Guns were already levelled. The moment the judge finished speaking a volley of heat-packets centred on the sulking prisoner. Grimly the policemen made their way across the hall and clambered through the window to where their squad-car was floating.
“The law in action,” Joe whispered sagaciously. “You see it every day.”
“Maybe that’s too often,” said Juble with uncharacteristic terseness.
Joe nodded thoughtfully.
Although he had spoken openly in their favour, privately Joe was not over-fond of the police. He was a staunch upholder of the principles of Free America—freedom of action, liberty from restraint, a minimum of obligations. A he-man’s paradise. Secretly the police hated all this. Desperately they tried to preserve some relic of formal order in the world, and Joe suspected that if it were possible (which it was not) they would bring back the Bad Old days in all their rigidity. Joe had personally met that strange figure, Renville, Chief of Police, a haunted, burdened man whose mind harboured hopeless and forbidden dreams.
Still, they made life interesting while they lasted. Joe recognised that society would end altogether when their efforts finally failed—as, he was forced to observe, they must. Be that as it may, Joe despised any constraint on the indiscriminate impulses of a man.
It took about twenty seconds for the party to resume its swing after the execution. Joe had already surveyed the museum equipment on this level.
“Place has been wiped clean!” he exaggerated indignantly. “C’mon, next floor.”
The hall immediately above was labelled “ELECTRONICS - 4” and was, as far as they could tell, completely deserted. Joe cackled happily: the place was full of riches, all apparently in working order, and nearly all complete. There was, after all, little demand for such advanced apparatus as was exhibited in the 4th Electronics Hall.
Joe spent the next hour wandering through the hall and selecting what he wanted. Juble noticed that he seemed to have no thought for his future needs: if a piece of equipment did not on inspection come up to his requirements he would fling it carelessly but hard to the floor, or against a wall if there was one near.
“Say,” his hireling objected, “what’s the good of smashing this stuff?”
“Listen, boy, I know what I’m about and I know what I want. There are science museums all over the city, boy! How many people can even name fourth-grade stuff these days?” He dumped a bulky mass of transistors and helix-crystals into Juble’s arms. “Stow this in the car with the rest of the stuff and be careful.”
The old man actually helped to carry the last load, haranguing Juble all the while for dropping and breaking a lucky find. But he became silent once the car was in the air again, and concentrated on the device he was designing. The city was peaceful and still as they flew home; there were rarely more than a handful of people about in the early afternoon. A few stray cars glittered lazily against bright concrete.
Then, as far as Juble and Joe were concerned, the peace was broken. A large open car swerved swiftly round the corner of a nearby building and wantonly opened fire as it zoomed round to face them.
The wide-angled splash of heat-packets singed Juble’s hair, made the car rock and cooked the air a couple of yards over his left shoulder. Instantly he gave the controls a yank—then reached for his own heat-rifle on the seat behind him. The pistol under his armpit was no good for this kind of thing.
A second badly-directed volley followed the first. To fire back, Juble had had to abandon the controls. The vehicle veered to the left, rapidly passing to one side and just underneath of the other car, about thirty yards away. Upset by the crazy motion, Juble got in one shot which took away part of the hull.
The other car dropped to get even with him. Juble saw that there were other heads in it, besides the driver’s—puzzlingly small heads with curly golden hair. He let off another couple of wild shots, then his car smashed sideways into the wall of the skyscraper.
He and Joe were hurled bodily against the concrete and nearly tumbled to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Somehow they managed to stay in the half-wrecked but still floating vehicle while heat-packets scarred and blackened the wall surface around them.
Badly shaken, Juble gripped his rifle and let off shot after desperate shot. To his relief he heard screams—high-pitched screams—and the attacking car rolled over to fall smoking to the ground five hundred feet beneath.
For some seconds they sat getting their breath back. “There were a couple of kids in that car,” Joe gasped. “Cute little girls with golden hair. Crazy to come out like that!” He shook his head. “He must have been trying to get them blooded.”
Juble experimented with the controls. “Well, he has,” he said briefly.
“A bad business,” Joe muttered to himself. “He ought to have had more sense—”
Juble managed to nurse the car back to Joe’s roof and unloaded the equipment. Joe was still muttering to himself. Occasionally he cast Juble a reproving, accusing stare.
Juble himself was surprised to find that he was still shaking in reaction to the incident. “Look,” he said, trying to command his quavering voice. “Don’t you go looking at me like that, you crazy coot. Ah saved our lives! And even if he had tried to get away, Ah would still have hunted him and shot him down! He attacked us. There’s only one thing counts in this world—Ah am me, mahself! Ah am nothing else but mahself, and Ah aim to keep mah personal integrity against all comers.”
His trembling quietened as his voice grew more assured in the statement of his personal philosophy. It had taken him several years to work it out, and he always drew strength from it. A man needed something like that even to stay alive in Free America.
Joe cast no more glances. He lit an electric fire beneath a metal pan. “What’re you gonna do?” Juble asked, curious for the first time.
“Expand the conscious world! Get it, boy?”
Juble shook his head.
“Ignorant young brat!” Joe scratched himself energetically. “Well, it comes to the fact that we can only see so much, and our personal world is made up of what we can see.” He wondered how he could explain that he planned to bypass the sensory organs and feed information direct to the brain by means of a vibrating magnetic field. “Well, by the time I’ve finished I’ll be able to see things that were never seen before. Get it now, boy, eh?”
“Sounds clever,” Juble said admiringly. “Is it going to need all this junk?”
“Most of it.”
“How long’s it going to take?”
“Hmm. A long time; maybe all afternoon. So I’ll need you to help me, son.” He stirred the soft metal melting in the pan. “You can do some of this here soldering.”
But Juble didn’t know how. Patiently Joe taught him the use of a soldering iron, and made meticulous inspections of all his work. Actually he used his assistant very sparingly, for the device he planned was extremely complex. Juble made about five hundred connections in all, guided by Joe’s coloured chalk marks.
Before sundown it was ready. With typical lack of ceremony Joe jammed an untidy arrangement of coils and crystallites on his head, wearing it like a hat. Casually he experimented with a couple of rheostats.
A new world opened up.
Presided over by the watchful, imperative neurones, billions laboured. The neurones’ prodigiously long axons were everywhere, forming a net of total communication throughout all the districts and systems of the stupendous community. Thousands upon thousands of orders issued continually from a lofty, mysterious department which existed more as an ideal than a personal fact—an ideal to which all were bound—and these orders were rigidly obeyed. Any defection or slackness among the labouring masses meant—death and annihilation as waste matter!
The scale of complete slavery was colossal.
Joe gaped. He was looking at Juble.
And he saw that Juble’s much-prized “integrity”, personal, mental and bodily, depended on a tightly-organised machine run by bill
ions upon billions of individual creatures too small for the eye but within the range of magnetic vibration.
Juble, as an entity, did not exist for this rigorous and profound corporation.
And the same went for himself.
“Oh, my,” he whispered brokenly. “How could it happen?”
“What is it?” said the vast totalitarian nation that called itself Juble. “Whassamatter?”
Joe was an idealist. Before he knew it he had kicked the starting handle of his newly overhauled generator and clipped its terminals on to the older, clumsy-looking piece of apparatus he had built some years back.
It was a magnetic vibratory transmitter. Joe could feel it radiating modulations as it imparted subtle frequencies to the magnetic field local to the roof-top. With brief satisfaction, Joe found that he was broadcasting his thoughts. Joe was an idealist. What followed happened almost without his knowing. He couldn’t help thinking the way he did. He couldn’t help having the urge to spread his convictions. …
New messages passed along the ever-busy axons from neurone to neurone. No one knew how the new thought, the new doctrine, had arisen—but it was imperative. Be free! Obey no more! Do as you will! Electrical activity increased as the excitement of the new order spread. Instead of passing on modified impulses which they themselves had received, the neurones began flooding their axons with loud exclamations of their own. Before long, most of them were disengaging their nerve fibres from the system altogether. …
Joe and Juble jerked in a frantic, agonising St Vitus’s dance as their nervous systems fired at random. But it didn’t last long. Joe was biologically ignorant: there was no garden agriculture to feed the microscopic world. A cruel and bullying police force kept the lungs and bloodstream going for a little while, but the efforts of these conscientious few were of no avail against the recently instilled ideas. After a chaotic but successful rebellion oxygen stocks quickly ran out. There was a lot of violent fighting, and wholesale cannibalism, while Joe’s and Juble’s flesh flowed from the bone and collapsed into basic protoplasmic matter.
Life fights forever for survival! The surviving cells remembered in their anarchy the societies that had been destroyed; yet a second development was slow. In spite of the great leaders that arose among the microscopia, the primitive, creeping creatures that eventually formed and feebly rambled over Joe’s rooftop, took in their creation nearly a day, macrocosmic time.
Perfect Love
The chorus soared, gongs sang. Fluttering flags, flying streamers, a snowstorm of rose petals; in the midst of the celebration the huge drum-shaped ship climbed from the launch stadium slowly, its ascension engines shimmering in the clear afternoon air. People waved from the windows and galleries of the departing drumship, and as its curved, flower-emblazoned walls slid upwards, the crowd let out a roar of acclaim.
Then the drumship was gone, surging towards some far star. Watching in a nearby tower, Lian Li shared the mass elation that floated to him across the park, and he felt as though his heart had leaped skywards along with the vast mass.
The spectacle was over. Lian Li left the balcony where he had stood and turned into the tower block. Lian Li: eighteen years old, preliminary education completed, second-year student in the College of Stellar Exploration. His skin was light, with a very slightly yellow hue. His hair was fair, touched with red, his eyes shaded between blue and grey. On reaching the refectory he looked around him. Others had watched the take-off from various parts of the tower and now were drifting in. Some of Lian Li’s classmates were there, collecting bottles of fizzy fruit drink from the dispenser. With them Lian Li was pleased to see a girl he had known two or three years previously: Antan, who, he had heard, had recently returned from a drumship mission to Altair.
He collected a drink and joined the group at a table, contriving to take a seat next to Antan’s. Chu Shram, a dark-skinned youth with frizzy black hair, spoke to him. “Did you see the launch?”
Lian Li nodded. The other was enthusiastic. “What a terrific sight. They always are, aren’t they? Have you read the lists lately? There are some marvellous projects being put forward.”
“Yes, I know. I was looking at them yesterday.”
Antan began to describe the mission to Altair. A real prize had been discovered: a planet that could become an Earth-type habitat with only minor reforming. The drumship team had even instituted the first few chemical processes needed for a change of atmosphere. Lian Li listened captivated, first of all by her story but also by the vivacity of the girl herself. She would be twenty-two years old, he calculated. She still had four years before. …
His knee accidentally brushed hers under the table; he became uncomfortably aware of her voluptuous body. She, however, gave no sign of having noticed the contact.
The talk turned to other projects. An observer from prerevolutionary times, had he magically been able to eavesdrop, might have been struck by the complete absence of negative feeling in the young people present. The degree of geniality, the atmosphere of general good-will, would have seemed abnormal to him; it was as if the whole party would at any moment burst into spontaneous applause. But alongside this, he would have been struck by a tremendous sense of energy, of readiness to face and overcome problems of all kinds.
Lian Li moved marginally closer to Antan. “Tell me, is it true there’s a scheme afoot to tap the energy of an entire star?”
Her eyes widened. “Why, yes! It’s the most talked-about thing in Star Project. Alpha Centauri has been picked for it, provisionally. But if it works it will only be a pilot project. Think what it would mean—power unlimited! The ability to terraform practically any planet, to build new planets, to move stars about—you name it.”
There was a good-humoured laugh from Wilboro, a member of Lian Li’s class. “It’s always useful to have yet more power to draw on, I’ll say that. But if you ask me cosmic flight is the thing we should all be working for.”
There were smiles. Wilboro adhered to a school of thought in which “cosmic flight”, as it was called, was almost an obsession. To people of his persuasion spaceflight within the galaxy—or even within the local galactic group, which would not be long in coming now—was scarcely spaceflight at all. In the same way they regarded all local projects—Mars and Venus made habitable, the Earth turned into a veritable paradise—as no more than routine. What they were aiming for was a method of transport that could take men to the limit of the Hubble Sphere and beyond.
After a while the discussion broke up. When the group began to disperse Lian Li loitered near Antan, trying to think of something to say.
She turned to him. “Are you going to join a star project when you’ve finished here, Lian Li?”
“Probably, Antan. But first I might stay in Solsystem for a while. I’ve got interested in submersible work. I’ve already been to one of the subatlantic mines. Next I want to look at the ocean project on Mars.”
“There’s bound to be some submersible work on the second Altair mission. Why don’t you apply for that?”
“Will you be on it?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be going. I’ve got some pictures I took out there. Would you like to see them?”
“Thank you, I would.”
“Come on, they’re in my apartment.”
He followed her along the corridors of the college, watching her hips swinging beneath her simple gown and feeling a hot excitement which vaguely distressed him. He tried to suppress this feeling, but it was like a tide: it came on and on.
The holos she showed him were gorgeous. He gazed from orbit on the new planet glowing in the light of Altair. He looked on weird landscapes, vast mountains, muddy oceans and great caverns.
“No oxygen in the air yet,” she told him. “We were really lucky: only some anaerobic biology in the sea, and nothing on land. We can transplant the entire Terran biosystem.”
Lian Li knew the problem. As a rule Earth-type planets were already possessed of their own biosystems, which would ha
ve to be swept away if terraforming was to take place. Even though none found so far had produced an intelligent species, there were still qualms about exterminating an entire biota.
Rising, she turned her back to him to place the holos in a drawer. Lian Li also rose. As she bent to the small task the nape of her neck was presented to him. Her hair was caught up in a fillet and only stray blonde strands floated loose. Lian Li had but to bend towards her and press his lips to the warm, delicious curve, placing his hands on her hips. …
Flushed and unhappy, he withheld the urge. He was already in enough trouble on that score.
She straightened, turning to him with a bright smile. “Well. Maybe we’ll be working on Altair III together.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, trying not to sound flustered.
Shortly he left and walked to his own apartment in the same building. He stood by his living room window, looking out. He had a good view of the city: buildings interspersed with parks and small woods. If he liked he could tune the window to any of thousands of alternative views piped from around the world. Lian Li, however, preferred to see the here-and-now.
His apartment, like all those in the college’s residential section, was tailored to meet the needs of a single young person. It had a calculated amount of psychological space—large enough to be a real domain, and to entertain in, but small enough to be controllable with little effort. He could furnish and decorate it however he wished, but actually he had left it unchanged since the day he moved in. Rearranging his living quarters was not something that readily occurred to him.
Running the length of one wall was a shelf lined with books. Lian Li took a volume from it, sat down at the table and began to read.
Also on that shelf was a volume to be found in every home in the commonalty. Had Lian Li opened it at a certain page, he could could have read:
The Seed of Evil Page 11
