The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

She returned on the third day, without a word of explanation to me of where she had been or what she had done. She greeted me and disappeared again, this time only for hours. Then she came back and said, “Now I am through, for a time. How have you liked our little hideaway?”

  I said, “It gets lonesome.”

  “Lonesome?” Her brown eyes were wide and perfectly serious. “I had thought it would be otherwise, Tom. So many of us in this little space, how could you be lonesome?”

  I took her hand. “I’m not lonesome now,” I told her. We found a place to sit in a corner of the communal dining hall. Around us the life of the underground movement buzzed and swirled. It was much like a branch of the Company, as I have said; the work of this secret section seemed to be mostly a record-keeping depot for the activities that took place on the surface. But no one paid much attention to Rena and me.

  What did we talk about? What couples have always talked about: Each other, and everything, and nothing. The only thing we did not talk about was my basic beliefs in regard to the Company. For I was too troubled in my mind to talk about them, and Rena sensitive enough not to bring them up.

  For I had, with all honor, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Company; and I had not kept it.

  I could not, even then, see any possibility of a world where the Company did not exist. For what the Company said of itself was true: Before the Company existed, men lived like beasts. There was always the instant danger of war and disease. No plan could be made, no hope could be held, that could not be wiped out by blind accident.

  And yet, were men better off today? I could not doubt the truths I had been told. The Company permitted wars—I had seen it. The Company permitted disease—my own wife had died.

  Somewhere there was an answer, but I couldn’t find it. It was not, I was sure, in Slovetski’s burning hatred of everything the Company stood for. But it could not be, either, in the unquestioning belief that I had once given.

  But my views, it turned out, hardly mattered anymore; the die was cast. Benedetto appeared in the entrance to the dining hall, peering about. He saw us and came over, his face grave.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Wills,” he said. “I have been listening to Radio Napoli. It has just come over the air: A description of you, and an order for your arrest. The charge is—murder!”

  I gaped at him, hardly believing. “Murder! But that’s not true; I certainly never—”

  Benedetto laid a hand on my shoulder. “Of course not, Mr. Wills. It is a fiction of the Company’s, beyond doubt. But it is a fiction that may cause your death if you are discovered, do not doubt that.”

  I swallowed. “Who—whom did I murder?”

  Benedetto shrugged. “I do not know who he is. The name they gave was Elio Barletteria.”

  That was the suspendee whose place Zorchi had usurped. I sat back, bewildered. It was true, at least, that I had had some connection with the man. But—kill him? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the mere act of taking him out of his plastic sack endangered his life? I doubted it, but still—

  I asked Benedetto. He frowned. “It is—possible,” he admitted at last. “We do not know much about the suspendees, Mr. Wills. The Company has seen to that. It is my opinion—only an opinion, I am afraid—that if this man Barletteria is dead, it had nothing to do with anything you did. Still—” he shrugged—“what difference does it make? If the Company calls you a murderer, you must be one, for the Company is always right. Is that not so?”

  We left it at that, but I was far from easy in my mind. The dining hall filled, and we ate our evening meal, but I hardly noticed what I ate and I took no part in the conversation. Rena and her father considerately left me alone; Zorchi was, it seemed, sulking in our room, for he did not appear. But I was not concerned with him, for I had troubles of my own. I should have been…

  After dinner was over, I excused myself and went to the tiny cubicle that had been assigned to Zorchi and myself. He wasn’t there. Then I began to think: Would Zorchi miss a meal?

  The answer was unquestionably no. With his metabolism, he needed many times the food of an ordinary person; his performance at table, in fact, was spectacular.

  Something was wrong. I was shaken out of my self-absorption; I hurried to find Benedetto dell’Angela, and told him that Zorchi was gone.

  It didn’t take long for us to find the answer. The underground hideout was not large; it had only so many exits. It was only a matter of moments before one of the men Benedetto had ordered to search returned with an alarmed expression.

  The exit that led through the subway station was ajar. Somehow Zorchi had hitched himself, on his stumps, down the long corridor and out the exit. It had to be while we were eating; he could never have made it except when everyone was in one room.

  How he had done it did not matter. The fact remained that Zorchi was gone and, with him, the secrecy of our hiding place.

  CHAPTER XI

  We had to move. There was no way out of it.

  “Zorchi hates the Company,” I protested. “I don’t think he’ll go to them and—”

  “No, Wills.” Slovetski patiently shook his head. “We can’t take a chance. If we had been able to recapture him, then we could stay here. But he got clean away.” There was admiration in his eyes. “What a conspirator he would have made! Such strength and determination! Think of it, Wills, a legless man in the city of Rome. He cannot avoid attracting attention. He can barely move by himself. And yet, our men track him into the subway station, to a telephone…and that is all. Someone picks him up. Who? A friend, one supposes—certainly not the Company, or they would have been here before this. But to act so quickly, Wills!”

  Benedetto dell’Angela coughed. “Perhaps more to the point, Slovetski, is how quickly we ourselves shall now act.”

  Slovetski grinned. “All is ready,” he promised. “See, evacuation already has begun!”

  Groups of men were quickly placing file folders into cartons and carrying them off. They were not going far, I found later, only to a deserted section of the ancient Roman Catacombs, from which they could be retrieved and transported, little by little, at a later date.

  By sundown, Rena and I were standing outside the little church which contained the entrance to the Catacombs. The two of us went together; only two. It would look quite normal, it was agreed, for a young man and a girl to travel together, particularly after my complexion had been suitably stained and my Company clothes discarded and replaced with a set of Rome’s best ready-to-wears.

  It did not occur to me at the time, but Rena must have known that her own safety was made precarious by being with me. Rena alone had nothing to fear, even if she had been caught and questioned by an agent of the Company. They would suspect her, because of her father, but suspicion would do her no harm. But Rena in the company of a wanted “murderer”—and one traveling in disguise—was far less safe…

  We found an ancient piston-driven cab and threaded through almost all of Rome. We spun around the ancient stone hulk of the Colosseum, passed the balcony where a sign stated the dictator, Mussolini, used to harangue the crowds, and climbed a winding, expensive-looking street to the Borghese Gardens.

  Rena consulted her watch. “We’re early,” she said. We had gelati in an open-air pavilion, listening to the wheezing of a sweating band; then, in the twilight, we wandered hand in hand under trees for half an hour.

  Then Rena said, “Now it is time.” We walked to the far end of the Gardens where a small copter-field served the Class-A residential area of Rome. A dozen copters were lined up at the end of the take-off hardstand. Rena led me to the nearest of them.

  I looked at it casually, and stopped dead.

  “Rena!” I whispered violently. “Watch out!” The copter was black and purple; it bore on its flank the marking of the Swiss Guard, the Roman police force.

  She pressed my hand. “Poor Tom,” she said. She walked boldly up to one of the officers lounging beside the copter and spoke briefly to him, too
low for me to hear.

  It was only when the big vanes overhead had sucked us a hundred yards into the air, and we were leveling off and heading south, that she said: “These are friends too, you see. Does it surprise you?”

  I swallowed, staring at the hissing jets at the ends of the swirling vanes. “Well,” I said, “I’m not exactly surprised, but I thought that your friends were, well, more likely to be—”

  “To be rabble?” I started to protest, but she was not angry. She was looking at me with gentle amusement. “Still you believe, Tom. Deep inside you: An enemy of the Company must be, at the best, a silly zealot like my father and me—and at the worst, rabble.” She laughed as I started to answer her. “No, Tom, if you are right, you should not deny it; and if you are wrong—you will see.”

  I sat back and stared, disgruntled, at the purple sunset over the Mediterranean. I never saw such a girl for taking the wind out of your sails.

  * * * *

  Once across the border, the Guards had no status, and it was necessary for them to swing inland, threading through mountains and passes, remaining as inconspicuous as possible.

  It was little more than an hour’s flight until I found landmarks I could recognize. To our right was the bright bowl of Naples; far to our left, the eerie glow that marked bombed-out New Caserta. And ahead, barely visible, the faint glowing plume that hung over Mount Vesuvius.

  Neither Rena nor the Guards spoke, but I could feel in their tense attitudes that this was the danger-point. We were in the lair of the enemy. Undoubtedly we were being followed in a hundred radars, and the frequency-pattern would reveal our copter for what it was—a Roman police plane that had no business in that area. Even if the Company let us pass, there was always the chance that some Neapolitan radarman, more efficient, or more anxious for a promotion, than his peers would alert an interceptor and order us down. Certainly, in the old days, interception would have been inevitable; for Naples had just completed a war, and only short weeks back an unidentified aircraft would have been blasted out of the sky.

  But we were ignored.

  And that, I thought to myself, was another facet to the paradox. For when, in all the world’s years before these days of the Company, was there such complacency, such deep-rooted security, that a nation just out of a war should have soothed its combat-jangled nerves overnight? Perhaps the Company had not ended wars. But the fear of wars was utterly gone.

  We fluttered once around the volcano, and dipped in to a landing on a gentle hump of earth halfway up its slope, facing Naples and the Bay. We were a few hundred yards from a cluster of buildings—perhaps a dozen, in all.

  I jumped out, stumbling and recovering myself. Rena stepped lightly into my arms. And without a word, the Guards fed fuel to the jets, the rotor whirled, and the copter lifted away from us and was gone.

  Rena peered about us, getting her bearings. There was a sliver of a moon in the eastern sky, enough light to make it possible to get about. She pointed to a dark hulk of a building far up the slope. “The Observatory. Come, Tom.”

  * * * *

  The volcanic soil was rich, but not very useful to farmers. It was not only the question of an eruption of the cone, for that sort of hazard was no different in kind than the risk of hailstorm or drought. But the mountain sides did not till easily, its volcanic slopes being perhaps steeper than those of most mountains.

  The ground under our feet had never been in cultivation. It was pitted and rough, and grown up in a tangle of unfamiliar weeds. And it was also, I discovered with considerable shock, warm to the touch.

  I saw a plume of vapor, faintly silver in the weak light, hovering over a hummock. Mist, I thought. Then it occurred to me that there was too much wind for mist. It was steam! I touched the soil. Blood heat, at least.

  I said, with some difficulty, “Rena, look!”

  She laughed. “Oh, it is an eruption, Tom. Of course it is. But not a new one. It is lava, you see, from the little blast the Sicilians touched off. Do not worry about it…”

  We clambered over the slippery cogs of a funicular railway and circled the ancient stone base of the building she had pointed to. There was no light visible; but Rena found a small door, rapped on it and presently it opened.

  Out of the darkness came Slovetski’s voice: “Welcome.”

  Once this building had been the Royal Vulcanological Observatory of the Kingdom of Italy. Now it was a museum on the surface, and underneath another of the hideouts of Rena’s “friends.”

  But this was a hideout somewhat more important than the one in the Roman Catacombs, I found. Slovetski made no bones about it.

  He said, “Wills, you shouldn’t be here. We don’t know you. We can’t trust you.” He held up a hand. “I know that you rescued dell’Angela. But that could all be an involved scheme of the Company. You could be a Company spy. You wouldn’t be the first, Wills. And this particular installation is, shall I say, important. You may even find why, though I hope not. If we hadn’t had to move so rapidly, you would never have been brought here. Now you’re here, though, and we’ll make the best of it.” He looked at me carefully, then, and the glinting spark in the back of his eyes flared wickedly for a moment. “Don’t try to leave. And don’t go anywhere in this building where Rena or dell’Angela or I don’t take you.”

  And that was that. I found myself assigned to the usual sort of sleeping accommodations I had come to expect in this group. Underground—cramped—and a bed harder than the Class-C Blue Heaven minimum.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Rena breakfasted with me, just the two of us in a tower room looking down over the round slope of Vesuvius and the Bay beneath. She said: “The museum has been closed since the bomb landed near, so you can roam around the exhibits if you wish. There are a couple of caretakers, but they’re with us. The rest of us will be in conference. I’ll try to see you for lunch.”

  And she conducted me to an upper level of the Observatory and left me by myself. I had my orders—stay in the public area of the museum. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t used to being treated like a small boy, left by his mother in a Company day nursery while she busied herself with the important and incomprehensible affairs of adults.

  Still, the museum was interesting enough, in a way. It had been taken over by the Company, it appeared, and although the legend frescoed around the main gallery indicated that it was supposed to be a historical museum of the Principality of Naples, it appeared by examination of the exhibits that the “history” involved was that of Naples vis-a-vis the Company.

  Not, of course, that such an approach was entirely unfair. If it had not been for the intervention of the Company, after the Short War, it is more than possible that Naples as an independent state would never have existed.

  It was the Company’s insistence on the dismantling of power centers (as Millen Carmody himself had described it) that had created Naples and Sicily and Prague and Quebec and Baja California and all the others.

  Only the United States had been left alone—and that, I think, only because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one states…

  The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors. It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so. There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room, with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, spraying DDT into the bedding. There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue Heaven modern allotment—with a certain amount of poetic license; few Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and autocooks.

  It was the section on warfare, however, that was most impressive. It was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, e
ven the tank, was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn’t quite placed—an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint of evil under its lacquered sheen…

  It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days.

  I looked at it again, shuddering.

  Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-60, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal.

  Score one for the Company. They’d put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need—and no principality would risk the Company’s wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company’s credit than anything else.

  Maybe it was possible that in this controversy both sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary.

  I continued my wandering, looking at the exhibits, the rubble of the museum’s previous history. The cast of the Pompeiian gladiator, caught by the cinder-fall in full flight, his straining body reproduced to every contorted line by the incandescent ashes that had encased him. The carefully chipped and labeled samples from the lava flows of the past two centuries. The awe-inspiring photographs of Vesuvius in eruption.

  But something about the bomb casing kept bothering me. I wandered around a bit longer and then turned back to the main exhibit. The big casing stretched upward and downward, with narrow stairs leading down to the lower level at its base. It was on the staircase I’d noticed something before. Now I hesitated, trying to spot whatever it was. There was a hint of something down there. Finally, I shrugged and went down to inspect it more closely.