Compleat collected sff w.., p.429
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 429
Elaine sighed and opened her eyes, stepped back. The picture swung into place again, covering the buttons. She looked at me, still pale but calmer now. The wailing siren died away.
"The riot call?" I asked.
She smiled faintly. "H and C in Morse—for Hey, Charley," she told me. "That's the signal. Listen."
Even from here we could hear the low, rising murmur of voices from the streets and houses, people calling to each other, doors opening, feet running.
"It means break up," Elaine said. "Stop what you're doing, get to your headquarters. Drop everything and move! By now your play's losing its audience—I hope. It means——"
Now it was my turn to say, "Listen!" She was quiet. We both heard the staccato sound of gunfire from the way we had come. I said grimly, "Maybe some of the audience isn't leaving so fast. What do you think?"
She started for the door. Then she seemed to take a tangible grip on her own emotions, and she turned back deliberately, pulled out a chair from one of the desks and sat down in it, closing her eyes again for a moment. Then she looked up at me, the bright black gaze very questioning, very disturbed.
"Sit down, Rohan," she said. "We've got to get things clear. What is it you know?"
I was glad of a chance to sit. I'd been through a lot in the past hour. I could feel random nerves and muscles jumping when I tried to relax, and my head ached savagely. I drew a deep breath.
"It may take a while," I said.
She nodded. "We've got about ten minutes. Let's have it."
I said, "About a week ago I was working out a Cropper contract——" Here I paused, marveling at myself. A week ago? It seemed like years. "Comus picked me up," I said. "Ted Nye and I used to be Mends when I was on Broadway. He needed an actor. He offered me the job. Before he offered it he had me run through the usual brain searching to make sure I wasn't a subversive. I mentioned this to you when we first met, back in San Andreas. Remember?"
She nodded, watching me. "You saw my brother in New York at the psycho-search center."
"You look a lot alike." I hesitated. "Is he—all right? I'm not sure how much I remember, but——"
"You remember," she told me somberly. "Joe—died quite suddenly just a week ago. Some kind of overdose, the newscast said." Her mouth was grim.
I said in a quiet voice, "He knew it was coming. He sent you his love—I think. And a message about the trap the traveling theaters are—I think." I rubbed my eyes. "I was drugged. They pump you full of stuff in those brain-searching sessions. That night—well, I thought I had a dream. All this while it's been bothering me—the message your brother sent, the things he told me. In the dream they were so garbled they didn't make sense. I began to realize it couldn't have been a dream after a while. But I still didn't understand." I stopped and thought in silence about the dark garden and the still waters and the new knowledge about myself I had wrestled with tonight.
I said, "I couldn't remember until—a little while ago. I couldn't. There was something else that kept getting in the way. Something about—myself and some things that happened a long time ago."
I paused, thinking. Remembering the letters of fire I couldn't read for so long. I could guess now what happened back there in New York as that other Dr. Thomas ran off the routine personality checking which Nye had ordered for me. Whatever it was he saw in the pattern of my reactions had made him believe I'd carry a message for him to the rebels in California. And he was right. Essentially I was a rebel even then, born to rebel, living in rebellion against the world.
But what he had told me was frightening. In essence he must have said, "I'm working with a rebel organization that's going to destroy Comus with the Anti-Com. I've just discovered the traveling theaters are a lie-detector trap to spot rebels who know too much. You've got to carry the warning. You've got to help."
But I'd protested. I wasn't ready to take up arms against a sea of troubles, his or mine or anybody's. And then he'd said—what? That I didn't need to remember what he'd told me, that I would when the time came—post-hypnotic suggestion? Something like that, I felt pretty sure. He'd been right about picking me out—not that he probably had much choice. His pursuers may well have been right at his heels or he wouldn't have taken such chances with such a broken reed as Howard Rohan.
It had taken me a long time to come round to his way of thinking. I'd had to clear away all that murk of confusion about Miranda before I knew what it was I really wanted, which side I was really on. It took me a long time to see the truth. Maybe too long.
Elaine said, "What was the message exactly, Rohan? Can you remember?"
I shut my eyes and tried. "Your brother wanted me to join the Swann Players because they'd been assigned to the area where you and Harris were, and the——" I paused, looking at her. "The Anti-Com is here too, isn't it? In Carson City? I know Nye's looking for it here."
She gave me an expressionless glance. "No, it isn't here. Go on."
I shrugged. "He told me the Anti-Com would destroy Comus—make it commit suicide was the way he put it. He wanted to warn you about the traveling theaters. There wasn't any time to send a message directly to you and he had to take a chance on me." I grinned faintly, seeing again the unreadable letters of fire circling before me—unreadable until now. "It was a long chance," I said.
"Don't worry about it," Elaine said. "I expected he used post-hypnotic suggestion on you. If he wasn't sure you were fully in sympathy with our side he had to implant certain mental blocks to make sure you wouldn't remember until it was safe to. Does that mean you haven't been really convinced about us until tonight?"
"I've had some problems," I said with restraint. "But——"
Elaine said, "Wait," and turned toward the door. I heard the sound of feet on the stairs, subdued voices talking excitedly, very low, and then a key in the lock.
Elaine said to me, "I didn't tell you this. This is the Carson City headquarters. Now we'll hear what's been happening. Whether you left things until too late."
Two men came into the office, one of them disheveled and the other still buttoning his shirt as if he hadn't had time to finish dressing. A woman followed them closely, and then three m men. They looked at Elaine and me.
"Where's Beardsley?" someone asked.
"He was at the theater," Elaine said, her voice under heavy restraint. "What happened there? Does anybody know?"
The disheveled man said, "I was there. When the alarm sounded we all tried to scatter. I don't think they expected anything like that so soon, because at first it was easy to get away. But they moved fast. Before Beardsley and Ferguson could clear the stands, the Comus cops closed in."
"Not both of them!" Elaine said, her voice flatting a little. The man nodded somberly. Elaine got her voice under control and said calmly, "What about the gunfire?"
"Comus, stopping some runaways," the man said. "None of ours, as it happened. But it shows they're not fooling."
"You think they know?" somebody in the background asked.
"Rohan," Elaine said, "tell them about the theater."
So I stood up and told them. While I was talking more and more people came into the room, most of them hurrying, looking shocked and a little exhilarated, as if now that things were starting life had somehow taken a turn for the better.
I told them about the play itself, the insistence on giving it verbatim, without changes in pace or action. I told them about the sound truck with its intricate, unnecessary apparatus. I remembered the line of silvery circuits painted along the insulated undersides of the benches. And I thought how often, sitting there preoccupied in the bleachers tonight, I had found the words, "Anti-Com!" springing into my mind without any real reason I could think of.
There had always been something a little wrong about the play. I'd sensed it without knowing why. Thinking about Crossroads with detachment, I could see now that it was two plays. It had two levels. If you knew anything about the Anti-Com you responded on both levels. For people who knew a lot about it, Guthrie's instrument panel must have blazed with constant reactions. That maze of electronic equipment in the truck, intricate beyond any possible need of the play itself, had been triggered to catch the last subliminal responses of people who knew more than they should.
The word was never mentioned in the play. There was no reference of even the obliquest sort. And yet time after time I had found the one unspoken name coming up irresistibly in my mind as cues kicked off thoughts and responses centering around the one unspoken word.
Somebody said doubtfully, "But could it work? Without any direct physical connection?"
I shrugged. Somebody else answered for me. "Oh yes, it could work. It's the same principle as a lie jacket with a larger field. The body's own electromagnetic field could trigger it.
"But how could he locate one person in the whole crowd?"
"How do you locate a disturbance in any electrical field? Hell, that's no problem. How they meant to follow them up afterward is anybody's guess, but you can be damn sure they'd thought of it."
Someone else said, "What about the rest of the traveling theaters? They must have picked up a lot of our people already."
"Expendable," Elaine said shortly. "Nobody outside this area knows enough to be dangerous anyhow. But Ferguson and Beardsley aren't expendable. Neither am I. If Comus gets any one of us——"
"Alive," somebody added.
There was a pause. Elaine glanced from face to face.
"They took Beardsley and Ferguson," she said. "Well?"
Silence for a moment. Then, from the rear of the crowd, "Both alive when we saw them," a voice said. There was another silence, briefer this time.
Elaine said, breaking it, "We'll hear. There's time yet. Any more questions?"
"Yes," a voice said. "What about this theater? It's given two or three performances already. This isn't the first time the lie detector's been used in this area."
I said, "It's the first time it's worked. I loused up the only two performances we gave. Tonight was the first chance Guthrie had to screen the audience." I was silent a moment, realizing clearly for the first time a possible explanation for my shattering freeze-up of last night.
Was it simply that the levels of censorship in my mind been shifting all along? I knew, down under, what the play Crossroads would do if it went on as written. I'd blocked it once by a brilliant performance that threw the emphasis off. I'd blocked it a second time by a total freeze.
A dazzling light sprang into full bloom in the middle of my mind. Had that compulsive freeze been nothing worse than the unconscious censor clamping down? Was that the only way it knew how to stop the trap from snapping on the rebels I had come to sympathize with? Could it mean that my ability to act, to hold an audience, to live the part I played, wasn't gone after all? I stood there speechless, a blaze of tentative joy beginning to pour through me in a warm flood. Maybe, then, there was still a chance——
Elaine said sharply, "Rohan, what is it?"
I looked at her rather sheepishly. "Nothing. An idea I had about—my own work. I didn't know it showed."
Elaine said, "Something did. You looked so happy I thought maybe you had some ideas about Comus. God knows we need ideas." She glanced around the room. "With Ferguson and Beardsley gone I think I'm next in line of command. George, will you see what you can find out about the captures? Johnny, get up to the top of the monument and see what the situation is. I think——"
Somebody came up the stairs running. Everybody turned. A breathless young man leaned against the doorframe and said, "They're stopping anybody who tries to leave town. Somebody said they'd seen Prowlers on the road coming in. Where's Beardsley?"
Elaine said, "Johnny, get started. Beardsley won't be here, Tony. I'm in control so far. What happened to you?"
"When I heard the siren I started out," the young man said. "A couple of blocks away two men closed in on me. One of them had a hypodermic. I slapped it out of his hand just in time. Some of the boys saw us fighting and got there just in time."
Elaine nodded. "Brewster, take charge of rounding up as many as you can to patrol the streets and watch for arrests. Try to recapture our people if you can."
A thickset man said, "I'll try, but I'm afraid it's too late."
"Well, try!"
He nodded and turned quickly to the door, beckoning to people as he passed them. I had a sudden thought.
"Wait a minute," I said loudly. "Hold on. About the theater troupe—nobody in the play had any idea what they were doing. You've got to understand that."
The words seemed to fall very flat. Nobody spoke. There was a small silence and then Brewster said, "Come on," and went out with his own group. I looked at Elaine.
"What about my troupe?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. I've got a lot to think about, Rohan. They can look after themselves."
Before I could protest a commotion near the door resolved itself into a woman with her hair wildly wind-blown. She was talking in gasps, as if she had been running.
"Johnny says you want to know—about the monument," she said. "I was just—up there." She paused to catch her breath. "All around the outskirts—in the fields—I've never seen so many machines. Tanks. Prowlers. Hedgehoppers. A ring of 'em, right around the town. A mouse couldn't slip through. They must have been waiting in the woods. They've got—radar set up, too. We're—locked in."
I said, "What about my troupe?" Nobody paid any attention.
"What are the machines doing?" Elaine asked. "Just sitting there?" The woman nodded, pushing the wild hair off her forehead.
There was a muffled shout on the stairs. Footsteps thudded. An elderly man came in, his face grayish. He pushed directly through the crowd to Elaine.
"Ferguson," he said. "Dead. He got the ring to his mouth as they took him up the steps to the Comus Building. But Beardsley" He paused, shaking his head. "Sam couldn't make it," he said. "They've got him."
"Alive?"
The old man nodded.
Elaine said, "Couldn't he reach his ring?"
"He had it up to his mouth. I saw him. And then he—I don't know—he just let it drop again. He couldn't quite make it when the chips were down."
Silence. Then Elaine said, "Where is he now?"
"They're questioning him at Comus headquarters."
"Under direct television hookup with Nye's office, I suppose," Elaine said. Her shoulder sagged a little. "Well, that's that."
"How bad is it?" someone asked.
Elaine said softly, "I was sure Sam would use the poison if he had to." She looked down at her own ring. "I guess we never really know," she said, "until we have to do it ourselves." She was silent a moment longer.
"It's bad," she said. "Sam knows what town the Anti-Com's in. Not the exact location, but the town. It could be worse."
"Isn't that enough? As soon as they mind-scan Beardsley can't they just move in on that town——"
Elaine said, "Maybe. Remember, though, Nye wants the Anti-Com intact if he can get it. As long as he doesn't know what it is or how it works he's vulnerable. Even if he blew up this one, we might still build another."
"But he won't risk our turning it on!"
Elaine laughed shortly. "We aren't going to turn it on. That's something Beardsley doesn't know."
There was a dead silence. Somebody said thinly:
"Why aren't we going to turn it on?"
Elaine said with sudden fierceness, "Because it isn't safe! Because yesterday Comus raided a distribution center and we had to destroy the only safety device we had for the Anti-Com. That's why we won't use it."
A voice said after a moment's shock silence, "I thought it was all finished. All ready to operate."
"It is," Elaine said less angrily. "It's finished. It'll work. It'll knock out Comus. But we got to one of the calculators for the first time last week and we found out it'll do something else, too—something we hadn't realized. There's going to be tremendous amount of energy released. It'll knock out Comus, all right, but it can bounce right back on us, too. It could blow the state clear off the map and gouge another bay out of the Pacific."
"It could," somebody said, "or it would?"
Elaine shrugged. "There's a chance it wouldn't. I'd hate to take the chance. We did have a safety device that would channel off the energy harmlessly. Since we lost it yesterday morning we've been working right around the clock on a new one. It's nearly done. But it isn't attached to the Anti-Com. If it were——" She shrugged delicately. "If it were, Comus would end. Right then, at that moment."
