Hudd blinked at Cameron with shrewd weary eyes.
“Now, I’m sending out another party.” His voice turned decisive. “Captain Rory Doyle will be in command—under the advice of my liaison man, of course—and Doyle wants you two with him. You are taking off in two hours. Your first object will be to learn what happened to Fort America.”
Hudd put his great hands flat on the desk and came laboriously to his feet, puffing with the effort. For all his gross bulk, however, he made a towering figure, dynamic and impressive still. Shrewd and imperious, his small eyes burned into Cameron.
“You had better find out.” With a visible effort at control, he lowered his violent voice. ‘‘Your mission is important. I believe the Directorate has been overthrown, and I intend to restore it. I’ve got plutonium enough to smash the earth. The first necessity, however, is to learn what has happened. I believe you can anticipate the consequence to yourselves of failure.”
“I think we can, Mr. Hudd,” said Cameron.
My heart began to thump, with an excited and somewhat apprehensive expectation.
II
Life-craft 18 was a trim steel missile, lying snug in its berth-tube amidships of the Great Director. Eighty feet long and slim as a pencil, it had its own ion-drive, a regular crew of six, and plenty of additional space for our party.
Captain Rory Doyle met us at the valves. He was a big man, red-haired, straight and handsome in the gray of the Atomic Service. Under party supervision, he and Cameron had rescued a scout ship sunk in a liquid nitrogen sea on the inner planet of the Dark Star. He was capable, fearless, and loyal to Hudd. Smiling, he welcomed us aboard his swift little craft.
His crew of able spacemen helped us stow our space armor, and made ready to launch. Our take-off time went by, while Doyle scowled at his wrist chronometer, keeping the valves open.
“Waiting for Victor Lord,” he muttered. “The Squaredealer."
Only his impatient tone suggested any dislike for Squaredealers—and even that was indiscreet.
Lord came swaggering insolently aboard, twenty minutes late. He was a tiny man, very erect and precise in his gray uniform—with the gold squares of the Machine instead of the blazing atoms of the Service. He had tight brown skin over a hard narrow face, with heavy lids drooping over pale yellow eyes. His long black hair had a varnished slickness. Strutting between his two tall bodyguards, he looked like a peevish dwarf.
He didn’t bother to return Doyle’s correct salute.
“You know my status, Doyle.” His high, nasal voice was deliberately overbearing. “My duty here is to oversee your performance of this important mission. We’ll have no trouble —if you just keep in mind that one word from me can break you.”
He paused to blink at Doyle, with a sleepy-lidded arrogance. Success in the Squaredeal Machine required brutality, and Lord, I knew, stood second only to Julian Hudd. Haughtily, he added:
“You may take off, now.”
"Yes, Mr. Lord.”
The Squaredealer s petulant insolence may have been nothing more than a compensation for his size, but still I didn’t like him. His yeDow eyes were shifty; his narrow forehead sloped and his nose was too big; his whole expression was one of vicious cunning.
Doyle turned quickly away, perhaps to conceal his own resentment. He ordered the valves closed and climbed the central ladder-well to his bridge. A warning-horn beeped, and we cast off.
In the acceleration-lounge, we hung weightless for a few seconds as we dropped away from the flagship; then the thrust of our own ion-drive forced, us back into the cushions with a 2-G acceleration.
I turned in the padded seat to look back through a small port. Against the dead black of space, I glimpsed the enormous bright projectile-shapes of the Great Director and the Valley Forge—coupled nose-to-nose with a long cable, spinning slowly, like a toy binary to create an imitation gravity.
Earth, close beside them, was a huge ball o( misty wonder. The twilight zone made a long crimson slash between the day-side and the night. Dull greens and browns and blues were all patched with the dazzling white of storms.
All the hope and longing of twenty years burst over me when I saw the earth, in a sudden flood of choking emotion. My wet eyes blurred that splendid view. I sat grappling in vain with that shocking mystery of spreading forest, abandoned farmlands, and jungle-buried cities, until Victor Lord’s high nasal voice recalled me to the life-craft.
“Feather merchants, huh?” Sitting pygmy-like between his two husky guards, Lord turned condescendingly to Cameron. “But Hudd insisted you must come. Let’s have your expert opinion.”
He stressed the adjective too strongly, but Cameron answered quietly, “I rather expect we’ll find the ultimate result of what the old economists used to call the division of labor.”
At the time, I failed to see the real significance of the interchange that followed, though it proved the key to much that happened later. I was merely annoyed at Cameron, and increasingly alarmed, because his talk plainly angered Lord.
“Explain!” Lord rapped.
“If you like—though I’m afraid the historical principle runs counter to Squaredeal ideology.” Cameron was a little too grave. “Because I don’t believe the Directorate was created by Tyler’s unique statesmanship, or even by the emergent dictatorship of the common man. It was, I think, just one of the end-products of the division of labor.”
Lord blinked his beady eyes, apparently uncertain whether this was double-talk or high treason. I kicked Cameron’s foot, vainly trying to keep him quiet.
Explain yourself,” Lord commanded.
“Nothing to it,” Cameron said. “The division of labor was hailed as something wonderful—before its unpleasant final consequences came to light. One man made arrows, another hunted, and they both had more to eat. That was very fine, back in the stone age.”
Cameron stretched out his legs, cheerful and relaxed.
“But it went a little farther, in the modem world. Division of labor divided mankind, setting special interest against the common good. It made specialists in mining coal, in scientific research—even in political power, Mr. Lord. The specialists formed pressure groups, each fighting to advance its own class interest—with weapons incidentally created by that same division of labor.
“When specialists fight, the winners are apt to be the experts in war,” Cameron continued innocently. “Thus government becomes a function of military technology, which of course derives from the basic industrial technology. The prevailing form of government, therefore—dictatorship or democracy—depends on the current status of the division of labor. That interesting relation of technology and politics was pointed out by the old philosopher, Silas McKinley."
Lord’s sleepy eyes glittered suspiciously.
“He’s forbidden I Where do you keep such pernicious literature?”
Cameron grinned. "Once I had permission to do some research in Mr. Hudd’s very excellent library.”
“You’re apt to suffer for the dangerous ideas you acquired there,” Lord commented acidly. “Now what’s this nonsense, about technology and government?”
“Political power reflects military power,” Cameron cheerfully explained. “When war is fought with cheap, simple weapons, easy for the amateur to use, then the military importance of the ordinary citizen is reflected in his political freedom. Democracy in America was established by the flintlock and maintained by Colt’s revolver.
“But democracy is always threatened by an increase in specialization, especially military specialization. When weapons are expensive and complicated, requiring a class of military experts, then the ordinary man can’t defend his rights—and he therefore has no rights.
"Democracy was murdered, on a desert in New Mexico, in 1945. Already, for a hundred years, the increasing division of labor had been forcing it into slow decline. The same specialization that created the bomber and the tank had already reduced the free citizen to a pathetic little man at the mercy of
the corporation manager, the union leader, and the party bureaucrat.
“The atom bomb was the end of freedom. Because it was the final limit of specialization. The most complicated and costly weapon ever, its production required a fantastically complex division of labor. Government followed the trend of technology, and totalitarian control destroyed the individual.” Sitting half upright in the long reclining chair, Cameron gave the little Squaredealer his wry, sardonic grin.
“Tyler thought he had conquered the world,” he concluded. “But really it was just division of labor that created the new technology of atomic war, and so destroyed the whole world’s freedom. It was just the trend of specialization that made the Directorate and flung Tyler to the top of it—no more responsible than a pebble flung up by a wave.”
Pressed deep in the cushions, Lord sat peering back with confused suspicion in his yellow eyes. Fortunately for Cameron, he was now concerned with dangers more immediate than ideological heresy. His nasal voice rasped angrily:
“Well? What happened then—according to your theory?” Cameron answered with an easy grin.
“Quite likely, the division of labor broke down at last.” “Watch your manner, Mister.” Lord clearly didn’t like his grin. “What could break it down?”
“Rebellion, perhaps.” Cameron was properly respectful. “For America had a permanent garrison of nine thousand specialists in death. They were prepared to devastate any part of the earth—or all of it. Perhaps they were just too thorough.”
Uneasily, the little Squaredealer licked his thin lips.
“Then why should the fort itself be silent?”
“Disease, perhaps—some biological weapon out of control.” In Cameron’s blue eyes, I caught a faint glint of malicious amusement. “Or famine—maybe they left the earth unable to feed them. Or natural cataclysm.”
Lord fought the acceleration-pressure, to sit bolt upright. His bleak narrow face was filmed with sweat of effort— and of fear.
“Cataclysm?” He peered into Cameron’s lean, sardonic face. “Explain!”
“Twenty years at space has shown us the insensate hostility of the universe.” Cameron’s low voice deepened my own unease. “Man lives at the mercy of blind chance, surviving only through a peculiar combination of improbable factors. Just suppose we find the earth stripped of oxygen.” He grinned at Lord, satanically. “As efficiently as the planets of the Dark Star were robbed of uranium?”
Before we reached the moon, Lord had turned a sallow green with acceleration-sickness.
Fort America was hidden beneath a crater in the tawny desolation of the Mare Nubium. We wheeled above the mountain ring, just above the highest crags, searching the dozen miles of barren floor.
“It hasn’t changed!” I whispered to Cameron. “The valves, the roads, the docks—just as they used to be!” I tried to point through the small quartz port. “There’s where the Great Director stood.”
“But it has changed.” Cameron glanced at me; and the strong glare of the moonscape, striking his haggard face from below, made his habitual sardonic expression seem oddly diabolic. “It’s abandoned, now.”
And I remembered. Great trucks once had rolled over that white web of roads. Colored signal lights had blinked and flickered from the domes over the pits. Tall, tapered ships had stood like rows of silver pillars on the immense, dark fields.
But now the crater was an empty bowl. The lowering sun made all the westward rim a jagged lip of shattered ebony. Sharp fingers of the dark crept across the empty miles, to clutch the empty domes and seize the empty roads.
Nothing moved, anywhere. No metal flashed beneath the sun. No signals flickered, now, out of the cold, increasing shadow. Men had been here once, armed with atomic science, bold with conquest. Now they were gone.
Yet the crater wasn’t empty, quite—for it held a riddle. What had silenced man’s greatest citadel? Cold dread sank into me, out of that black, expanding shadow. The brooding mystery of it numbed my senses like some spreading biotoxin.
We landed at last, well out in the retreating sunlight, on a concrete road near one of the valves. We clambered into space-armor—Cameron and I, and Captain Doyle. Laden with assorted equipment, we scrambled one by one through the small air-lock, leaping clumsily down to the moon.
Victor Lord remained aboard. He was ill. I believe his apprehensive thoughts had fastened too strongly on Cameron’s malicious suggestion of interstellar invasion. I think he expected us to encounter unearthly monsters lurking down in the pits and tunnels.
Beside the bright spire of the life-craft, we set up a portable radiation counter and a neutron detector. The counter started flashing rapidly, and 1 couldn’t stop an apprehensive gesture toward the valves.
“Dangerous intensity!” My voice rang loud and strange in the spherical helmet. “The residue, maybe, from atomic weapons—though I don’t see any craters.”
But Cameron was shaking his head, which looked queerly magnified inside the thick, laminated bubble of his helmet.
“Just the normal secondary activity, excited by our own ion-blast.” His voice came on the microwave phone, dulled and distorted. “I think it’s safe for us to go on.”
Moving clumsily with all our equipment, we moved a hundred yards to try again. Now the counter showed only the normal bombardment of solar and cosmic rays.
“Come along!” Doyle’s deep voice roared in my phones. “Have a look—here’s a whole row of wrecks. The mutineers must have caught them sitting. They’re blown all to scrap.”
Beside a huge deserted dock of gray pumice-concrete, he had discovered the dismembered remnants of half a dozen vessels. We approached cautiously, and paused again to test for dangerous radiations. There were none—for these skeletons of space-craft had been stripped by something other than mutiny.
This-had been a repair-dock. Suddenly sheepish, Doyle pointed at abandoned cranes and empty jet-pits. The apparent wrecks had merely been cannibalized—their plates and valves and jets ripped out to repair other vessels.
“No mutiny!” Doyle made a disgusted sound. “Let’s look below.”
For the actual fort was far beneath the crater. A vast web of tunnels, sheltered hangars, shops, barracks, magazines. The launching tubes, trained forever on the earth, were hidden in deep pits. Somewhere in that sublunar labyrinth, we could hope to find our riddle answered.
The nearest entrance shaft was topped with a low dome of concrete, piled with pumice boulders by way of camouflage. The great armored valve was closed, unrusted, quite intact. Doyle spun a bright little wheel, outside.
“I was stationed here, before they picked me for the task force,” he said. “A robot-missiles officer—used to know my way around.”
The massive steel wedge failed to move, and Doyle turned to another, larger wheel. It resisted, and I came to help. Stubbornly, it yielded. The great wedge sank slowly.
“Power’s off.” Doyle was breathless with effort. "Manual emergency control!”
We shuffled at last into the huge dark chamber of the lock. Our battery lights cast flickering, fantastic shadows. Peering at a row of dials and gauges on the curved steel wall, Doyle punched a series of buttons.
Suddenly I felt a faint vibration. The huge wedge lifted behind us, shutting out the dark and harsh-lit moonscape. The chamber was a steel-jawed trap. I felt a tense unease, and the sudden boom of Doyle’s voice startled me.
"The main power lines are dead. That’s an emergency generator, with a chemical engine—there’s one at each valve, to work the controls and energize the instruments.” He scanned the dials again. “Air inside—seven pounds. Better test it.”
When he turned another wheel, air screamed into the chamber. It brought back sound—the clink of our equipment, the clatter of our armored boots, the throb of the emergency engine beneath the metal deck.
We tested it. The counter gave only an occasional click and flash. I broke the glass nipple off a regulation testing tube, and Cameron leaned clumsily
beside me to study the reaction of the colored paper indicators.
“Okay,” he said. “Safe.”
We took off our armor. The. air was fresh, but icy cold— we exhaled white mist. Hopefully, Doyle tried the telephone in the box beneath the dials. Dead silence answered him. Shivering—perhaps to a sense of something colder than the freezing air—he hung it up and opened the inner valve. The emergency power system didn’t work the elevators. We climbed down a black ladder-well, into the silent citadel.
III
Fort America was dead.
The thrumming of the little emergency engine was muffled, as we climbed on down, and finally lost. We descended into appalling silence. So long as we moved, there was a comfortable rustle and clatter. When we stopped to listen, there was nothing at all.
Everywhere, power lines were dead. Midnight shadows retreated grudgingly from our little battery lamps, and lay in wait at every turning. Beyond was total dark.
The heating system must have been shut off, months or years before, for the cold was numbing. Sweat had dampened my wool lined suit, in the heated armor, and now it was icy on my back. The chill of the rung sank through my thin gloves; my fingers were stiff and aching long before we reached a horizontal passage.
Gruesome expectations haunted me. I looked for frozen corpses, twisted with agony from quick biotoxins, or charred with atomic heat. Queerly, however, we found no mark of violence, nor any evidence of human death.
“They’re just—gone!” Even the deep voice of Captain Doyle held a certain huskiness of dread. “Why—I can’t imagine. Nothing wrong, no sign of any trouble.” He caught his breath, squared his shoulders. “We’ve got to find the answer. Let’s try the commandant’s office.”
He led the way along a black and soundless lateral tunnel, and opened an unlocked door. The series of rooms beyond was deserted—and quite in order. Empty chairs were neatly set behind the empty desks. Dead telephones were neatly racked in their cradles. Pens in their stands were neatly centered on green blotters, with the ink dried up.
The Best of Jack Williamson Page 23
