And this time he knew it to be true, sincere, and it made him feel curiously humble. The words fell into a silence, then exploded into a great shout of derisive laughter, underneath which was a distinct note of savagery. He waited for quiet.
"The green people have no concept of "kingship,' or of any other kind of ruler, in your sense," he said, sweeping them with a curious gaze. "But they do have co-operation. And they do have, at last, a supreme spokesman—myself. I think they will overlook my use of the word Icing.' I speak for them!"
"You're as green as they are," some wag shouted, "if you believe that!"
"Quite true. I am as green as they are. As you can see!"
And he cast off the illusion that had wrapped him and Lovely with false appearances. It was surprisingly difficult to do, to strip himself, physically, mentally, figuratively—and irrevocably—before that hostile throng of eyes. He was surprised and ashamed to find that, far away at the back of his mind, he had clung to a fragment of insane hope that he would one day be white again. To pull that out and throw it away was like losing a tooth. But he did it.
In the stunned silence he turned to look at the girl by his side, and was struck by the change in her. The transformation was as delightful as it was unexpected. In this dry and cool atmosphere her skin had lost its sheen, its oily sleekness. Now it had a peach-bloom glow of radiance like velvet and silk in delicate combination. There was an added lift, a buoyancy in her shape, too, and her long black hair that had been heavy and clinging was now a dark lustrous cloud about her glowing face. Where she had been lovely before, she was ten times more so now.
It was just a glance, but it helped to bear in on him the difference that could come to his people, the transformation that could happen to all of them, given the right circumstances. The knowledge stiffened him against the sullen roar of the frightened mob, for that's what it was, now. He put up a hand.
"I am green. I speak for all the other green people. You will do well to listen, before it is too late." The implied
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threat got him silence. "I am here to tell you that your time on Venus is almost done."
He saw Harper start forward furiously, and raised a hand, pointed a finger. Harper stopped as if he had run into a wall. His face purpled as he fought to move. The audience hushed in astonishment. M'Grath tramped forward—and was frozen in exactly the same fashion. Barney Lyons, quick to leam, kept still of his own accord. The death hush in the audience held for ten seconds then snapped into a roar of outrage.
Anthony turned and spread his hands—and there was stillness and silence, immediately. "I'm not going to explain. There's no need. I hold you all helpless. Just me, because I speak with the voice, and the power, of three hundred million green people like myself. Now you will listen, and those who are watching within the other domes will do well to listen, too, because what I have to say includes them.
"I am green. I was bom on this planet. All my life I have known I was green. Never have I believed myself an animal. I knew different. Now I know that this is also true of my brothers, out there. The green people you have met, the only ones you know anything about, have been defectives, the cas toffs and failures, the only ones stupid enough to be caught by your drugs and temptations. The rest have kept away, have ignored you, have not wanted to know anything about you.
"What does it matter to them that you have taken up a small area of their planet? That you have built yourselves a phoney fairy-land to hide in? What do they care about Earth? Or Earth-people? Why should they? They were quite happy to ignore your puny miracles, your tawdry empire, until I told them of something else that you do. I told them. Hold me responsible. I told them that you have been, that you are, and that you will go on, stealing away their bean-plants. You uproot them, wherever you find them. You force-grow and strip them, and then uproot more. You ship the beans back to Earth. As of this moment your depra-dations have taken but a tiny fraction of the whole, but you will go on, like a creeping disease, a blight. And know this, that the bean is not just a fancy food to my people. It is life and death to them. When they learned, from me, that you were stealing away their life-needs, it was then
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they decided the time had come to remove you. That time is now!"
He could feel their combined resentment, their anger. This clutch that he held on them was his own making, for the first time. Lovely supplied the raw force, the gathered energy of thousands, but he was channeling it, and he felt what his victims felt. He knew, beyond all doubt, that he could not kill by this method, that he couldn't even hurt without being hurt himself. That was the hidden snag in this gamble.
"It would be poindess if you all spoke," he declared. "I will release one to speak for you."
He glanced at Harper and shook his head. He chose M'Grath. "You can talk," he said. "Don't waste it in argument."
"Admirable advice," M'Grath grunted. "I'd give a lot to know how you spread the invisible glue I seem to be steeped in. But, man, you must be insane! You can't hope to get away with this. Naked savages, regardless of how many or how intelligent, can't hope to win against technology!"
"I expected that argument. I've arranged a display that might convince you otherwise."
He made a tiny gesture to Lovely, who nodded in return. In another place a silent, waiting line of green people, perched high on an anchor wall, spaced a meticulous arm's-reach apart, moved as one. Razor-edged sword-leaves bit into tough plastic, through one layer and then the second. Blades moved from left to right, slits joined up with each other. The precious cool dry air gushed out in a gasping gale. The green figures dropped silendy down over the pyramided ranks of their brethren and vanished into the mist. Anthony faced M'Grath, quite steadily.
"I have just destroyed Dome Two," he said. "The plastic balloon has been slit completely around, at wall level. I've pulled your house down about your ears, M'Grath. One of them, at any rate. Ring up and find out!"
Confirmation was obvious on the fat man's gray face as he came back to the platform. The audience knew without need of speech, and writhed in their prisoned silence. Anthony felt their instinctive fear giving way to equally instinctive rage and resistance. "It will take some hours for the envelope to collapse all
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the way. Enough time for the inmates to protect themselves. No one need be hurt. In- fact, given time, the whole thing can be put up again. But that is just a small sample, M'Grath, of what we can do."
"You caught us unawares, that time. Next time—" "What next time? What can you do against a silent enemy who can do this—" and Anthony put a throttiing squeeze on the fat man's throat without lifting so much as a finger himself. "Must I say it again? Three hundred million. And this is OUT planet. What I am doing, they can do also, any and all of them, at any time. Men in atmosphere suits, with guns, can fight this?" He let M'Grath choke awhile, and then released him, to watch him heave for breath and massage his throat.
"You preach an effective sermon. Ill take your word for it. Ill even agree that you have made a point. But I'm not all men, Taylor. If you know anything at all, you must know that mankind has never been ruled by cold reason, or commonsense, that there is no such thing as a hopeless cause, to the average man. Throw us off this planet—as I admit you can do, and have every right to do—but whatever the ethic, there will be the bloodiest outcry ever, from Earth. Mankind will come back in force. Perhaps to fail, to die by the millions, but no reasoning I know will stop them. Tell a man he can't, and he'll die trying to prove you wrong!"
"I know," Anthony sighed. "I was a man, once." He reached for Lovely's hand, drew her near to him. "You have her to thank that I saw this a long time ago. This is one of your primitive savages, M'Grath, one of the people I can speak for. She will do anything I ask, except kill."
He turned to the crowd again, raised his voice. "I grew
up on Earth. I wanted to wipe out the lot of you, when I
realized just what you were doing. That's t
he way I was
taught to think, as a man. Hit back! But my people taught
me something else. It is better to work together, to co-oper- i
ate—as brothers." i
"How can we co-operate with you?" M'Grath demanded. •
"What have we to exchange? On what level can we possi-
bly meet?" j
"I've been thinking about that, but perhaps Lovely can j tell you." He smiled to her and she blushed.
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For the first time since entering the dome she ventured to speak aloud. "This is cool, and dry, and a bright light. These things I have never know before. They are good things."
M'Grath regarded her thoughtfully. "Succinctiy put, my dear. But you are only one. How do you know the rest of your people would approve such strange things?"
"What I feel, all feel, all know. And it is goodl"
"Good God I" M'Grath swung his wide eyes on Anthony. "Does she know what she's saying? That you have some form of total telempathy?"
"It's quite true. Complete community of emotion-feeling-experience. It shook me when I found out. It's not on a verbal level, of course."
"No? No, of course. That's education, personal-trained response. Obvious! Good heavens! Do you realize what this will do to all our accepted theories of mental processes?" M'Grath caught himself suddenly. "But it is out of the question. We cannot possibly provide controlled environment such as this over the whole planet. If that's the kind of co-operation you want, we're stopped before we start."
Anthony felt an urgent prickling at the fringe of his attention, a struggling for notice, out there. "Who?" he asked, lifting the blanket of restraint, and an eager-eyed man broke forward from the ranks of the technicians.
"Never mind who I am," he said urgently. "There are others who will back what I say. We can modify this climate. This is something we've thought about for a long while among ourselves. It wouldn't be too tough. The plans have all been worked over a dozen times. Humidity is the main thing, and there are a dozen ways to lick that, to reduce evaporation from open water surfaces. And there are just as many ways to lick the fungus dust, too. Enzymes, clotting-agents, précipitants, all sorts of things. It would take time, sure! And money. But it could be done."
"Why hasn't it been done, then?"
"Don't ask me. The ideas have been submitted several times, but they got shelved, passed-over. I guess somebody didn't want to know, wanted things to stay the way they are. You can guess."
"Thank you." Anthony turned his stare on Harper, lifting the restraint. "Let's hear you on this. Is it true?"
"Why should we waste time and money making the
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whole damn planet fit for any snot-nose to live on?" Harper snarled. "If your damned Greenies want it so much, why don't they do it for themselves? And don't think you're on top, Taylor. You might fool M'Grath with a bit of jargon, but not me. You daren't lay a finger on us, and you know it!"
M'Grath sucked in a breath, but Anthony halted him before he could speak. He turned to Barney Lyons, who had kept a discreet silence so far.
"I believe you have ways of seeing, from here, what is happening outside, outside the hall, I mean. Have you?"
"Yeah, sure. We can scan any part of the interior from here, and throw it on that screen there. That what you want?" He stepped to a console at one side of the central area. "Where d'you want to look?"
"A main entrance. Any one, or all, just as you like."
Lyons touched a switch that dimmed the lights a trifle, and the screen glowed into life. And the aghast humans moaned with one collective voice as they saw what the cameras revealed. Green people, no matter which view Lyons shifted to, there were green people, thronging in silent march. Thousands of them, filling the broad avenues, casting appreciative glances up and around, but moving steadily forward.
"And those are but a very tiny fraction," Anthony said. "Just a few. At a thought from me they would cut down this dome, too. With no effort at all they could stamp this fairy-land of yours into oblivion. And what would they lose, Harper? They were happy and contented before you came. If I gave the word they would obliterate all sign of you. It wouldn't take long. And then they would vanish back into the mist where they have been all this time, where you never knew they were, and where you'd never find them again. As for your punitive expedition"—he eyed M'Grath—"you have your point, but how would Earth people exact vengeance on an enemy they couldn't find? It's a big planet. And would they? Would they arise in wrath to avenge the elimination of a group of parasitic and selfish exploiters? After all, you have exploited humanity just as much as you have my people."
"Hey! Not all of us!" came a cry from the audience, to be joined by others, into a clamor.
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"There's your answer, Harper. Do you want me to take a vote on it?" He turned back to the restive audience. "You're all free to speak, just as you feel. What do you want to do —stay here and fight that?" He gestured to the marching hordes, and then to the first flow of green people emerging into the hall where they were. "Or run home back to Earth and tell them that you were kicked out? Or do you want to stay, and help, and co-operate with us?"
"How can we co-operate?" M'Grath demanded, through a swelling hubbub of argument. "It will take years to transform the climate, and a fantastic amount of money, men and material. That's not co-operation. That's bleeding us of our resources. Altruism can go only so far. What do we get out of it? What's in it for us?"
The sentiment found many echoes. Even Harper regained calm enough to agree with it.
"A deal is a deal, Taylor. I'm damned if you'll twist my arm, but I might do a deal with you. Honorable terms of some kind."
"What could be easier?" Anthony met him with a level stare. "You can bring us medicine, physical knowledge. We can give you knowledge about the mind. But there's one thing above all that we can do together. Show us how to make two beans grow where only one grew before. It's that simple. Give us the agricultural know-how, the science, and we'll do the growing. And we share the crop. That way nobody loses."
Harper's face betrayed, without any call for mental powers, that he gagged on the thought of losing his comfortable monopoly. In the audience there were a handful who shared his resentment. But by far the majority let it be known in no uncertain terms that they liked the proposition. Harper had to yield.
"Have it your way," he growled. "You've called the tune. On your head comes the responsibility for passing on the tricks, the know-how, the training of all these—" and he flung his arm in a sweep to encompass the pressing crowd of green people. "We can deliver. How do we know you can keep up your end, and pass the skills along in a proper manner?"
"Nothing simpler." Anthony smiled, a great sense of relief flooding him. He took Lovely's hand again, saw her eyes
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glow with understanding. "You said I called the tune. Let me show you how appropriate that was."
He raised an arm, and got silence in a moment. It was an intently expectant silence, as something of the immense power he wielded communicated itself even to the awed humans. This was a treasured fancy, something he had dreamed of for a long time. And he knew that all over the planet, far and wide, breaths were being held now.
To M'Grath he murmured, "This is the most expressive piece I could think of, for a moment such as this. Listen!" And he brought his hand down in a gesture.
With a unanimity no human choir could hope to copy, the assembled green people raised their voices in a great shouting sound, the electrifying "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. Hardly had they roared into the third bar when there was a rustle, and Anthony saw the human audience scrambling to its feet, and joining in lustily. Now his dream was complete, and he, too, sang "Hallelujah" along with the rest.
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John Rackham Page 16
