Masters of Evolution

by Damon Knight

  But the strangest of all was to be looking at the City from this viewpoint. The towers stared back at him across the surrounding wall, tall and shining and proud, the proudest human creation—a century ago. Pitifully outdated today, the gleaming Cities fought back, unaware that they had lost long ago, that their bright spires and elaborate gadgets were as antiquated as polished armor would have been against a dun-painted motorized army.

  “I wish I could go with you,” said Beej from the breathing forest at his back.

  “You can’t,” Alvah replied without turning. “They wouldn’t let you through the gate alive. They know me, but even so, I’m not sure they’ll let me in after all this time. Have to wait and see.”

  “You know you don’t have to go. I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” said Alvah unhappily, “and you’re right. But all the same, I do have to go. Look Beej, you’ve got that map I drew. It’s a ten-to-one chance that, if I don’t make the grade, they’ll put me in the quarantine cells right inside the wall. So you’re not to worry. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she promised, worried.

  He kissed her and watched her fade back into the forest where the others were—Bither and Artie Brumbacher and a few others from home, the rest Jerseys and other clansmen from the Seaboard Federation—cheerful, matter-of-fact people who were going to bear most of the burden of what was coming, and never tired of reminding the inlanders of the fact.

  He turned and walked out across the wasteland, crunching the dry weeds under his feet.

  There was a flaming moat around the City and, beyond the moat, high in the wall, a closed gateway—corroded tight, probably; it was a very long time since the City had had any traffic except by air. But there was a spy tower above the gate. Alvah walked up directly opposite its bulbous idiot eyes, waved, and then waited.

  After a long time, an inconspicuous port in the tower squealed open and a fist-sized dark ovoid darted out across the flames. It came to rest in midair, two yards from Alvah. It clicked and said crisply, “State your name and business.”

  “Alvah Gustad. I just got back from a confidential mission for the City Manager. Floater broke down, communicator, everything. I had to walk back. Tell him I’m here.”

  The ovoid hovered exactly where it was, as if pinned against the air. Alvah waited. When he got tired of standing, he dropped his improvised knapsack on the ground and sat on it. Finally the ovoid said harshly, in another voice, “Who are you and what do you want?”

  Alvah patiently gave the same answer.

  “What do you mean, broke down?”

  “Broke down,” said Alvah. “Wouldn’t run any more.”

  Silence. He settled himself for another long wait, but it was only five minutes or thereabouts before the ovoid said, “Strip.”

  When he had done so, the gate opposite broke open with a scream of tortured metal and ground itself back into a recess in the wall. The drawbridge, a long rust-pitted tongue of metal, thrust out and down to span the moat, a wall of flame on either side of it.

  Alvah walked across nimbly, the metal already hot against his naked soles, and the drawbridge whipped back into its socket. The gate screamed shut.

  The room was the same, the anthems were the same. Alvah, disinfected, shaved all over and clad in an airtight glassine overall with its own air supply, stopped short two paces inside the door. The man behind the Manager’s desk was not Wytak. It was jowly, red-faced Ellery McArdle, Commissioner of the Department of War.

  One of the guards prodded Alvah and he kept going up to the desk. “Now I think I get it,” he said, staring at McArdle. “When-”

  McArdle’s cold gaze flickered. Then his heavy head dropped forward a trifle, and he said, “Finish what you were saying, Gustad.”

  “I was about to remark,” Alvah said, “that when Wytak’s pet project flopped, he lost enough support to let you impeach him. Is that right?”

  McArdle nodded and seemed to lose interest. “Your feet are not swollen or blistered, Gustad. You didn’t walk back from the Plains. How did you get here?”

  Alvah took a deep breath. “We flew—on a passenger roc —as far as the Adirondacks. We didn’t want to alarm you by too much air traffic so near the City, so we joined a freight caravan there.”

  McArdle’s stony face did not alter, but all the meaning went suddenly out of it. It was as if the man himself had stepped back and shut a door. The porter behind his chair swayed and looked as if he were about to faint. Alvah heard one of the guards draw in his breath sharply.

  “Fthuhr,” said McArdle abruptly, his face contorting. “Let’s get this over. What do you know about the military plans of the Muckfeet? Answer me fully. If I’m not satisfied that you do, I’ll have you worked over till I am satisfied.”

  Alvah, who had been feeling something like St. George and something like a plucked chicken, discovered that anger could be a very comforting thing. “That’s what I came here to do,” he said tightly. “The Muckfeets’ military plans are about what you might have expected, after that lousy trick of yours. They know it wasn’t Chicago that raided them.”

  McArdle started and made as if to rise. Then he sank back, staring fixedly at Alvah.

  “They’ve had a gutful. They’re going to finish New York.”

  “When?” said McArdle, biting the word off short.

  “That depends on you. If you’re willing to be reasonable, they’ll wait long enough for you to dicker with them. Otherwise, if I’m not back in about an hour, the fun starts.”

  McArdle touched a stud, said, “Green alert,” pressed the stud again and laced his fingers together on the desk. “Hurry it up,” he said to Alvah. “Let’s have the rest.”

  “I’m going to ask you to do something difficult,” said Alvah. “It’s this—think about what I’m telling you. You’re not thinking now, you’re just reacting—”

  He heard a slight movement behind him, saw McArdle’s eyes flicker and his hand make a Not now gesture.

  “You’re in the same room with a man who’s turned Muck-foot and it disgusts you. You’ll be cured of that eventually— you can be, I’m the proof—but all I want you to do now is put it aside and use your brains. Here are the facts. Your raiding parties got the shorts beat off them. I saw one of the fights—it lasted about twenty minutes. The Muckfeet could have polished off the Cities any time in the last thirty years. They haven’t done it till now, because—”

  McArdle was beating time with his fingertips on the polished ebonite. He wasn’t really listening, Alvah saw, but there was nothing for it except to go ahead.

  “—they had the problem of deconditioning and re-educating more than twenty million innocent people, or else letting them starve to death. Now they have the knowledge they need. They can—”

  “The farms,” said McArdle.

  “They’re going to close down this—this reservation,” Alvah said. “They’ll satisfy you in any way you like that they can do it by force. If you help, it can be an orderly process in which nobody gets hurt and everybody gets the best possible break. And they’ll keep the City intact as a museum. I talked them into that. Or, if they have to, they’ll take the place apart slab by slab.”

  McArdle’s mouth was working violently. “Take him out and kill him, for City’s sake! And, Morgan!” he called when Alvah and his guards were halfway to the door.

  “Yes, Mr. Manager.”

  “When you’re through, paint him green and dump him out the gate he came in.”

  It was a pity about Wytak, Alvah’s brain was telling him frozenly. Wytak was a scoundrel or he could never have got where he was—had been—but he wasn’t afraid of a new idea. It might have been possible to deal with Wytak.

  “Where we going to do it?” the younger one asked nervously. He had been pale and sweating in the floater all the way across Middle Jersey.

  “In the disinfecting chamber,” Morgan said, gesturing with his pistol. “Then we haul him straight out. In there, you.
r />   “Well, let’s get it over with,” the younger one said. “I’m sick.”

  “You think I’m not sick?” said Morgan in a strained voice. He gave Alvah a final shove into the middle of the room and stood back, adjusting his gun.

  Alvah found himself saying calmly, “Not that way, Morgan, unless you want to turn black and shrivel “up a second after.”

  “What’s he talking about?” the boy whispered shakily. “Nothing,” said Morgan. The hand with the gun moved indecisively.

  “To puncture me,” Alvah warned, “you’ve got to puncture the suit. And I’ve been eating Muckfeet food for the last month and a half. I’m full of micro-organisms—swarming with them. They’ll bloop out of me straight at you, Morgan.”

  Both men jerked back, as if they had been stung. “I’m getting outa here!” said the boy, grabbing for the door stud.

  Morgan blocked him. “Stay here!”

  “What’re you going to do?” the younger one asked.

  He swore briefly. “Well tell the O. D. Come on.”

  The door closed and locked solidly behind them. Alvah looked to see if there was a way to double-lock it from his side, but there wasn’t. He tried the opposite door to make sure it was locked, which it was. Then he examined the disinfectant nozzles, wondering if they could be used to squirt corrosive in on him. He decided they probably couldn’t and, anyhow, he had no way to spike the nozzles.

  Then there was nothing to do but sit in the middle of the bare room and wait, which he did.

  The next thing that happened was that he heard a faint far-off continuous noise through the almost soundproof door. He stood up and went over and put his ear against the door, and decided it was his imagination.

  Then there was a noise, and he jumped back, his skin tingling all over, just before the door slid open. The sudden maniacal clangor of a bell swept Morgan into the room with it, wild-eyed, his cap missing, drooling from a comer of his mouth, his gun high in one white-knuckled fist with the muzzle, big as a cannon pointing straight at Alvah.

  “Ghhr,” said Morgan,, and pulled the trigger.

  Alvah’s heart went bonk hard against his ribs, and the room blurred. Then he realized that there hadn’t been any hiss of an ejected pellet. And he was still on his feet. And Morgan, with his mouth stretched open all the way back to the uvula, was standing there a yard away, staring at him and pulling the trigger repeatedly.

  Alvah stepped forward half a pace and put a straight left squarely on the point of Morgan’s jaw. As the man fell, there were shrieks and running footsteps in the outer room. Somebody in Guard uniform plunged past the doorway, shouting uncoherently, caromed off a wall, dwindled down a corridor. Then the room was full of leaping men in mode.

  The first of them was Artie Brumbacher, almost unrecognizable because he was grinning from ear to ear. He handed Alvah a four-foot knobkerrie and a bulging skin bag and said, “Let’s go!”

  Alvah looped the bag’s strap hurriedly over his shoulder. The bag seemed to be full of something brown and heavily mushy, about the consistency of wet sand. There were spatters of what looked like the same stuff on the walls and floor of the outer corridor; otherwise the place was empty. There was nobody behind the guard desk in the lobby, and the riot guns were still racked neatly in their case. “Artie, what’s this?” he asked as they went. “Didn’t you bring any dogs? How’d you get past the guards, anyhow?”

  “Didn’t need no dogs,” said Artie, his eyes roving. “This here did the business.” He patted the bag he carried. “Idea of Doc’s—he fixed it up at the last minute, and it sure does work. Show you later.”

  Then they were out in the open, and Alvah had no time for further questions. Half a dozen rocs were circling overhead; except for them, the air was empty.

  Alvah paused to try to open the zippers of his glassine coverall; they were sealed tight. After a minute Artie saw his trouble, and sliced off the hood of the coverall with two casual strokes of his bowie. “Come on,” he said again.

  The streets were full of grounded floaters and stalled surface cars. The bells had fallen silent, and so had the faint omnipresent vibration that was like silence itself until it was gone. Not a motor was turning in the Borough of Jersey. Occasional chittering sounds floated on the air, and muffled buzzings and other odd sounds, all against the background chorus of faraway shrieks that rose and fell.

  At the comer of Middle Orange and Weehawken, opposite the Superior Court Building, they came upon a squad of Regulars who had thrown away their useless guns and picked up an odd lot of assorted bludgeons—lengths of pipe, tripods and the like.

  “Now you’ll see,” said Artie.

  The Regulars set up a ragged yell and came running forward. The two Muckfeet on either side of Alvah, Artie and the bucktoothed one called Lafe, dipped heaping dark-brown handfuls out of the bags they carried slung from their shoulders. Alvah followed suit, and recognized the stuff at last—bran meal, soaked in some fragrant syrup until it was mucilaginous and heavy.

  Artie swung first, then Lafe, and Alvah last—and the soggy lumps smacked the foremost faces. The squad broke, wiping frenziedly. But you couldn’t wipe the stuff off. It clung coldly and grainily to the hair on the backs of your hands and your eyelashes and the nap of your clothing. All you could do was move it around.

  One berserker with a smeared face didn’t stop, and Lafe dropped him with a knobkerrie between the eyes. One more, a white-faced youth, stood miraculously untouched, still hefting his club. He took a stride forward menacingly.

  Grinning, Artie raised another glob of the mash and ate it, smacking his lips. The youth spun around, walked drunkenly to the nearest wall and was rackingly sick.

  Charles Fairweather was a realie actor, a concupiscent little man with a soft paunch and a gray close-clipped mustache. His rimless glasses softened the wicked gleam in his eye; he looked the very image of a pompous, ineffectual little executive. He was often cast as the bewildered father in a domestic comedy, and in fact had enjoyed a long run some ten years ago in the best-rated domestic series of them all, Dangerous Dolores. He had a talent for high comedy which he seldom got a chance to use; but his services were in demand, he ate regularly and enjoyed himself. He had been married and divorced twice; at present he was a bachelor. He liked the girls, and to tell the truth, the girls liked him.

  This week he was in rehearsal for a special, a ninety-minute Western about an Old Los Angeles veterinarian and his struggles against Peke-poisoners. Alvah Gustad had been penciled in for the lead, but at the last minute some conflict had developed, and Buddy Riggs had been signed. Fair-weather played a minor role, the choleric police chief; his contribution consisted mainly of waving a cigar and banging his desk.

  It wasn’t a bad show. They had two real dogs from the Bronnix Zoo, nasty orange bits of business, and the girl who played the nurse was a new face, a cute brunette, not more than eighteen, with a cleavage that bulged nicely in her low-cut uniform. Fairweather was watching her, stroking his mustache, as she rehearsed a scene where she had to lean over a sick Peke. The beast, groggy from dope, rolled its yellow eyes up at her and weakly bared a fang. The cleavage was toothsome.

  There was a sudden gold-dust glitter in the air, too swift to be clearly seen. Fairweather blinked, and rubbed his eyes under the rimless glasses. His eyes were tired; he’d been out late die night before.

  Number two camera, which was suspended in its floater field facing the actress, slowly began to sink. The nearby monitor shifted from the actress’s face to the same view Fairweather was enjoying, then without pausing lowered still more to pick up the Peke. It kept going, to an angle shot of the operating table, and then a blurred closeup of the floor.

  “Hey!” somebody shouted over the intercom. Fairweather looked around, with a prickling of uneasiness up the back of his neck. All over the set, cameras were drifting downward at the same rate. They bobbed slightly as their fields touched the floor, then went on sinking, a little more slowly, until the gra
y-painted ovoids were actually resting on the hard plastic. The monitor screens showed crazy angles and blurs.

  A shout of profanity came out of the intercom. “Ill get on it, Burt,” another voice called. Jack Drew, the chief technician, came hurrying down out of the booth. Electricians and grips were converging on the working panels, over behind the set. The actress looked up uncertainly, then moved a little away from the Peke and signaled her porter for a cigarette. Fairweather stayed where he was, feeling decidedly uneasy.

  He glanced around, and saw the rest of the actors and crew standing in similar puzzled attitudes. They all felt it. But there was nothing to be seen. Even the faint golden blurring of the air that he had noticed before was gone. Nothing on the floor of the studio, nothing behind the sets, nothing—He peered up at the ceiling. Up there, among the spidery suspended arms of the scene-moving machinery, something long and threadlike and green was swaying … lengthening, coming nearer. Fairweather stared at it. Then he saw another. And another.

  They were hanging from the ceiling in faintly visible festoons—threads of green with something indefinably unpleasant about them. The ceiling seemed covered with them now, and there were more dangling threads all the time.

  Something made a small sound at Fairweather’s feet, and he looked down to see a hand-sized splash of sticky green on the plastic. Off at the other end of the stage, somebody yelled.

  There was another small sound, a pat, and then another, and two together. Fairweather saw a fat drop detach itself from one of the threads and start to fall. The things were dripping.

  Somebody started to run. Fairweather caught a glimpse of Ernie Rillup, the music director, wiping frantically at his green-smeared face. Then more people were running. The brunette actress threw her cigarette away, white-faced, and started after them.