"What in the black pits of hell is that?" Sue muttered.
"A true flying machine," Harker said proudly as three Spacers trotted out to the thing with their packs. "What is called an 'airplane.' It doesn't need helium for lift and it doesn't need the sun for power and it can fly nearly sixty miles in an hour ten thousand feet above the ground."
"All by burning petroleum," Lou said angrily.
"All by burning petroleum," Harker repeated enthusiastically, perhaps deliberately mistaking Lou's tone. "The petroleum engine not only drives the powerful propeller, it provides two forms of lift. The hot exhaust inflates the wing, and the strong draft under it enhances the airfoil effect. This is how men were meant to fly in the atmosphere!"
"Assuming they had any atmosphere left to fly in," Lou snapped. "It's hard to believe even you would be this black."
"Most of the exhaust gasses are trapped in the wing," Harker said somewhat defensively. "We only have to vent them when we want to lose altitude. Besides, by now there are less pollutants left in the atmosphere than you people think."
"So you might as well pump some more carcinogens into the air," Lou said angrily. "This really is evil."
"You promised not to give justice until you saw everything," Harker reminded him more belligerently.
"This isn't enough?"
"This is nothing," the sorcerer said airily. "Before you learn the reason why, we will give you abundant cause to condemn us. But once you learn all, you'll find everything we do justified. You now believe this is impossible, but I know that it's true, and so now let me show you just how confident we really are. It's time to cross the mountains. Welcome to a greater world."
And with that, he ushered them toward the waiting eagle.
He rolled up one of the cabin's sides as they stooped under the wing. Inside four canvas seats were slung from the cabin framework, two in back, two in front. A young woman with short-cropped black hair sat in the front left seat behind a complicated-looking set of controls. Sue crawled in beside Lou in back, and Harker took the empty front seat.
Sue felt pretty weird in the cabin when Harker rolled down the flap. Three flexible windows were sewn into the canvas of each side flap, and the front and rear windows were ofcurved glass clear as a flat plane. It was like being trapped in a windowed tent, unable even to leave your seat.
A click, and a rasp, and then the muffled rumbling of the petroleum engine behind her. Nothing else happened for long moments. Then Sue felt the cabin lift slowly off the ground. A loud thrumming drone all but drowned out the noise of the engine as the propeller whirled into a solid blur, and the eagle began to pick up speed and altitude.
Out a window, Sue saw the eagle's nest spiraling slowly away as the eagle circled for altitude, and then it came out of its circle in a long curving arc upward and eastward toward the mountains that loomed before them.
Sue glanced at Lou. Their hands snaked together as the eagle nosed steeply upward into the starry night. The world below was already lost in blackness, and only the great mountains outlined against the sky gave any hint of scale or height.
"Well here we are," Sue shouted in Lou's ear over the drone of the propeller, "on our way to the land of sorcery in a black eagle."
Lou smiled feebly at her and squeezed her hand. "It'll be all right," he shouted back. She hoped he really meant it.
For as the eagle soared upward into the featureless void and even the peaks of all but the highest mountains fell away into impenetrable darkness, here she was, trapped in an evil craft flying higher and faster than whiteness allowed on the deadly breath of petroleum. This was no dream, this really was sorcery, and her very bones were vibrating with its power.
Clear Blue Lou awoke to a headache drone in the darkness, and for a moment he didn't remember where he was. He blinked and came more fully awake and realized that the deep vibrating thrum was the propeller of the Spacer eagle, that he was flying at tremendous speed high above the mountains through the dark night sky.
Sue was asleep in her sling beside him, Arnold Harker's head rested on his shoulder at an odd angle, and the only illumination was the pale starlight filtering in through the windows. Below he thought he could make out the looming peaks of the central range of the Sierras passing by beneath them, vague shapes of solid blackness.
Conversation had not been easy over the drone of the propeller, the darkness had enveloped them like velvet, and the steady mantra of the propeller thrum, loud though it was, had been conducive to dozing. He must have drifted off without knowing it, brooding upon the unknown destiny he was moving toward at unreal speed; somehow it seemed appropriate that this passage through the secret skies had become like a hypnagogic dream, a twilight world between awareness and sleep.
In front of him, the young Spacer girl hunched over the controls. He wondered how she managed to fly the craft safely through the high mountains in the blind darkness. He leaned forward and spoke softly in her ear to avoid waking Sue and Harker. "How do you see where you're going?"
"What?" she said much more loudly, not looking back.
"How do you see where you're going?"
"I don't. I hear where we're going with this. Like a bat."
She nodded toward a round glass plate in the control panel before her. A line of pale green swept around it like the second hand of a clock, and in its continual wake, vague shapes and patterns of light formed and faded and reformed again.
"Radar," she said over the propeller noise. "It sends out a sweeping radio beam that bounces off the mountains. The echoes bounce back like the cries of a bat and form patterns on the screen that map the terrain."
Sue began to mutter and stir in her sleep. Any conversation loud enough to be comprehensible would probably awaken her.
"The wonders of black science..." Lou muttered and slumped back into his sling. An uneasy feeling came over him. Here he was, flying above the supposedly impassable Sierras at sixty miles an hour in an eagle that saw through the darkness with its ears like a bat! It was hard not to be seduced by the wonders that sorcery seemed to offer. What a magic world it would be if everyone could fly faster and higher than any bird, see through the darkness, never have to pedal, receive instant Word of Mouth from anyone else anywhere in the world! No wonder the Spacers fell prey to these fantastic temptations.
But every mile that this swift eagle flew could be measured in the deadly breath of its petroleum engine, in so many vile carcinogens pumped into the air, in shortened lifespans, in death, in human suffering. The Spacers had to know this, and yet, somehow, they seemed able not to care. How was that possible? How could they be so morally blind?
It seemed to Lou that the psychic space between the worlds of white and black was as vast and dark as the void through which this craft now moved, transporting them between one reality and the other.
He put his arm around the sleeping Sue, closed his eyes, and willed himself back into the sleep-giving mantra of the droning propeller. The only way across that great divide was the way they were following now, a dark dream through the abyss of the night sky. Tomorrow the sun would find them in another world. Oh yes, we're in this together! Lou thought as Sue snuggled her head into the softness of his arm.
But just what are we getting into?
Somewhere over the Rainbow
Sunshine Sue awoke in a blaze of eye-searing light, her neck kinked from the weird angle at which it had lain on Lou's shoulder, her head pounding with the insistent thrum of the propeller.
"Oh! Ugh! Where the hell are we?"
Lou had been staring out a window, down and to the south, away from the brilliant cloudless sunrise that made the eastern horizon a glare of cruel fire. "The Wastes!" he shouted, not turning his head. "Look at it!"
Below, Sue saw a nightmare landscape that chilled her soul.
To the west, still in shadow, the spine of the great cordillera rose out of a badland plain where the long shadows and pitiless light of the rising sun etched a hideous picture of deat
h and desolation. Waterless lakes—amoeboid expanses of some strange rock, flat and shiny as glass—shimmered an evil purple in the sere desert landscape. She could see three huge round craters gouged into the tortured body of the Earth and places where multicolored rocks seemed to have melted and flowed into mounds and puddles like so much candle wax. In all that cruel landscape, nothing grew, nothing lived, nothing moved.
A tremor of fear went through her; reflexively, she reached for Lou's hand. So this is the world the Smash made... she thought. "How far does it go?" she shouted. "Is it still radioactive? Are we safe up here?"
Arnold Harker twisted around to face them. "Safe up here," he shouted over the din, "but you wouldn't last a week down there. How far does it go... ?"
He leaned close to them to make himself better heard, and they both craned forward to listen. "This Waste goes all the way to the Rockies except for some patches of clean desert. Some people up there that we look in on from time to time. We've sent some expeditions over the Rockies, and we know another Waste begins on the far slopes and runs most of the way to the eastern seacoast. Nothing as significant even as Aquaria left in all the world."
"In all the world?" Sue gasped in despair.
"In all the world we know of. Which isn't very much. We know there are other lands beyond the great eastern ocean, but we don't know if anyone is still alive there or if the rest of the world is all like... this."
"I didn't know..." Sue stammered. "I mean, I knew, but..."
Harker nodded grimly. "Who knows how much is really left of our wounded planet?" he said. "Who knows how many people survive?"
His eyes hardened and his voice grew fervent. "Only from space can we view the world entire. We can only regain the lost knowledge of this planet by leaving it."
"And only with a broadcast satellite network can we communicate with whoever is left," Sue said. "Assuming there is anyone else somewhere."
Harker smiled at her almost warmly. "You begin to understand," he said. "A little more pollution? A few more radioactive particles? Does it matter after you've seen this? A wrecked world and a humanity spiraling down to extinction. Without a new Age of Space, our species is doomed anyway. Pollution? Sorcery? Radiation? Black science? Behold the world and tell me that we have anything left to lose!"
"But sorcerers like you did that!" Lou shouted, nodding down at the destruction. "Doesn't that even make you question the rightness of your path?"
"We seek to bring knowledge from the stars that will raise humanity from the ruins!" Harker insisted.
"Or destroy what's left."
"The level of risk is acceptable," Harker said flatly, and with that he turned his face back to the bright eastern horizon, and the three of them fell silent.
Sue stole a sidelong glance at Clear Blue Lou, who stared out the window looking grim and angry. For a moment, she began to wonder about this perfect master, this man whom fate had thrown her together with. He seemed so sure that he was right and Harker was wrong. True, she had never dreamed that the Earth was so ruined, that humans were so few and scattered. True also, that the destruction below was undeniably the evil handiwork of black science.
But she found herself more convinced than ever of the dire necessity of her cause. Only a global electronic village could give what was left of humanity a second chance, if indeed it deserved one. And only a satellite broadcast system could make that possible. And only black science could put that in her hands.
It was all so unfair! It was all so circular! Black science seemed to have the only hope there was, and if it was false, if it was evil, where did that leave the human species?
Deep inside, she found herself shaking a phantom fist and shouting angrily at she knew not whom. Why should we bear the guilt for the evil of our ancestors? We might be stuck with the karma that was written by the implacable hand of fate. But accepting the justice of that karma was an act of free will, and she was having none of it.
As the sun rose higher, the heat became noticeable even after the flaps were rolled up to admit the breeze of passage, and then it became truly horrible—a dry hot wind from the mouth of a kiln, nature's sardonic howl of hostility. Clear Blue Lou was beginning to develop an unholy appreciation for the black eagle's speed. The sooner this flight was over, the better. There was no joy in this corpse of a landscape and no soaring pleasure to be had in traversing it. Now he could understand why the black scientists were willing to sell whiteness for speed, or at least he could feel the temptation.
"How much longer?" he shouted at Harker.
"We'll be landing soon at Starbase One, our main installation."
"Landing soon?" Sue said. "Out here?"
Harker pointed out the front window toward a purple range of lower mountains marching toward them across the Waste. "The next valley is untouched," he said. "Original uninhabited desert that escaped the megatons. Such are our oases."
Soon they were flying high over the sere slopes of pastel brown mountains. The western slopes were as dead and lifeless as the lowland Waste, but as the black eagle flew eastward, sparse scrub growth began to appear, and Lou thought he could make out tiny moving black shapes that might have been animals.
Then the mountains fell away to reveal a long, flat, high desert valley. Lou's first impression was of another Waste, dry, and dead, and shimmering whitely like bleached bone under the fierce sun. But as the Spacer eagle turned north along the length of the valley floor and the landscape below unreeled itself, he realized that there were no craters or melted rock or lakes of blue crystal here, only dry brown earth and expanses of sand that might have looked this way for the last million years. Apparently nature was as capable as man of creating utterly deadly wasteland.
"Down there! What's that?" Sue shouted, pointing down on her side of the cabin, where Lou couldn't see.
"Fuel wagons from our refinery far to the southwest," Harker told her. "We have to reach a long way for petroleum."
Then Lou saw an expanse of greenery beginning below him with the geometric precision of a line across the landscape. "Crops?" he said. "You're able to grow crops out here?"
"We pipe water in from deep wells about ten miles from here," Harker told him. "The engineering isn't too difficult. Laying pipe to our petroleum supply, unfortunately, is another matter."
To the northeast, surrounded by the great square of cropland in the middle of the desert, Lou now made out the shapes of buildings. Thin fountains of water sprayed into the bone-dry air from sections of the farmland around them, creating an incongruous vision shimmering preternaturally in the desert heat.
"Starbase One," Harker said. "We'll give you a chance to inspect it before we go on to the spaceport tomorrow."
The pilot did something to the controls, and a long disgusting stream of grayish black smoke plumed out from a vent in the wing near the back of the cabin, and the eagle began sinking toward the rapidly approaching buildings.
Soon they were circling over the strangest-looking town that Lou had ever seen. A perfect square of green about the size of La Mirage seemed to have been painted on the sere valley floor. In the geometric center of the square was a huge geodesic greenhouse dome, five times the size of the Exchange and crafted of glass and metal. Long low sheds radiated out from its circumference like the metal petals of a flower. A quadrangle of big squat ugly gray buildings enclosed this weird construction.
Except for a much smaller dome of gray concrete way up in one corner of the cropland and a line of "airplanes" southeast of the center close by a large series of sheds and squat metal cylinders, the whole thing was as inorganic and symmetrical as a mathematical diagram.
And except for the eagle's nest and the concrete dome, all the buildings were connected by passageways like the links of some gigantic half-buried metal worm. A gridwork of arrow-straight concrete roadways was laid over the green area like the lines of a huge chessboard.
It was unlike any human habitation Lou had ever seen, and he couldn't even begin to guess
its population.
"How many people live here?" he asked Harker.
"Almost three thousand."
"There are that many black scientists?" Sue exclaimed.
"That few," Harker said. "There's a work force of about a thousand at the spaceport and a few hundred more at scattered installations, and that's all there is of the most advanced civilization on this planet."
"That's still a lot of black scientists by my reckoning," Lou said.
"Most of us are pilots and gardeners and craftsmen and technicians," the pilot said, speaking for the first time in hours. "It takes a lot of workers to keep a modern civilization going. We can't all work on Operation Enterprise. But we all know what our work means."
"What does your work mean to you?" Lou asked ingenuously as the eagle, streaming petroleum fumes, began to sink rapidly toward a landing, for he was curious to know how a Spacer who was not a full-fledged sorcerer felt about what they were doing. The karma of the followers had as much to say as the karma of the leaders about the justice of any enterprise.
"We're building the new Age of Space," the young woman said with an idealism that seemed clear and genuine. "We're building a spaceship so that men may listen—"
"Here we are!" Harker interrupted loudly and perhaps somewhat shrilly, obviously and deliberately cutting her off. What had she been about to say? What was the sorcerer hiding?
The Spacer eagle slowly settled the last few feet to the ground as the engine died, and a horseless cart sped out of one of the sheds toward it at twice the speed of a running horse, trailing the inevitable plume of sooty poison. There were two benches under a canvas awning on the flat bed behind a grimy petroleum engine.
Songs From The Stars Page 14
