,” Smith agreed—Modell had already brought out blankets and opened a side bench into a cot. “Though first I’ll take a leak and, say, a walk to settle my head. If you leave the door on the latch?”

  Modell nodded dourly. “You’ve been listening to that fool Howes and his talk of the girls across the Assembly. Him with a wife and six children, too! Well, don’t try to bring one back here with you. They should know better, but if one didn’t, it’d be the worse for both of you.” The innkeeper blew out one of the lamps and moved toward the other.

  * * *

  Smith urinated in the open ditch behind the building, letting his eyes readjust to the moonglow. Then he began to walk along the sewer with a deceptive purposelessness. In the shadow of the house nearest the creek he paused, eying the nodding guards across the gorge. The traveller took off his boots. He ducked into the ditch and used its cover to crawl down onto the creek bank.

  The rock was steep, but it was limestone and weathered into irregularity enough for Smith’s practiced digits to grip. Smoothly but without haste, the traveller slipped along below the line of sight of the guards at the powerplant. When he reached the bridge trestles he paused again, breathing carefully. His hands examined the nearest of the handsawn oak timbers, tracing it from where it butted into the rock to where it crossed another beam half-way to the stringers. Smith swung onto the trestle and began to negotiate the gorge like an ant in a clump of heavy grass.

  Any sounds the traveller might have made were hidden by the creek. Its clatterings beneath echoed in a backdrop one could not easily talk over. That itself was a danger for Smith when he reached the far end of the bridge and would have listened to the guards’ conversation before going on. Carefully, because a crook in the gorge threw most of the spray onto the rocks on this side, Smith edged left toward the west corner of the building. The wall there was built almost to the rim of the gorge. Smith’s clothing matched the color of the wet stone so that his outline was at least blurred for a potential watcher from the village; but lack of alertness on the guards’ part was his real defense.

  Smith raised his head. Both guards were nodding in their chairs, crossbows leaning against the doorposts beside them. The traveller swung lithely up. A step later he was hugging the greater concealment of the powerplant’s west wall. The stone hummed.

  The building was as massive a construction as anything Smith had seen created after the Blast. The walls were drystone, using the natural layering of limestone and their two-foot thickness to attain an adequate seal without mortar. Their weathered seams made it easy for one of Smith’s strength and condition to mount the fifteen feet of blank wall to the lighted slits just below the roof. The interior was much as the traveller had expected it to be, much as he had seen it before here and there across the face of the world.

  Six huge electric motors were ranked below him. They were being used as generators, driven by a complex pattern of shafts and broad leather belts. Only one of them was turning at the moment. When the smelters were working at full capacity and called in turn for the maximum output of the plant, the room would be a bedlam of machines and their attendants. Now a man and a woman, scarcely less somnolent than the guards outside, were sufficient. The light of the naphtha lanterns illuminating the chamber may have exaggerated the attendants’ pallor, but they certainly saw less of the sun than the villagers across the stream did. It was hard to believe that control of this apparatus was left to slaves; yet it was even more unlikely that free men who knew what they were doing would be willing to enter the chamber below.

  In the center of the north wall, built against the living rock of the mountainside, was the reactor.

  Its genesis was evident, for the black hulls of ten fusion bombs were ranged along the partition wall to the east. Smith, his head framed in the narrow window, licked his lips when he saw the bombs. They would no longer be weapons; the plutonium of their fission cores would have decayed beyond the capacity to form critical mass when compacted. But those cores, taken from their cocoons of lithium hydride and the inner baths of deuterium, could still fuel a reactor.

  The latter was an ugly mass of stone blocks, overshadowed by a mantis-like derrick. Steam from the reactor drove the pistons of a crude engine. Unlike the pre-Blast electric motors, the steam engine had been manufactured for its present purpose. Inefficient, it leaked vapor through seams and rope gaskets—but the power to create steam from water was practically inexhaustible on the scale required here.

  Manufacturing skill and not theoretical knowledge had frequently been the brake on human progress: da Vinci could design a workable aircraft, but no one for four hundred years could build an engine to drive it. Nuclear power technology was so simple, given the refined fuel and expendable humans to work it, that an age which could not manufacture smokeless powder could nonetheless build a fission plant. All it would have taken was a weapons stockpile and a technician or two from Oak Ridge, vacationing in the mountains at the time of the Blast.

  It was what Smith had come to learn.

  There was a new sound in the night. A score or more of men were thudding across the bridge to the powerplant. Smith ducked his head beneath the sill of the window. As he did so, the siren on the roof hooted ferally. Knowing that there was no escape downward if he had been seen, the traveller slipped sideways and began to clamber up between a pair of the windows. As his fingers touched the edge of the slates, a voice from below shouted, “There he is!”

  Smith gathered himself to swing onto the gently-sloped roof; something tapped his knuckles. He looked up. The muzzle of Carter’s M16 stared back at him. The Policeman smiled over the sights. “I saw something block one of the plant windows,” the local man said. “Thought it might be worth waking the guards for. Now, ‘friend’, you just climb down easy to where the people are waiting, or me and the boys here won’t wait for the ceremon
y.”

  The pair of guards flanking Carter had faces as tense as their cocked crossbows. Smith shook his head ruefully and descended into the waiting manacles.

  * * *

  The siren gave three long cries as the guards marched Smith back across the bridge. Citizens, warned by the initial signal, began walking out of their houses; the men armed, the women bleak as gray steel. They drifted toward the shrouded platform across the long axis of the Assembly from the bridge. None of the citizens seemed to want to be the first to reach the common destination. They dawdled in pairs and trios, turning aside as Smith and his captors passed through them.

  The Chief and the remaining Policemen had hurried up the steps to what was clearly a covered altar by the time Smith reached it. Cords fluttered as the canvas roof was gathered within the screen of hoardings built on a base of stone blocks. Something mechanical purred and paused. Sparks hissed about the powerline strung to the platform along a line of low posts on the western edge of the Assembly.

  “On up,” Carter said, smiling. He tweaked Smith’s manacles toward the steps. The guards were taking position at the base of the altar, facing out toward the Assembly. Despite the siren calls, there was no sign of life or movement from the smelter and its associated buildings. Their blank walls were no more than a physical reminder of the grip the freeholders of Moseby held on the minds and lives of those who would work in their village. The business tonight was no business of a bargee or a factory hand.

  Smith mounted the steps. Two Policemen received him, holding their rifles by the pistolgrips as if they were still functional weapons. Well, perhaps they were.

  There were other improbable things in this place.…

  The moonlight was shadowed by the flimsy walls. It gave only hints of the enclosed area: the Policemen in their ragged uniforms; two large, vertical cylinders, the one mounted somewhat higher than the other; and, at the front of the platform, a wooden block the height of a man’s knee.

  “There,” muttered one of the Policemen, guiding the traveller’s neck onto the block. No force was necessary; Smith was as docile as a babe at its mother’s breast. Carter took a quick lashing from Smith’s right wrist to a staple set for the purpose in the flooring. “If it wasn’t that you know too much,” the Policeman said conversationally, “we’d let you spend the rest of your life inside the plant. But somebody’s who’s travelled as you have, seen what you have … we don’t want to be like Samson, chaining you in the temple so you can bring it down on us, hey?”

  “Tie him and we’ll get this over with,” the Chief growled.

  Carter unlocked the manacles and bound Smith’s left wrist to another staple. “It was a good idea when they chopped muties here every week,” he said. “It’s a good idea now. The ceremony reminds us all that it’s us against the world and all of us together. I’ll take the axe if you like.”

  Smith, facing the wooden panels, could not see the exchange. The air licked his neck and cheek as something passed from hand to hand between the two men. “Drop the walls,” the Chief ordered. “And turn on the Light.”

  The pins locking together the corners of the hoardings slipped out. The panels arced down simultaneously in a rush of air and a collective sigh from the Assembly. The purring of an electric motor awoke under the platform, rising and becoming sibilant in the absence of competing sound. A taut drive-belt moaned; then the moan was buried in a sudden crackle and white light played like terror across the upturned faces.

  Smith twisted his head. The Policemen stood in a line across the width of the platform. Carter, in the middle, gripped the haft of a fire axe. Its head was still darkened by flecks of red paint. He grinned at the traveller. Behind the rulers of the village glared another burst of lightning between the static generator’s heads: the polished casings of a pair of fusion bombs. No objects could have been more fittingly symbolic of Moseby’s power. The van de Graff generator provided a crude but effective way of converting electricity to light. Its DC motor pulled a belt from which electrons were combed into one bomb casing. The static discharges to the grounded casing were all the more spectacular for being intermittent.

  “You still have a chance to save yourselves if you let me go,” said Smith, shouting over the ripping arcs. “There is no punishment too terrible for men who would use atomic power again, but you still have time to flee!”

  Carter’s smile broadened, his teeth flickering in light reflected onto his face. He roared, “We dedicate this victim to the power that preserves us all!” and he raised his axe.

  “You fool,” the traveller said quietly. He did not try to slide back from the block, even as he watched a multiple discharge strobe the edge of the descending axe. The hungry steel caught him squarely, shearing like a shard of ice through his flesh. His vertebrae popped louder in his ears than the hollow report of the blade against the wood. The axe head quivered, separating all but a finger’s breadth of the traveller’s neck. He blinked at Carter.

  The Policeman rocked his blade free. Static discharges sizzled behind him at three-second intervals. Smith felt a line of warmth as his Blast-changed flesh knit together again as the steel withdrew.

  Still kneeling, the Changling turned toward the crowd. “People!” he shouted. “Whatever it costs men today, men tomorrow must know that nuclear power is death! Nuclear power made this world what it is. Nuclear power is the one evil that cannot be tolerated, never again! For Man’s sake, for the world’s—”

  Screaming, Carter slammed the axe down on the traveller’s temple. The blade bit to the helve. Smith reached up with his right hand, tearing the staple from the flooring. He gripped the wood and it splintered as he drew the axe from where it was lodged in his bone. The Changling stood, his head flowing together like wax in a mold. His left wrist reformed as the rawhide lashing cut through it.

  Sparks like shards of sunlight clawed through the high windows of the powerplant. That gush of light died. The siren began to wind, higher and higher. The motor of the van de Graff generator was speeding also, the current that drove it no longer controlled. The arcs were a constant white sheet between the bomb casings. Someone—two figures—crossed the bridge from the powerplant. The blue glow from the building backlighted them.

  “Flee!” Smith cried, lifting to the crowd the scarred hand he had thrown up two centuries before to the flare of a hundred megaton bomb. “Flee this abomination before it devours you—as it surely will, as it did the world before this world!”

  Carter screamed again and struck with his riflebutt, hurling the Changling off the platform. Smith picked himself up. The guards backed away from him, their eyes wide, their cocked bows advanced as talismans and not threats.

  The two figures on the bridge threw back their cloaks. The lapping arcs played across the half of Kozinski’s face and torso that was naked bone. The bare organs pulsed within, and his one eye darted like a black jewel. The Blast had sometimes preserved and had sometimes destroyed; this once it had done both in near equality.

  Ssu-ma would have stood out without the artificial lightning. She had the same trim, beautiful figure as the girl she had been the night she stared into the sky above Lop Nor and saw dawn blaze three hours early. Now that figure shone blue, brighter even than the spreading fire that ate through the wall of the powerplant behind her.

  The crowd was scattering toward homes and toward the river. No one approached the platform except the two Changlings walking toward their fellow.

  The Chief threw up his revolver and snapped it three times, four, and at the fifth attempt an orange flash and the thump of a shot in the open air. Five of the Policemen were triggering their automatic weapons and tugging at the cocking pieces to spill misfired rounds on the platform. But the old guns could still fire. Shots slapped and tore at the night in short bursts that pattered over the flesh of the Changlings like raindrops on thick dust. And still they came, walking toward Smith and the platform.

  Incredibly, the anti-tank rocket ignited when the sixth P
oliceman tugged its lanyard. In ignorance he was holding the tube against his shoulder like a conventional weapon. The back-blast burned away the man’s arm and chest in a ghastly simulacrum of Kozinski’s mutilation. The rocket corkscrewed but chance slammed it into Ssu-ma’s chest. The red blast momentarily covered the Changling’s own fell glow. Her body splattered like the pulp of a grapefruit struck by a maul. Simultaneously, the front wall of the powerplant tore apart, snuffing the arcs dancing madly between the bomb casings.

  Then, evident in the sudden darkness, the bits of Ssu-ma’s glowing protoplasm began to draw together like droplets of mercury sliding in the bowl of a spoon. Her head had not been damaged. The waiting eyes smiled up at the platform.

  Only Carter still stood before the casings. He had thrust the muzzle of his M16 into his mouth and was trying to fire the weapon with his outstretched finger. The round under the hammer misfired.

  The powerplant exploded again, a gout of lava that loosened the hillside beneath it and sprayed the village. Wood and cloth began to burn in a pale imitation of what was happening across the creek. In slagging down, the reactor was fusing the rock and the hulls of the remaining bombs. Plutonium flowed white-hot with its own internal reactions, but it was spread too thin to self-trigger another Blast. The creek roared and boiled away as the rain of rock and metal spewed into it. The vapor that had been a plume over the powerplant was now a shroud to wrap the burning village.

  “I hadn’t called you yet,” Smith said, shouting over the tumult as he clasped Kozinski’s hand with his own left hand. He extended his right to the smiling Ssu-ma.

  “We heard the siren,” the Ruthenian said, his voice strange for coming from a mouth that was half bone … the half that had been turned away from the Strike which vaporized his infantry company, he had once explained.

  “We could all tell they weren’t burning coal, couldn’t we?” Ssu-ma added.