by William Tenn
"The Aaron? You mean the guard commandant."
"I do not mean the guard commandant," she told him imperiously. "I mean the Aaron. I want to speak to the Aaron direct. And you'll put me through immediately, if you know what's good for you."
The man stared at her. Then he walked to the string telegraph and began to pull on it in a series of rhythmic, staccato jerks. When he had finished and let go, it immediately began to jerk out a reply, tinkling, in the process, a tiny hammer and anvil to which it was attached. Rachel and he nodded when it had stopped, she in triumph, he with eyebrows raised and very respectfully. "All right," he said. "You're connected. Please feel free to use it as long as you like."
Rachel apparently felt free to use it very long indeed. While she worked away at the instrument, pausing every once in a while to hear a question or a response, Eric, still with hands achingly high above his head, took the opportunity to study his guards.
They all wore the skirts he had seen on Jonathan Danielson, short skirts with many, many small pockets. And their hair was tied in the back, Stranger fashion. Besides the bows with which they were armed, and the quivers of arrows, they each carried a single spear in a rather beautifully decorated back sling. But the spear was far too heavy to be used for anything but very close infighting, Eric judged. They looked very much like each other—like Jonathan Danielson—like Rachel. These people were inbred!
He found their warrior discipline highly questionable. Depending on the power and swiftness of their weapons, admittedly unique in the burrows, they were standing far too close to the prisoners. One or the other of them was constantly glancing at Rachel and trying to follow the conversation over the string telegraph. From time to time, all three of them would be looking at the girl. Two fast, tough warriors, like Roy and himself, might be able to take them, even from this position.
The Runner, thinking the same thoughts, nodded at him. Eric grinned.
Rachel called the officer of the guard to listen as the telegraph tinkled out a last response. "You two men," he said to Eric and Roy, in a relatively friendly voice. "You can lower your arms and do whatever you like. The Aaron says you are honored guests of our people, and I'm to serve as your escort. Anything you want, you ask me."
They walked past the guard post, leaving the other two men still on duty. "Well!" Eric said to Rachel. "This is more like it!"
She threw her arms around one of his and squeezed it. "I wanted you to come into our burrows as a free man and a proud one. That was the main reason I asked to speak to the Aaron, darling. But it turns out there are other reasons that make it a very good thing that I did. Our people were hardly hurt at all by the spray, but we know now we have to make our move very soon."
"The Plan, you mean? The Plan to hit back at the Monsters?"
"Yes. It goes into action immediately. There's a ship on the roof."
Eric came to a dead stop while he considered what she had said. "The roof" had to be the roof of the whole enormous Monster dwelling. And "a ship" meant only one thing: a spaceship. Could an entire spaceship—one large enough to transport dozens and dozens of Monsters—could it be accommodated on the roof of a single house? And wouldn't it destroy the house when it took off? He asked Rachel.
She shook her head impatiently. "They don't use rockets as our ancestors did. As far as we know, the ships that take off from the roof are combination lifeboats and ferry launches. We have good reason to believe they rendezvous with a mothership somewhere near Pluto. They enter the mothership and travel to the destination with her."
"But then—your Plan—"
Rachel kissed him. "I turn off here. I have to go to the headquarters of the Female Society and help assemble our neutralizers—now that we know they work. Everything has been set to go for a long time: we've been held up for lack of an effective neutralizer. I'll see you later in the Aaron's burrow, darling." She stopped on the verge of darting up a side corridor. "Feel free to ask the Aaron any question you want, Eric. I've made him understand what a dear, wonderful genius you are!"
And she was gone toward a slight glow in the far distance.
A few moments later, they came to a huge slab which completely blocked off the corridor, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The guard officer jerked out the password on the string telegraph which, at this point, entered a wall. In reply, the slab moved smoothly up into the air, disappearing into a snug socket that was cut out of the ceiling.
Eric heard Roy gasp—and agreed with him. The technology of these people! No wonder the homicidal spray had not wiped them out.
The slab slid down behind them, and they found themselves standing before a series of enormous burrows, each one larger than the great central meeting place of Mankind. Monster territory dwarfed these burrows, it was true, but Monster territory alone.
Hundreds of fat glow lamps hanging from the ceiling lit the place. Crowds of people moved about in these burrows, along the floor and along galleries which ran overhead. Any given crowd was the size of the whole population of Mankind. Eric sensed that there were more of them about than usual, and that they were moving faster than they normally did. There was a feeling of hurry, an urgency in the air. People seemed to be packing goods and assembling in groups, both according to some prearranged plan.
He asked the guard officer if this were so. "Yes," the man said, pulling at his lip and sighing. "We've been drilling at it ever since I was a kid. And today it stops being just a drill. It's like the difference between real battle and a parade. You guys know what I mean."
"I wouldn't like to leave a home as comfortable and as safe as this," Roy told him.
"Well, it's not safe anymore. That's the point. The Monsters have been reaching out for us: they've been getting closer and closer. And the Plan—the Plan is the Plan. You people came back with the last vital piece of information."
It took them a long time to reach the Aaron's burrow, and Eric had learned a great deal before they got there. He had passed rows of cages filled with rats that the Aaron People had managed to preserve for research connected with the Plan. He had never seen rats before. "As pests, they were indestructible," Rachel had told him. "As food, the legends say, they disappeared overnight."
He waited, highly disturbed, while the strong-looking old man, whose cascades of unbound white hair poured down to his shoulders, gave a few last orders to the throng of subordinate officials. "That should be it for a while," the Aaron said. "Don't bother me unless there's a real emergency—Mike Raphaelson will handle everything else. I want to speak to the man who made this day finally possible for us." He gestured at Eric with his outstretched hand, causing the officials to turn in the direction he pointed with startled, but nonetheless warm, smiles. Off to the right, where he was standing with the guard officer, Roy waved proudly and encouragingly.
"Now then, Eric the Eye, Eric the Only," the Aaron half-sung to himself, picking up a document from the large table in front of him and studying it. "Eric, who successfully planned and led the only escape from Monster cages ever achieved by a human being—let me ask you this: are you willing to join our people? Of course you are, of course you are," he went on before Eric had a chance to say a word. "Rachel Esthersdaughter is your mate, and you have no people of your own. You'll be initiated into the Male Society a few days after we're under way. I'll be your sponsor. We don't have a Theft for a test of manhood, as your tribe does—we have an Achievement. Your Achievement, of course, will be the escape. Quite an Achievement. After the ceremony, you'll say a few words. No dance of triumph, or anything like that: just a short speech. It's customary to recite the details of your Achievement—very superficially, you understand—then to thank everybody, then to sit down. Any questions? No, of course not—it's simple enough. Now, once you're officially a member of our people, I don't see why I couldn't—Yes, I think I will."
As he bent over the table, scribbling a note into a corner of the document, Rachel Esthersdaughter, accompanied by several members of the Female Society
, came out of a passageway nearby and stood behind him. Rachel, like the women with her, was again wearing an enormous neck-to-ankles cloak whose pockets were filled with equipment. Her dark brown eyes twinkled at Eric.
"The neutralizers all ready to be used?" the Aaron asked, not looking up from the document. "Good. You know your posts—move off. Rachel: you, of course, will stay with me at headquarters, wherever headquarters happens to be. Now, tell me, girl—I'm thinking of making this man of yours a section leader—do you like the idea? I'm sure you do. The leadership of Section 15 was vacant once you told us of Jonathan Danielson's death. Young man, do you think you can handle the lives and destinies of almost two hundred people? There will come a time when you will be alone in that position, when you will be exclusively in charge. Rachel will be your executive assistant, of course. I've put you down for it, and we'll settle the whole matter some time after your initiation. Let me see: we'll need the approval of a Council of the People, as well as the members of Section 15. No problem, there. To move on, however—"
"I don't think I can do it, sir!" Though Rachel had shut her eyes in a wince, he was pleased and astonished to find that he had actually managed to cut in.
The Aaron was even more astonished. He looked up from the document, turned around and studied Eric. Evidently, he was rarely interrupted. His flow of thought was listened to, taken as orders and acted upon.
"Eric, my boy," he said, clearly annoyed. "Please do not waste my time with modest noises. I am grappling with a major transition in the life of an entire people; I cannot be deflected for the purpose of administering first-aid to your ego. You commanded a pretty large group in the cages of the Monsters. You have been educated by Rachel, here, one of the finest minds among us. Anything else you need to know, I'll teach you myself, on the way. And if you're concerned about your front-burrow background, let me tell you this: in terms of our ultimate destination, the final goal of our plan, that background fits perfectly. You are an Eye, which none of us ever—"
"Pardon me, sir!" Eric broke in again. "But that's the reason I don't feel I can do it. It's not my capacity for leadership I'm questioning—it's the Plan. Let me explain," he said hurriedly to the Aaron's terrifying frown. "I didn't have any suspicion as to what the Plan was until I got here. I thought it was some combination of Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, a new way of hitting back at the Monsters. Then, when I heard about the ship, I had the wild idea that you people were going to take it over, to use their own weapons against the Monsters. All right, it was naive of me—I admit it. But what you're actually planning has nothing to do with hitting back at the Monsters. You're just running away from them."
The frown slowly disappeared from the old man's face. He nodded, as if to say, "Oh, that problem." He hitched himself carefully up on a corner of the table and thought for a bit. "Try to understand me, Eric," the Aaron said at last, in a totally different kind of voice. "Try to understand me: put your preconceptions aside for the moment. Alien-Science, Ancestor-Science—we were the first to believe in each of them, here in the Aaron People, and we were the first to discard each of them, many auld lang synes ago. The Plan we have in mind does combine both Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, but that is purely accidental. The Plan, we have come to believe, is the only real and valid way in which man can hit back at the Monsters. We are not running away from them, even though our position here has become more than a little untenable. We are running amongst them—directly amongst them, do you hear?—where we can hit back at them most effectively."
"Hit back at them how? As vermin?" Eric asked bitterly. "As vermin, stealing odds and ends from them for the rest of our existence as a race?"
A gentle, compassionate smile appeared on the Aaron's deeply lined face. "Eric, what do you think you are? What do you think you've learned to be best at all through your life in the burrows? Do you think you could change tomorrow and go back to planting crops or tending cattle—as your ancestors did? And if you could, would you want to?"
Eric opened his mouth and shut it again. He did not know what to say. He did not know what to think. Rachel slipped her hand into his and he found himself gripping it desperately.
"That's why we feel our Plan is thoroughly realistic. Our Plan recognizes a fact, Eric: that there are probably more people alive on Earth right now, living in the huge houses of the Monsters, than ever before in human history. And there's something else about human history that our Plan recognizes."
Clasping his arms on his chest, the Aaron shut his eyes and began rocking himself back and forth. His voice changed once more, this time to a kind of chant. "Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin—and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Nine days later, Eric stood on a ramp leading up to the Monster spaceship and, by the light of the moon, checked off on a repeatable slate the 192 members of Section 15 as they mounted past him on the way to embarkation.
He would never have believed it was possible to move literally thousands of men, women and children—the entire population of the Aaron People—so rapidly and so smoothly over such a vast distance. They had come from the very bottom burrows, over a route that went around and around in a gently ascending spiral through the layers of insulating material that packed the walls, all the way to a topmost hole that opened on the roof itself. They had lost not a single individual by accident or in battle, though they had passed across the territories of a hundred different tribes. Heavily armed men had seen to that, heavily armed men and experienced diplomatic officials who knew exactly when to negotiate, when to threaten and when to buy. Flying squads of trained emergency workers had swarmed to the scene of anything at all unusual; scholars and scouts had cooperated in selecting, from maps made long ago for this very journey, the best approaches and the most economical shortcuts.
It had been an incredible experience, an amazing performance by a whole society. But it had been in preparation for at least a full generation. Every one of the Aaron People had known exactly what to do.
He would never have believed what the Outside looked like—even after all that Rachel and the others had told him—until he had stood on the roof in the screaming sunlight and seen what it meant to have no ceiling at all, to be unable to observe a wall anywhere. At first, he had fought the terror—rising in his throat like a flood of vomit—simply to preserve his standing in the eyes of his section; but as he heard the whimpers behind him and realized that there were no sturdy explorers among his followers, only homebound artisans and their families, he had forgotten his own panic and gone among them, cheering and chiding and making suggestions. "Then don't look up if it's so upsetting." "Take care of your wife, you—she's fainted." "When you feel you just can't take it anymore, try kneeling and putting your hands on the floor of the roof. It's there, and it's solid."
Still, that first day had been pretty bad. The nights were better: there wasn't nearly as much open space to be seen. They traveled across the roof mostly at night, partly because they found it easier and partly because the Monsters seemed to dislike the night and were rarely abroad in it.
Now, they were embarking at night, climbing wearily up a ramp which led to a hold in which cargo was stacked. They were hurrying too: according to the records kept by the Aaron's planning staff, the ship was due to leave very shortly.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he crossed out the names which their owners announced, he could see his wife, Rachel Esthersdaughter, a dozen or so paces up
the ramp from him. She and ten other members of the Female Society were manipulating the unfolded sections of their neutralizers over the writhing orange ropes which lay across the ramp at regular intervals. These orange ropes were the reason that the Monsters felt so secure about leaving their cargo hold open and the ramp down. Unlike the green ropes back in the Cages of Sin, the orange ropes repelled protoplasm violently. It was impossible for a man to approach them in any way without being knocked flat on his back, at the least. Sometimes, they had killed those who got too close. But now the orange ropes wriggled and were harmless.
Eric remembered a comment he had heard at a section leaders' meeting the night before. "The Monsters develop their penetrating spray, and we develop our neutralizer. Everybody makes a breakthrough. Fair's fair."
Roy came up the ramp, waving his hand to indicate that the last of the section had preceded him. Eric checked his list: yes, every name was crossed out, every name but Rachel's. He put the slate under his arm and followed the Runner. Behind him, the leader of Section 16 took his place on the ramp and propped up a slate full of uncrossed names.
As he passed Rachel, Eric lingered for a moment and stroked her arm tenderly. "You look so tired, darling," he said. "Haven't you done enough on this job? You're pregnant."
Holding her neutralizer in place, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "There are five other pregnant women on this ramp, Eric, or hadn't you noticed? I'm on my last shift. I'll be joining you in the ship very soon."
At the entrance to the hold, where the crowd was still sorting itself out, a young man wearing the brassard of an expeditionary policeman had a message for him. "You're to join the Aaron up ahead. He's with the men assigned to cutting a hole in the wall. I'll take over your section."
Eric gave him his slate. "When my wife comes, please send her directly to me," he asked. Then he signaled Roy to follow and walked along the path indicated by men stationed every thirty or forty paces. Around them, on every side, were great containers piled up to the ceiling. The place was brightly lit, as he now expected Monster territory to be. Monsters left the lights on while they slept.
