Ching immediately transferred his attention to the viewscreen showing the top of the landing pit. The doors began to slide open … the crack widened. … And now the doors were at full-open position, and the screen showed the Prometheus sitting at the bottom of the pit with only naked space above it. …
In the control room of the Prometheus, Boris Johnson, cradled in his Cocoon, stared at a viewscreen in ever-growing confusion as he watched the Hegemonic ships land. Somehow, Robert Ching had gotten them to come down. Duntov would be able to lift the Prometheus, perhaps get clear of the asteroid. …
But it all seemed so pointless. They might get as much as a five minute start on the Hegemonic ships before the Commander of the flotilla realized what was happening. But what good would it do them? They could have five hours’ lead on the Hegemonic ships, and the cruisers would still be able to overtake the Prometheus and blast it into a million pieces. …
Confusedly, half-cursing the small glimmer of hope that still flickered within him, Johnson turned his attention to the viewscreen showing the massive doors above the landing pit. And as he watched, the doors began to slide open, smoothly, inexorably. …
And the stars shone down clear and beckoning above the Prometheus.
“Well here goes nothing. …” Arkady Duntov said wanly. He cut in the antigravs.
Johnson felt a momentary floating sensation as the antigravs neutraized both the artificial gravity of the base installations and the near negligible natural gravity of the asteroid itself.
Then he was crushed back into his Cocoon as the main reaction drive cut in at full emergency power, and the Prometheus bolted upward, past the rock walls of the pit, and out into the cold, black free space.
As the tremendous acceleration weighted his body, Johnson kept his eyes glued on the benign panorama of space on the forward facing viewscreen, not daring to gaze upon that which filled his mind—the Hegemonicships which even now must be spotting the Prometheus, running through hasty countdown cycles, lifting off in swift, deadly pursuit. …
While the Prometheus accelerated outward, starward, Johnson stolidly steeled himself for the shock that must soon come, as the Hegemonic ships attacked, with lase-cannon, with thermonuclear missiles. … He wondered morbidly if he would even have time to feel the shock before the Prometheus was atomized. …
As the Prometheus reached for the stars, Boris Johnson waited for the death that he expected to come at any moment, waited for the fatal blow that surely must fall. … He waited and waited and waited …
The great starship leaping up out of the landing pit seemed to Robert Ching the greatest sight he had ever seen, the culmination, the fulfillment of his whole life. His soul seemed to leap up with it as the Prometheus reached for the stars, for the future of man.
A future, Ching vowed, that will not be denied. Mentally, he began counting off the seconds until the second switch could safely be thrown … ten … fifteen … thirty. …
With a wrenching mental effort, Ching tore his eyes away from the sight of the Prometheus and focused his attention on the second viewscreen which showed the Hegemonic ships.
Apparently, they had already spotted the Prometheus, for confusion reigned amidst the forest of ships. Some airlocks were already shut, some ships were hastily reloading troops, other Guards were milling about aimlessly. …
One minute … a minute and ten seconds … a minute and fifteen seconds. …
Ching glanced around at the assembled Brothers. All were watching the viewscreen, and he saw many pairs of lips moving as they mentally counted with him.
Two minutes and ten seconds … twenty … thirty … forty. …
Robert Ching hesitated for the briefest moment, blinked his eyes, and threw the second switch on the control panel.
Deep within the bowels of the asteroid, surrounded by tons of lead shielding, a signal reached the automatic control system of the Brotherhood headquarters’ nuclear reactor. One by one, and then in whole clusters, dampening rods began to withdraw from the reactor, and the reaction mass3">Deep aced toward critical, toward that moment of titanic nuclear explosion which would blast the asteroid and all on or in it—Brothers, Guards, Hegemonic ships—to atoms.
The great nuclear explosion that would destroy every Hegemonic ship and clear the path to the stars.
Victory through suicide—the Ultimate Chaotic Act.
Robert Ching turned to stare at the stars, at the vastness of space with which the great all-encompassing view-screen in which he floated surrounded him. Over the heads of the watching Brothers, each man facing this moment alone and silent, he saw the tiny silver streak that was the Prometheus hurtling towards the images of the stars on the great viewscreen before him.
Ching blinked his eyes, and to him it was as if the viewscreen that surrounded him was reality itself. …
He was floating free in space, one with the universe in which he was but a mote, the millions upon millions of stars, each a warming sun, on and on and on, without end, infinitely, Chaotically—the destiny of Man.
In his mind’s eye, the moment of destruction that raced towards him was already upon him. … The asteroid, the Hegemonic ships, the substance of his own body, rendered by the nuclear fire to the primal Chaos from which they had coalesced. … His mind, his thoughts, his being, his ego not simply destroyed but disintegrated, Randomized, one with the Chaotic universe. …
And his last thought, as anticipation became reality, as asteroid, ships, men, and Robert Ching, First Agent of the Brotherhood of Assassins were vaporized, was one of utter mystic ecstasy, as he savored his death even as it happened—a death with victory, a death that united him, body and mind, with that which he had served.
Robert Ching was at last one with Chaos.
Boris Johnson suddenly felt a great shudder go through the hull of the Prometheus, jarring his bones even through the stress-fiber packing of the Gee-Cocoon.
As it happened, he fully expected the ship to split open or another near miss to occur, or to be instantly erased forever as the Prometheus was vaporized by a direct hit.
But none of these things happened. Instead, he half-heard, half-felt the sounds of many small concussions against the outer hull, as if the ship were passing through some impossibly dense swarm of meteors.
Then … nothing! No further concussions, no more sounds, no moment of searing nuclear fire. Nothing. They … they were alive.
He glanced up at the viewscreen showing the view forward of the ship—stars and blackness, nothing more.
“What was that?” he finally grunted.
“I don’t kno,” Duntov said. “Unless. …”
Johnson saw him reach out, activate the rear-facing viewscreen camera. The viewscreen came to life, and Johnson looked for the asteroid and the Hegemonic flotilla which by now certainly must be pursuing them. …
But neither were there. Where the asteroid and the ships should’ve been, he saw nothing but an expanding cloud of dust and debris, flotsam so fine it seemed like no more than gravel. That was what he had felt. The asteroid exploding and bits of metal and rock rattling off the hull. Asteroid and ships alike were now dust. And all those men. …
But the Prometheus now was safe.
Then Johnson felt himself float weightless as Duntov cut off the reaction drive.
“What act can be more truly Chaotic than Victory through suicide … ?” Arkady Duntov whispered.
“What?”
“A quote from Markowitz,” Duntov said. “Something about what he called the ‘Ultimate Chaotic Act.’ Victory through suicide.”
“You mean … you mean you think it wasn’t an accident?” Johnson said. “Ching blew up the asteroid on purpose?”
“I’m sure of it,” Duntov said. “They gave their lives to destroy the Hegemonic ships. They sacrificed themselves so the Prometheus could go to the stars.”
Boris Johnson understood and did not understand. It was something a coldly logical man, a Gorov, might’ve done, a ruthles
sly logical weighing of their own lives against the future of the human race. But somehow, viscerally, he suspected that there had been nothing cold about it.
And he sensed that, for Robert Ching, it had not been an act of bleak desperation, but something else, something that had meaning in a way he could never understand. Johnson shivered. The Millenium of Religion was supposed to have died centuries ago. Had it died now with Robert Ching? He wondered … would it ever die?
And an hour later, when the final course corrections had been made and the Prometheus was irrevocably on its way to 61 Cygni, Boris Johnson stared in wonder at the far stars to which they would soon be hurtling at many times the speed of light.
He looked at the stars, and only now, with the Hegemony and the dangers he had traversed to reach this moment receding behind him, did he realize that nothing was over, that it all was really just beginning.
What was out there? Star after star, race after race, danger after danger, without end in time or space. Racial immortality for Man, perhaps, but an immortality that he would have to wrest from an indifferent universe again and again and again.
he struggle was just beginning. In another billion years, it would still be just beginning. It would always be beginning.
Boris Johnson, frail mote of temporarily reversed entropy, looked upon the billions of stars stretched before him, islands in an infinite ocean without bottom, without shore, without end—and looked squarely for the first time in his life upon the countenance of Chaos.
And it seemed to him, that in those unwinking stars, the myriad blind eyes of Chaos, the scattered atoms that had once been the face of Robert Ching stared back.
THE END
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Also By Norman Spinrad
Novels
The Solarians (1966)
Agent Of Chaos (1967)
The Men In The Jungle (1967)
Bug Jack Barron (1969)*
The Iron Dream (1972)
Riding the Torch (1978)*
A World Between (1979)
Songs From The Stars (1980)
The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)
Child Of Fortune (1985)
Little Heroes (1987)
Russian Spring (1991)
Pictures at 11 (1994)
Journals Of The Plague Years (1995)
Greenhouse Summer (1999)
He Walked Amongst Us (2003)*
Collections
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)*
No Direction Home (1975)
The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
Other Americas (1988)
Deus X and Other Stories (2003)
Non-Fiction
Science Fiction In The Real World (1990)
* Not available as an SF Gateway eBook
Norman Spinrad (1940 – )
Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1941. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad's work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Norman Spinrad 1967
All rights reserved.
The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11720 4
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted inany form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Website
Also By Norman Spinrad
Author Bio
Copyright
Agent of Chaos M Page 18
