The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “He could have picked it up again when you hurled him into the compartment,” Blakemore said. “Why didn’t he?”

  “The panel was already closing,” Tyson said. “Apparently he didn’t have time to look around and see where the weapon had landed. The only way he could keep the panel from closing was by thrusting his arm into the opening.”

  “So he’s locked up now in the compartment with that weapon with him,” Faran grunted.

  “That’s right,” Tyson said. “But it can’t blast a hole in a solid metal wall, or even shatter the panel mechanism. Don’t forget—the panel practically melts into a more massive sheet of metal, inches-thick, and with nothing he can get at attached to it.

  “Are you sure?” Faran asked. “How do we know what that weapon can do?”

  “He told us exactly what it couldn’t do,” Tyson said.

  “He told us that a half-dozen times, but, as you’ll recall, he made it emphatic when we asked him to join us in some target practice. It’s not like that one—”

  Tyson pointed to the far more complex-looking weapon that was still lying in the sand at Faran’s feet. “We discussed both weapons when we asked him to bring down that gull, remember? That was before he leapt up and started for the sea wall. The rage against the wheat hadn’t come upon him yet. He would have had to reason to lie to us—”

  “Still, I don’t like it,” Faran said.

  “Remember how friendly he was before he saw the wheat,” Tyson persisted. “He was a gentle sort—Gilda liked and trusted him, and so did I. He was so grateful to you for keeping him from starving to death I had the feeling, at times, he was like—well, like some poor, mistreated hound dog you’d rescued from malicious children as cruel as only children know how to be—children and savages—because an unthinking cruelty is something special and apart—”

  Tyson shook his head. “You know what I mean. There’s a gratefulness and a loyalty that’s also special and apart. I had the feeling he would have died for you—or for Gilda. That he would be capable of deceiving you about what that weapon can do— No, I refuse to believe it.”

  “He could have had his reasons—even if what you say about him is true in a general way,” Faran pointed out.

  “I trust everything he told us, before he became enraged.”

  “All right, have it your own way. But I still don’t like the thought that he is confined in that compartment with a weapon we don’t know too much about.”

  “I’m going right back,” Tyson said. “But I don’t think there’s the remotest possibility that he could get out of the compartment. I’m more concerned about the way he feels about Dan. I never saw anyone quite so enraged, with such an intensity of hate in him. He kept cursing Dan even while I was struggling with him, and his eyes were wild.”

  The more than merely troubled look had come back into Tyson’s eyes and Blakemore could see that Faran shared his concern.

  “That’s bad,” Faran said. “It could lead to all kinds of complications, none of them pleasant to contemplate. We can’t keep him locked up permanently and unless we can reason with him and overcome the way he feels—”

  “We can try,” Tyson said. “I’ll talk to him through the audiotube and see what can be done. I’ll remind him that he wouldn’t be alive now if you hadn’t brought him back with us. I think we can still reason with him.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Faran said. “He’s more likely to listen to me.”

  He nodded at Blakemore. “Just Roger and I will go,” he said. “Gilda might as well stay here with you. We won’t be long.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before Blakemore could say anything in reply Faran changed his mind. He had started to move to Tyson’s side, but he suddenly frowned, and came to an abrupt halt.

  “It can wait five minutes or so,” he said, returning to where his daughter was standing. “There’s just one or two things concerning Malador and the wheat I was going to tell Dan when the Trawler came out from behind the lighthouse and we saw the jets. Until he knows how the world’s tragically thinned out population is going to feel about that wheat a century from now Malador’s rage will be incomprehensible to him. I think he should know, right now. That we can all come to a better understanding.”

  “Understanding?” Tyson asked. “I don’t quite see—”

  “We’re going to need to draw closer together. Because when I take the longer journey I doubt that there will be just the three of us—and Malador. That will be for Dan to decide. But I don’t want Dan to be kept in the dark, when it’s not absolutely necessary. I can spare a few minutes more, if you’ll go back and make sure that Malador isn’t beating his brains out against the wall of the compartment or lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. You never know what a man so enraged may take it into his mind to do. I doubt if he’s injured himself, but you’d better make sure.”

  “Good God,” Tyson said. “What if he uses that weapon on himself? It’s something I didn’t think of.”

  “Think of it now,” Faran said. “But if it will make you feel any better, I’d say it was extremely unlikely. For the first time in his life he knows what it means to be able to look up at the stars and breathe the salt sea air and stride along the beach with the sun and wind in his hair without knowing that he’s going to die—and soon.”

  “There’s more to it than that, Dad,” Gilda said. “It’s knowing you’re with people who care.”

  “I think he knows we care—or did,” Tyson said. “You can forget what I said about a hound dog. I didn’t mean it the way it probably sounded. I was just thinking of how grateful he seemed to be—to you and your father. But if a man turns homicidal it’s a little harder to care.”

  “That’s why I don’t want Dan to judge him too harshly,” Faran said. “The sooner he knows the truth about him the better. All right—see what you can do. Talk to him if you want to. Tell him I’ll be along shortly. If you fail, I’m almost sure he’ll listen to me. If we can take just a little of the edge off his rage it will help.”

  Tyson put his arm around Gilda’s waist, drew her close and kissed her once lightly on the cheek before he turned and headed back toward the breakwater, crossing to the surf line first, as if the crashing of the breakers had become so familiar a sound that it steadied him in some way and he was reluctant to part with it.

  At any other time the tenuousness of the embrace would have amused Blakemore, for it had been quite different from the one they had exchanged a few minutes previously that Tyson must have known he could not have failed to see. But his thoughts were of too grim a nature to provide room for amusement—and anyway, it hadn’t been too surprising a thing. No matter what degree of intimacy their relationship had reached, there were men who became reticent in the presence of a father and even, sometimes, in the presence of an older man. He hoped that Tyson and Gilda would not go on thinking of him in that way, but ten years did, after all, make a difference.

  Blakemore was quite sure that Faran was completely happy about the earlier embrace, for he had been watching his face closely during the twenty or thirty seconds Gilda and Tyson had remained entranced, with the roar of the surf no doubt indistinguishable from the pounding of the blood in their ears.

  For a moment Faran remained silent, his eyes on the tall, robustly built figure of a man who seemed to have the strange capacity—Blakemore had noticed it before—of looking just as tall a considerable distance away as he did close at hand. Then he turned and gestured toward the sea wall.

  “I’d much rather start by telling you exactly what you’ve accomplished by growing that wheat,” he said.

  “Then I think it would be wise to tell you about the darker side before—well, I think I can make you see how something that seems dark for a short while can change and become a shining hope.”

  “What you probably mean is—you’ve decided I’ll be needing a band
age to keep the wound tidied up. If Malador hates me the way he seems to—”

  Faran smiled. “I suppose it is wounding—just to know you’re hated by someone you’ve never set eyes on before, someone you’ve done nothing, to the best of your knowledge, to provoke. The fact that he comes from an age remote from ours doesn’t make such a wound any the less painful.”

  “It’s the feeling of unfairness it gives you,” Blakemore said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of man he is. When someone hates you irrationally it’s hitting below the belt. You keep asking yourself why, and there’s no answer.”

  “There is an answer, I’m afraid,” Faran said. “As for the wound—there won’t be any flow of blood. The age from which we’ve just come can’t deal you a direct physical blow with Malador where he is now. And I don’t think you’ll want to visit that age when you’ve heard what I’m going to tell you.

  “A later age, yes—but not that one. That’s why it’s important for you to know what we found out about it. The early years of the twenty-second century foreshadow, as perhaps no other age could, what life on earth may be like a thousand years from now.

  “If we’d traveled a century into the future and found no trace of your wheat—we’d have had good reason to feel that the battle had been lost. But we found a great deal more than a trace. Not the present field, of course, but a harvest yield fifty thousand times as abundant.

  “Not only has that field been duplicated thousands of times around the world. There are apple orchards, acres of plum, cherry and pear trees, banana and melon plantations, and fields of corn just as golden—all utilizing the soil-restoring techniques you’ve worked out.”

  Blakemore was almost sure, from the intent way that Faran was staring at him, that his expression had frozen into a strange mixture of wonderment and disbelief. He had difficulty in keeping unsteadiness out of his voice.

  “I thought it might be just barely possible, a century from now,” he said. “But when I considered what it would cost—”

  “The cost has come close to exhausting the resources of every nation on earth,” Faran said. “You see, there are still separate nations in the early years of the twenty-second century. But they are bound together in a loose confederation. A confederation of that nature gives tyranny on decision-making levels a better opportunity to flourish than would a World State, where it would have to be more rigorously curtailed. It is unfortunate that it should be so, for it is not too bad a governmental system otherwise. It has at least eliminated war.”

  Faran paused for an instant to stare seaward, as if the Atlantic’s gray immensity symbolized for him the height and depth and width of the governmental systems which had been explored and discarded since the Dawn Age.

  “There are two ways,” he said, “of trying to recapture the special qualities that separate one age from another. You can set ten thousand scholars to writing books about an age in walled-off cubicles and you’ll have as many volumes to consult in a surprisingly short time. But I can hardly choose that way now.

  “Another way, perhaps the best way, is to try to recapture the inner essence of an age by considering how—and to what extent—its dominant characteristics may have been shaped by the age immediately preceding it. You ignore everything but the characteristics which stand out to such an extent that they fairly leap at you.

  “Straight for the jugular, perhaps, like a suddenly materializing werewolf. I’ve said that, barring some unexpected cataclysm, a century does not provide enough time for the shadows, in an age like the present, to do more than lengthen and deepen.

  “All right. Think first of the early years of the twenty-second century as an age of steadily deepening shadows. An age, also, in which technology, particularly in the categories associated with weapon-making, has taken a considerable leap forward. You can put that down, if you wish, to the desperate need that men faced with starvation have for weapons.

  “Now—introduce one other factor, the most crucial one of all. The tyranny, often unconsciously motivated, and present—I’m referring, of course, to the need to exercise it—even in men of good will.

  “There are many different kinds of tyranny and some of them are motivated by greed or an insensate grab for power. But fright alone can bring about a very terrible kind of tyranny. In the early years of the twenty-second century there are hundreds of men and women on decision-making levels who have become remorseless tyrants simply because of the Big Scare.”

  “The Big Scare?” Blakemore asked curiously.

  “Yes, I can think of no better name for it,” Faran said, nodding. “After long years of famine, of deprivation and human wretchedness, with people dying like flies everywhere, a man can become so conditioned by fear that he cannot rejoice in a sudden change for the better. Both his emotions and his thinking will have become almost pathologically distorted.”

  “But I can’t quite see how that would make him a tyrant.”

  “Listen carefully and I think you will. He’ll ask himself all kinds of tormenting questions. How long can an abundance of food, in a few scattered areas, last? What if some future blight should wipe out all of the gains? Would it not be a mistake to distribute even a small part of it?

  “Why do some men become misers? It’s usually because, in their youth, they’ve endured some memory-searing deprivation. To have it happen again would be unthinkable and they go right on hoarding, ten, twenty times as much wealth as they could possibly need—or a thousand times as much.

  “Don’t you see? Men on a decision-making level, so afflicted, can honestly come to believe that by refusing to distribute available food where it is most needed they are acting with sobriety and far-sightedness, in the public interest. All of the wheat must be hoarded and guarded, encircled by high walls that would be suicidal for a starving man to scale.

  “There wasn’t sufficient food being grown a century from now to justify not withholding perhaps a third of it, purely as a safeguard. But nothing can justify not distributing the other two-thirds to the starving. Actually, nine-tenths of it is being withheld. In some localities, the entire yield. An East Indian famine at its very worst couldn’t equal some of the horrors we’ve seen.”

  Faran stared out over the sea again, as if he still saw beneath the waves the city of dreadful night, but changed now from a prison-guarded metropolis to a city in which no attempt was being made to keep the inhabitants from destroying themselves as they fought with one another for scraps of food, or leapt from high terraces to the darkly-stained pavements far below.

  “There’s one thing I’m not absolutely sure about,” Faran continued. “Did Malador recognize your wheat by the fields distinguishing characteristics, and realize he was in the actual presence of a hated symbol from another age that could still be attacked and destroyed? The violence of his rage is easy to understand. Up to that moment the wheat you’ve grown must have seemed to a man from the twenty-second century forever safe from human destruction, simply because both the wheat and the grower had ceased to exist. You cannot exact retribution from the dead. But when he realized that he had been mistaken—

  “Well, that seems the most likely possibility. That he did actually recognize the field. But it’s not inconceivable that he was enraged beyond endurance because, being walled in, it bears a close resemblance to the many, securely-guarded fields that had made the gaunt specter of starvation so terrible a reality to him.

  “What makes me feel otherwise, however, is the fact that crude drawings of your field were everywhere. Crude—but accurate and detailed enough. They showed the lighthouse, the sea wall, the distant breakwater which looks like the skeleton of whale stranded on a sand bar, the width and curvature of the beach and even the way a few stalks of wheat tower above the sea wall on the landward side.

  “Apparently the field, as it exists today, has not escaped the attention of photographers with sufficient prophetic insight to know
that it will soon become legendary. Microfilm reproductions of it were probably projected on wide screens, and in depth for a great many years before men on decision-making levels decided it was not too good an idea to let starving men and women dwell on something that could make them so embittered and enraged that they would demand to know why a field of wheat grown a century ago was being praised so highly when nothing that had come of it was of the slightest benefit to them.”

  Faran was staring at Blakemore now as if what he felt he had to say he would have much preferred to leave unspoken.

  “When that land of rage and hatred is driven underground it can take an ugly turn. Graffiti. You know where they are most often encountered, both in verbal and pictorial form. No one in the early years of the twenty-second century could have failed to read what was said about the wheat you’ve grown, for the impulse to add a comment or two to the rude drawing of some vilified symbol becomes irresistible at times. “Hatred feeds on hatred and—well.”

  “So that’s the dark side of the picture you promised you’d get around to eventually,” Blakemore said. “You said it would seem darker to me than it does to you—and you’re right. I’ve always thought of my wheat as something—well, rather shining. I had to. And there’s nothing exactly shining about a graffito, no matter where it’s found.”

  “Time’s verdict will erase all that. Listen to me, boy. A man and his work may be reviled in one age, placed on a high pedestal in another. And that’s sure to happen.”

  Faran was staring a little farther along the beach, to a point midway between the breakers and the sea wall and when he continued Blakemore was almost sure that he was visualizing as he spoke what had taken place there.

  “We were all on the beach,” Faran was saying. “Malador had the weapon with him. He was showing us how to operate it. We’d asked him for a demonstration, more to satisfy our curiosity than anything else. There was a gull wheeling and dipping offshore and we were curious to see how quickly he could bring it down. Then Roger would have taken a crack at it. I had no particular desire to, and, as I’ve said, I’m not sure I could operate it now if my life depended on it.