On the Run (Mankind on the Run)

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Melee, and an old botanical technician that loved his bug. And the answer was almost, but not quite, there.

  The answer, he realized quite quietly and suddenly, was in himself.

  He felt a long sigh of accomplishment slip through him. He lifted his eyes to the mountains, and to the eagle, circling slowly against the blue unclouded sky. And he let his mind, like the bird, go free.

  He stood apart from himself and imagined himself looking down on his seated body, sitting on the mountainside, with Dekko and the fire a short distance away. And then he stepped his point of view away and up, so that he looked down at himself still, but from the edge of a cliff-top several hundred feet above. He saw himself, with his mind's eye, from the new viewpoint—small and motionless, with Dekko, small and motionless beside the fire, pale in the daylight.

  Again, he stepped away, so that he hung in air above the level of the tallest peak and saw the mountainside upon which he sat, and a speck that was he, and Dekko and the fire together, so small that they could not be made out separately. Again he moved away; and the whole continent lay spread below him.

  The sky was black above him, little patches of cloud were white and distant below, as they looked seen from an intercontinental rocket at the peak of its arc above the earth. One more stride upward into the blackness and the face of the Earth from Pole to Pole hung before him with the bright line of the dawn creeping westward across the ocean.

  He stepped back and saw the stars.

  He stood back from the Milky Way.

  From the galaxy.

  From the island universe.

  From the total universe.

  From . . .

  And then he was through.

  Chapter eighteen

  Kil got up and walked across the rocky ledge to Dekko and the fire. The sun was westering toward the early mountain twilight, for a good part of the day had come and gone as Kil sat apart. The decaying light lay obliquely along the upper walls of the gorge and the lower walls were already in shadow. The fire burned ruddily and fitfully in the light air; and its bed was ringed with charred, unburnt half-ends of dry limbs, where it had been replenished many times. Dekko had fallen into a doze; and he sat cross-legged and hunched over, his hump pronounced and his sharp chin digging into his chest. Kil looked down on him, feeling a sympathy, almost a tenderness for the smaller man, not unmixed with a certain amusement.

  Kil leaned over and shook one shoulder gently. Dekko woke at once, his head springing up.

  "Oh—Kil—" he said. He shook his head as if to shake the last shreds of sleep from his brain. "What's up?"

  "I am," said Kil. "I'm ready to go."

  Dekko scrambled to his feet.

  "Fine," he said. He shivered, rubbed his hands and held them to the fire. "Cold," he said. He took his hands away and energetically began to kick the burning embers apart, spreading them to die on the bare rock.

  "Now—" he said.

  "Now," said Kil, "I'm ready to take you up on your promise."

  "Promise?"

  "Didn't you say you could get me anything I wanted?

  Yes—" Dekko stared curiously at him in the dimming light. "Just about anything, that is. What do ybu want?" Kil smiled at him. "Get me a submarine," he said. Dekko stared at him.

  "A submarine? A sub? You mean a submersible."

  "No," Kil shook his head. "I mean a submarine. Something capable of going down a thousand feet or more."

  Dekko continued to look at him for a long moment.

  "You need some food and a good night's sleep," he said at last.

  Kil said nothing.

  "A submarine?"

  "That's right."

  "What for?" demanded Dekko. *

  "I know where Ellen is.

  Where?" asked Dekko sharply. "I'll show you. Can you get the submarine?" Dekko started to say something, checked himself, and ended briefly by saying, "I can try."

  They took their aircabs back to Vancouver and Dekko buried himself in a call booth. After some little while he emerged, looking grimly at Kil.

  "This is going to cost money, you know," he said.

  "I suppose," said Kil.

  Dekko, however, did not ask him for any. A deep-going craft had been located, it seemed, at One of the coastal geologic survey stations down the coast near San Luis-Obispo; off Pismo Beach, in fact. It could not be bought, rented or leased; but because of some intricately woven connections between Dekko and certain people on present duty at the station, it could be borrowed for a" day or two.

  "We'll have to move it overland," said Kil.

  "That's all right," replied Dekko. "It's a ducted fan drive. Air or water—though its going to be slow ¿n the air." He stared at Kil with renewed curiosity. "Where are we taking it?"

  "Later," said Kil. "Ask me' that again, later."

  He returned Dekko's gaze, calmly, and the little man, looking confused, dropped his eyes.

  They took a magship down the coast and an aircab out to the station. It stood, bright-lit and empty-seeming, in about four fathoms of water far enough out from the beach so that the booming of the surf came with a curious faintness to their ears. The moon was overcast and hidden, and as Kil and Dekko stood at last on the walkway running around the inside of the enclosed dock, the unshielded glare of the lights made a wall of blackness out of its open door, night-empty to the sea.

  "There she sits," said Dekko.

  Kil looked down at the swelling, metal whale-back of the sub, moving imperceptibly as it floated in the dock, restrained by its magnetic tethering field. The little slap-slap of small waves against its sides made short, impatient protest in the stillness.

  Kil nodded.

  "There's no one around here now, is there?" he asked.

  "Not them," said Dekko. "Nobody wants to know anything about this. Why?"

  "I just wondered," Kil looked at him, are you sure you want to go along with me?"

  Dekko blinked at him.

  "Me?"

  "Yes."

  Dekko said nothing for a long minute, his eyes, bright and unrevealing as polished obsidian, on Kil.

  "Kil," he said, at last. "You've been talking strange ever since we left the mountains. You don't look out of your head, but—why wouldn't I want to go?"

  "Because of what it means to you," answered Kil, softly, "because of what it means to me. Because if we go from here on together, we have to be honest with each other."

  "I don't read you, Chief," said Dekko.

  "Kil," said Kil. "Kil, not Chief, Dekko. And you do understand me. This is important to you. Is it important enough to be honest with me?"

  "I'm always honest."

  "With yourself, yes. Now, with me."

  "I think you're fishing for something," he said.

  "No." Kil shook his head. "I know. I just thought it would be easier for you if you came to it by yourself."

  Dekko favored him with a hard, bleak stare.

  Dekko said nothing, only continued to match him with that bright, unwavering gaze.

  "All right, then," said Kil, sadly, "take it off."

  "Take what off?"

  Kil sighed.

  "The mask," he said.

  Slowly the stiffness seemed to leak out of Dekko. He opened his mouth a little, then closed it again. Slowly his fingers came up under his chin as they had that day when, dressed as Uncle George, he had sat opposite Kil in the Unstab hotel room. The fingers hooked and pushed upward. And the face of Dekko crumpled and moved before them.

  He spread his shoulders and straightened, slowly. Slowly, almost magically, his torso seemed to stretch and expand. The hump on his back bulged. There was a slight pop and it deflated all at once as the man stood up to his full height, short now, but no longer little, and no longer crippled-appearing as mask and hair came off together.

  McElroy looked at Kil.

  Chapter nineteen

  Dawn was breaking again over the wide, ever-cold waters of Lake Superior when they reached it at l
ast in their slow-flying craft. Indifferently, the white, clear light, too new_for warmth, illuminated the slaty, rolling waves and the hills above the bouldered shore. McElroy, at the controls, sent the sub down through the yielding surface of the lake: down through the gray water, down through the green water, down through the black water. The great, tumbled blocks of stone scattered down the shallower slopes as if by some weird and silent, long-forgotten aquatic landslide, became more scattered and finally disappeared, leaving only a bare but rugged country of drowned ravines and hills, looking gray and palely startled in the centuries-forgotten light of the searchbeams from the fleeting sub. Who goes? Who breaks our ancient slumber, the wakened, silted hills seemed to cry, as with sound and glare the alien sub shot past and its distorting shadow flickered on oozy slopes and cliffs.

  "Which way?" asked McElroy.

  "To the right," said Kil. "about one o'clock."

  McElroy altered direction slightly and they sped on.

  "Eight hundred feet," he said reading the depth gauge. And a little later, "eleven hundred."

  They had come at last to a level, wide and empty plain. Their searchbeams probed its featureless expanse for a hundred yards before them.

  "Where?" asked McElroy.

  "Keep going," said Kil. •

  They continued on over the monotony of the bottom plain. Here there was nothing to mark distance or direction, only the occasional outcropping of basalt, swelling up out of the silt like the flank of some gigantic, mudded hog. Only once, startlingly, across this sterile-seeming plain, there wandered info the searchbeam's funnel of illumination the unexpected apparition of snouted ten-foot sturgeon, waving his forked tail in slow astonishment at encountering a traveler even larger than his own large self.

  "How do you know where you're going?" asked McElroy.

  "Partly feel—partly logic—" said Kil. He smiled a little. "That doesn't explain it very well, does it? Maybe somebody else can do a better job of it than I can."

  "Do you know what we're looking for?"

  "Yes," said Kil, slowly. "I don't know just what it'll look like—" he broke off suddenly, gazing out through the front observation window of the sub. "There, I think."

  They had come at last on a rising mound, all but identical with the basalt heaves, except for the fact that this was more circular, more regular and more vast. Silt covered this, too; but for one short minute they were treated to the impossible sight of a slim woman-figure, unprotected under all those vast tons of water except for ordinary kilt and tunic, who waved when she saw them and turned to the mound. Immediately an opening, large enough to admit the sub, yawned before them. She slipped through and disappeared, waving them on.

  They followed her in to a vast lock which was drained of water with a sudden rush, leaving them foolishly stranded in a shallow basin. Kil went back through the sub with a rush; and when McElroy followed him in emerging from the hatch a moment after, he was already holding the girl tight to him, the girl that had waved them in through the lock. They stood as lost as lovers are, on the metal flooring of the lock, while the heavy air around them reeked of the flat and fishy smell of the lake bed—and noticed none of it.

  After a little while, they let each other go a little, though they did not really step apart, and they both looked at McElroy.

  "Your wife, I suppose," said McElroy, dryly. "Yes," said Kil. "Ellen, this is—I don't know your first name."

  "David," supplied McElroy. "David McElroy, my. wife Ellen."

  "I know about him," said Ellen. Under the brilliance of the overhead sunbeams and in the damp air, her blonde hair and blue eyes alike seemed touched with little diamond highlights. "We all know about him. How are you, David?"

  McElroy shrugged, as if the unaccustomed mantle of his first name sat uneasily upon him.

  "No different than usual—Ellen," he answered. His voice sharpened. "Where's this Project Group of yours?"

  "I'll take you to them, in a moment," said Ellen. "We're all here, waiting for you—and Kil." She glanced up at her tall husband. "Kil, why did you bring him?"

  "Things have to come to a head," said Kil. He looked at her, suddenly softening. "Don't worry for me," he said, gently.

  "But I don't know what they'll do." Her voice was abruptly a little pitiful. "Chase called them all in—from all over the world. We've never been all together like this before. We're just people, after all, like anyone else. We can make mistakes, too. Oh, Kill"

  "Who's Chase?" McElroy's voice cut hard across the conversation. Ellen turned to him.

  "My great-grandfather, Bob—Robert Chase. He's the only one of us we call by the last name. He's—well, he's old; and he's Project Head." She looked up at Kil. "You've met him, darling. It was him, at Acapulco and—"

  "In that Unstab hotel in Duluth. I know," finished Kil, for her. "Are they waiting for us?"

  "Yes. But I wanted to speak to you for a moment by myself, first. Kil-" her eyes were a little fearful, "you understand, we'll be together from now on. It'll be all right, whatever they decide."

  Kil took his hands from her; and his face hardened a little.

  "No," he said.

  "But you're one of us now, Kil. You're part of the Project. You have to go along with what the majority decide."

  He looked at her with eyes like agates.

  "Which side are you on?" he demanded.

  "Oh, yours, Kil! I'm with you!" In her agitation she caught his arm and clung to it, as if to deny any shadow of a barrier between them. "You know that." She even shook his arm a little, angrily. "It's what it may mean to you. It's just that they'll expect you not to fight them."

  "Why?" he said, looking down at her.

  "Because you're one of them, one of us."

  "Am I?" he asked. His voice deepened; and he stared at her, unwaveringly. "What I am, I made myself. I broke my own prison. I threw away my Key, alone. I sat by myself on that mountain and what I found, I found myself, without their leave and without their help. I did what I did for you, and for me. I bought my freedom and I'm not going to trade it back again."

  "But this hasn't anything to do with you! It's about the rest of the world."

  "Isn't it my world? Aren't the people in it my people, as ' much as theirs?"

  "No. No!" she clenched her hands together. "We have to work together that's all."

  He looked at her with a strange light in his eyes. "There's no have to any more," he said. She looked up at him and shook her head slowly, pain on her face. "Oh, Kill"

  "There's not even any have to between us, any more."

  "Kill" she cried. "Don't say that! Don't ever say that. I'm always with you, against them, against anyone, against everything!"

  His face softened. He put his arm around her shoulders again; and she clung to him. "I know," he said.

  "You'll forgive me if I don't understand any of this," put in McElroy. Kil looked over at him.

  "It's just that we've reached an end to force," he said. "You'll see." He looked down at Ellen. "I think we better go now."

  Ellen let go of him and stepped back. She turned and led them across the wet and shining floor to a disk elevator set against one of the rising walls. They stepped together onto one disk and dropped downward.

  They passed several levels, opening on the corridors of what seemed to be dwelling quarters, and finally stepped off before a small, but solid door, the only exit from the equally small hall or alcove in which they had alighted.

  "The auditorium," said Ellen, nodding at the door. She went forward and opened it. The voice of the old man she had called Chase, speaking in measured accents, came through to their ears. Ellen beckoned; and Kil, with McElroy, came up and went through the door.

  He found himself on the small, semi-circular floor of what looked like an overlarge lecture room. The flat side of the floor was backed up against a high wall, from which projected a small stage, perhaps six inches above the floor, on which stood a lectern and, behind it, Ellen's great-grandfather. Ar
ound the rest of the room rose steeply, tier on tier, an amphitheatre of crowded seats, all filled by listening people.

  Chapter twenty

  There were, in that room, between three and four hundred people, ranging from the very young to the aged, though the young predominated. Meeting their combined gazes with a discernment that would have been entirely foreign to him a few weeks earlier, Kil was able to sort out perhaps six generations, of which those of Ellen's age were clearly in the majority. There was a curious openness about the faces of the younger ones that puzzled Kil with a sense of haunting familiarity, before he suddenly realized where he had seen something like it before. It was next-of-kin to the wide-eyed interest of very young children and animals, those who had not lived long enough in the world yet to make the acquaintance of Fear.

  Chase, the old man, had stopped speaking as they entered; and he turned to look at them as well. His eyes picked out Ellen and Kil, swung to McElroy, and back to Kil again.

  "Why did you bring this man?" he asked.

  "Because I thought he ought to be here," said Kil.

  "Why?"

  "Because I've been trying to find you—" broke in McElroy, quickly. "There's an emergency—a matter of life and death for everyone in the world. I had to find you."

  Chase's eyes glared at him for a moment, then softened.

  "We all know you, David," he said gently. "By reputation, if nothing else. You're a good man; but—what can we do for you?"

  McElroy came two swift steps forward toward the lectern. He spoke directly to the old man in a tense and eager voice.

  "Listen—" he said, "I know why you were set up here. You were set up at the same time Files was set up; isn't that right? Files was only a temporary solution to the problem of keeping people from blowing themselves up. You were to find a permanent one; isn't that right?"

  Chase stood looking down at him for a moment. A look of pain crept across his face. Finally, he nodded. "Yes," he said.