“He’ll be sorry.” She buckled the cloak at her throat and crossed the room on lingering feet, pressing each step into the resilient flooring she would probably never walk again except out of curiosity, perhaps a century from now. “How strange it will all look then,” she thought. “Dark and stifling, I expect, after so long in the free air. We’ll wonder how we ever stood it. Oh dear, I wish Sam Reed had never been born.”
Zachariah held the door for her. “Our plans will still go forward, landside,” he said. “I checked about your . . . your time-bomb. Parents and child are safe up there, in a sheltered job.”
“I wish,” Kedre declared, “that it had been a boy. Still—this may make a better weapon, after all. And it isn’t our only weapon, of course. Sam has got to be stopped. We may have to use weapons as disreputable as the ones he’s used against us, but we’ll stop him. We have time on our side.”
Zachariah, watching her face, said nothing at all.
“I knew you were up to something,” Hale said, “when you let all those mutineers go. It isn’t like you to let anything go you can use.” Sam looked at him under meeting brows. “You wanted to colonize landside,” he said uncompromisingly “Well, this is it.”
“Robot submarines, robot planes, remote control—and a long-term plan,” Hale said amusingly, and shook his head. “Well, you’ve done it. No one else in the world could have, but you did.”
“After twelve years,” Sam told him calmly, “they’ll be pretty well acclimated. After another twelve—and maybe another—they’re going to like it up here so well you couldn’t drive them back. Remember you told me once what makes pioneers? Push plus pull. Bad home conditions or a .Grail somewhere else. The Grail wasn’t enough. Well—” He shrugged.
Hale was silent for almost a minute, regarding Sam with his steady stare that had seen so much on Venusian landside before now. Finally he spoke.
“Remember what happened to Moses, Sam?” he asked gently, and then, like a classic prototype, turned and went out of the room, not staying for an answer.
The race struck roots and grew. Slowly at first, reluctantly, but with gathering vigor. And down in the deserted Keeps, in the first few days after the departing thousands had gone, for a little while life still moved through the strange new silence of the dying cities.
There were those who did not choose to leave. Some of the old people who had always lived here and could not face life above water, some of the ill who preferred the slow, comfortable death that had been provided for them. Some of the drug addicts. Silently in the deathly silence they moved through the empty shells. Never before since mankind first colonized Venus had such silence dwelt beneath the domes. You could hear the slowing Ways sighing on their rounds. You could hear strange, vague underwater noises transmitted from the great sounding-boards of the city shells. You could hear sometimes the shuffling footsteps of some fellow wanderer.
But after a little while all footsteps ceased, and all sounds except the echoes from the seas outside.
The thick walls shivered in the thunder of bombardment. In Sam’s hand the stylus danced upon the suddenly shaking paper. His desk top shook, and the chair he sat in, and the floor quivered rhythmically and was still. Sam grimaced without knowing it. This was the third day of the bombardment, and he had shut his mind to the minor irritations of the unstable walls.
A young woman in a sleekly severe brown tunic bent forward, watching him write, her black hair falling in short, straight wings across her face. She pulled the page off the pad almost before his stylus had finished writing, and went quickly across the trembling floor to her own desk. There was a televisor on it, and she spoke rapidly, in a soft, clear voice, into the transmitter. In a dozen other visors scattered about the vast, beleaguered fort her tanned face was the target for intense attention as Sam’s lieutenants received their latest orders. In a dozen visors her violet-blue eyes looked out narrowed with intentness, her velvety voice gave incongruously stern messages.
“All right,” Sam said wearily when she had finished. “All right, Signa, send in Zachariah now.”
She rose with a smooth precision of motion that was beautiful to watch, and went quickly across the floor. The door she opened led not directly into the waiting room beyond, but into a little space lock that could be bathed at a touch by searcher beams to catch the presence of any weapon a man might try to smuggle past it. Sam took no chances. It didn’t seem to matter much now—perhaps he had too long mistaken personal safety for group safety. The bombardment roared again and for the first time a long delicate crack went flashing like slow lightning down one wall. The space lock would seem futile enough when the walls themselves began to go. But for a little while longer it must be used.
Two guards came in at Signa’s beckoning, and paused perfunctorily in the lock and stood back for their prisoner to take his turn in the invisible bath of the beams. Two more guards came after.
Zachariah had a cut lip and a darkening bruise on one side of his ageless face, but he looked remarkably confident in spite of his manacles. Except for his tan he had changed little. He was still head of the Harker clan, and the Harkers were still the most influential family on Venus. But if Sam’s coup in capturing the leader of the attacking forces meant anything, Zachariah did not show it.
Twenty years had not been a very long time.
The Keeps were still uninhabitable. The change-over to landside living had come very gradually, but it was complete by now. The signal for completion had been sounded on that day when instruments first showed that the atmosphere of Venus had at last shifted over to an ecology balance that matched Earth’s. Crab grass and earth-native herbs with a high oxygen output had finally tipped the scale. From now on, this continent could be left to itself, botanically speaking. For the plants had changed the air. The heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere in which Venusian flora flourished would foster them no longer. What is normal for Earth-born plants is poison for the Venus-grown things that were so often neither plant nor animal, but a deadly symbiosis of the two.
It was this shift that the spreading colonies had been awaiting.
It was this war that came of the shift.
“Zachariah,” Sam said in a weary voice, “I want you to call off your men.”
Zachariah looked at him narrowly, not without sympathy, trying as he had so often tried, in vain, to trace some likeness to the Harker blood that ran in them both. “Why should I do that, Sam?” he asked.
“You’re in no position to bargain. I’ll have you shot unless this attack’s stopped by noon. Step over here—you can use my telecaster.”
“No Sam. You’re finished. This time you can’t win.”
“I’ve always won before. I can do it again.”
“No,” Zachariah said, and paused for a moment, thinking of those many times in the past when Sam had won—easily, scornfully, because of his impregnable defenses built up so cannily in years of peace. When the Immortality bubble broke completely, there had been rash, furious, tragically futile assaults upon this great white fortress that sheltered the most powerful man on Venus.
“We aren’t guerillas,” Zachariah said calmly. “We’ve been building up to this attack since the day you pirated our korium with the depth-bomb threat. Remember, Sam? You haven’t made many mistakes in strategy, but you should have checked the equipment we took land-side with us when we left the Keeps. A lot of it was stuff we’re using now.” He looked at the jagged lightning-streak that was creeping down the wall as the bombardment went on. “This time we’ve got you, Sam. You’ve been building for defense a long time—but not as long as we’ve built toward this offense.”
“You’re forgetting something.” Sam’s head ached from the incessant vibration. It made talking difficult. “You’re forgetting yourself. You aren’t really willing to be shot rather than call off the attack, are you?”
“That’s something you couldn’t understand, isn’t it?”
Sam shook his head impatiently. “You’d
have attacked twenty years ago if you were as strong as you pretend. You aren’t fooling me, Harker. I’ve never been licked yet.”
“We’ve needed you—until now. You’ve lived on sufferance, Sam. Now it’s over. This bombardment isn’t only guns. It’s the . . . the pressure of human emotions you’ve held down too long. You’ve tried to bring progress to a full stop at the level of your choosing, and you can’t do it, Sam. Not you or anybody. For twenty years that pressure’s been building up. You’re finished, Sam.”
Sam slammed the vibrating desk top with an angry fist. “Shut up!” he said. “I’m sick of talk. I’ll give you sixty seconds to make up your mind, Harker. After that—you’re finished.”
But there was in his mind as he said it a nagging uneasiness he could not quite name. His unconscious mind knew the answer. It nagged at him because Zachariah’s capture had been too easy. Sam’s conscious awareness had not recognized the incongruity yet; perhaps his vanity would not permit it. But he knew something was wrong about the setup.
He glanced nervously around the room, his eyes pausing for a moment, as they so often did, on the blue-eyed girl at the desk across the room. She was watching everything in alert, tight-lipped silence, missing nothing. He knew he could trust her. It was a heart-warming assurance to have. He knew because of the exhaustive psychological and neurological tests that had winnowed-out all applicants except the half-dozen from which Signa had been chosen.
She was eighteen, Keep-born, landside-bred, when she first-entered the Fort as a clerical worker. All of them were screened thoroughly, of course. All of them were indoctrinated from the first with the precepts Sam’s psychologists had worked out. But Signa rose faster than most toward the top. Within a year she was an assistant secretary in the restricted building that housed administration. Within six months from then she was a secretary with an office of her own. And then one day Sam, looking over applicants for his personal staff, was rather surprised to find a woman’s name among those with top-flight test ratings. One interview clinched the appointment for her.
She was twenty-five now. She was not Sam’s mistress, though few in this Fort would have believed it. Periodically she underwent further tests, under narcosynthesis, to make sure her emotional reactions had not changed. So far they had not. She was utterly to be trusted and Sam’s efficiency would be halved, he knew, if he had to work without her now.
He could see that something was troubling her. He knew her face so well the slightest shadow on it was recognizable. There was a crease between her brows as she looked at Zachariah, and an expression of faint uncertainty, of puzzled anticipation flickered in her eyes.
Sam looked at his wrist. “Forty seconds,” he said, and pushed back his chair. Every eye in the room followed him as he went over to the far wall, the wall where the long crack was widening, and flicked a switch in a six-foot frame. A shuttered screen, filling in the frame, began to open slowly. From behind it a faint, sweet, infinitely seductive humming swelled. Sam was reaching for the lid of a box set into the wall beside the frame when a buzz at Signa’s visor interrupted him.
“For you, Sam,” she said in a moment. “Hale.”
He flicked the switch again, closing the screen, and went rapidly across the room. The Free Companion’s brown unaging face looked up at him from the tilted visor. “You alone, Sam?”
“No. Wait, I’ll switch to earphones.”
The face in the screen grimaced impatiently. Then, at Sam’s signal the face vanished again and Hale’s voice buzzed in his ears, unheard except by Sam.
“There’s been a breakthrough,” Hale said crisply.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. Vibration did it. I told you I thought that plastic was too rigid. It’s down in the lower court. They’ve already manned some of our own guns and swiveled them around. The upper bailey’s going to start getting it in about five minutes. Sam—I think there’s been a leak somewhere. They shouldn’t even know how those needle guns work. But they do.”
Sam was silent, his mind flickering rapidly from possibility to possibility. Hale himself was as suspect as any. It had been a long, long while since Sam had trusted the Free Companion. But he had made grimly certain of Hale’s loyalty by insuring that public opinion bracketed the two men together. Hale profited by Sam’s methods. Sam made sure all Venus knew it. He made sure that Hale’s part in originating unpopular ideas—from the Immortality swindle on down—was fully publicized. It was fairly certain that Hale would have to back Sam up in all he did, if only to save his own hide.
“I’ve got Zachariah here,” he said into the transmitter. “Come up, will you?” He slipped off the earphones and turned back to his prisoner. “Your minute’s up,” he said.
Zachariah appeared to hesitate. Then he said, “I’ll talk to you, Sam on one condition. Privacy. We’ll have to be alone for what I have to say.”
Sam opened his desk drawer, took out a flat pistol and laid it on the vibrating desk-top, his palm over it. “You’ll talk now, Zachariah Harker,” he said, “or I’ll shoot you. Right between the eyes.” He lifted the pistol and regarded Zachariah down its barrel, seeing the serene Immortal face half blocked out by blued steel.
Silence. Then from far off, muffled by walls, the unmistakable piercing wail of a needle-gun bolt split the air of the inner fort. Impact, dull thunder, and a long sliding crash. The walls shook briefly to a new tempo and the crack widened at Sam’s back.
Zachariah said, “You’d better let me talk to you, Sam. But if you’d rather shoot—shoot. I won’t say it until we are alone.”
Sam’s hesitation was not very long. He knew now he was more shaken than he had realized until this moment, or he would never have surrendered to a bluff. But he let the pistol sink slowly, and he nodded.
Signa rose. “All right, guards,” she said. They turned and went out through the still activated searcher lock. She put her finger on its switch and looked inquiringly at Sam. “Shall I go, too?”
“No,” Sam said. “Not you.” His voice was firm.
“Sam, I . . . I’d rather go.” She sounded oddly puzzled and distressed. It was Zachariah who spoke first.
“You stay, please,” he said. She gave him another of her strange glances, uncertain, troubled.
Sam watched them leaning his hands palm down on the desk and feeling the almost continuous vibrations of the bombardment. The air was pierced now and then by the screaming needle beams, and he did not like to think what was happening to his inner ring of defenses around the upper bailey.
“All right,” he said. “What is it? Talk fast, Harker. I’m in a hurry.”
Zachariah, hands still manacled behind him, crossed the room and stood looking out the bank of windows that framed a vista of distant sea.
“I’ll show you,” he said. “Come over here.”
Sam came impatiently across the shaken floor. “What? What is it?” He stood beside the Immortal, but a safe distance away, for caution was second nature to him, and looked down. “I don’t see a thing. What is it?”
Zachariah whistled the opening bars of Lilibulcro . . .
The room exploded with thunder.
Sam found himself reeling, choking, gasping for breath, with no clear idea of what had happened. A needle beam, he thought wildly. But then the whole room would be a shambles, and it was only himself, leaning one shoulder against the wall, shaking his head dizzily, breathing hard, who seemed affected.
He looked up. Zachariah still stood by the window, watching him with a kind of hard restrained pity. The room was untouched. And there was something the matter with Sam’s shoulder.
That was where the blow had caught him. He remembered now. He put up an unsteady hand to the numb area and then looked unbelievingly at his palm, filmed with clear red. Something moved across his chest. Incredulously he bent his head and saw that it was blood. The bullet must have come out just under the clavicle.
Signa’s soft, clear voice gasped, “Sam . . . Sam!”
/> “It’s all right . . . it isn’t bad.” He was reassuring her even before he lifted his head. Then he saw her standing behind his desk, the flat pistol held in both shaking hands. She was staring at him with great, terrified eyes and her mouth was a Greek square of strained effort. Her stare shifted from Sam to Zachariah and then back, and the incredulity in it was very near sheer madness.
“I. . . I had to do it, Sam,” she said in a harsh, thin whisper. “I don’t know why—there must have been a reason! I don’t understand—”
Zachariah broke in, his voice gentle. “It wasn’t enough, Signa,” he said. “You’ll have to try again, you know. Quickly, before he can stop you.”
“I know . . . I know.” Her voice was a gasp. Normally she was a good shot, fast and easy, but she brought the pistol up in both hands, steadying it like a schoolgirl, squinting past the barrel. Sam saw her finger begin to draw up on the trigger.
He didn’t want to do it. He would almost rather have risked the shot. But he dropped his right hand to his side, found through cloth the outlines of the tiny needle gun in his pocket, and shot from the hip without taking aim.
He did not miss.
For one long last moment, afterward, her eyes were wide and brilliantly violet, staring into his. Sam scarcely heard the thud of the dropping gun. He was meeting her blue stare and remembering another blue-eyed girl, very long ago, who had faced him like this and puffed oblivion in his face between her fingers.
He said, “Rosathe!” as if he had just remembered the name, and swung around toward Zachariah It was the same triangle, he thought savagely—Zachariah, Rosathe, Sam Reed—sixty years ago and now. There was no difference. But this time—
His fingers closed on the needle gun again and its bolt hissed again across the room. Zachariah, seeing it coming, made no move. But when it came within six inches of his chest it seemed to explode in midair. There was a scream of expended energy, a flare like a miniature nova, and Zachariah smiled unhurt into Sam’s eyes.
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