Compleat collected sff w.., p.98
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 98
He spoke with quiet confidence into the screen. He outlined his ideas for offering the people themselves the opportunity to join in the crusade, financially if not personally. In deft words he referred to the hardships and dangers of landside; he wanted to discourage all but the hardiest from offering as personal volunteers. And to aid in that, as well as to provide a smash finale to his scheme, he made his great announcement.
Something which until today had been a plaything for the wealthy would now be offered to all who owned shares in the magnificent venture before mankind. Each participant could watch the uses to which his money was put, share almost at first hand in the thrills and perils of landside living.
Look!
On the screen flashed a dizzying view of jungle that swooped up toward the beholder with breathtaking swiftness. A ring of velvet-black mud studded the flowery quilt of treetops. The ring swung up toward the view and you could see an iridescent serpent slithering across the blackness. The mud erupted and a mud-wolf's jaws closed upon the snake. Blood and mud spattered wildly. Churning and screaming, the combatants sank from sight and the velvety pool quivered into stillness again except for the rings that ran out around it from time to time as bubbles of crimson struggled up and burst on the surface with dull plops which every listener in the Keeps could hear.
Sam thanked his audience. He asked their patience for a few days longer, until the first examination trials could be set up. He observed with arrogant humility that he hoped to earn their trust and faith by his service toward themselves and the Free Companion, who had left all such matters in his hands while Hale himself struggled up there on landside in the jungles he knew so well. We would all, Sam finished, soon be watching such struggles, with men instead of monsters enlisting our sympathy in their brave attempts to conquer Venus as our forebears once conquered Old Earth ...
-
The Families did nothing.
It worried Sam more than any direct action could possibly have done. For there was nothing here he could fight. Profoundly he distrusted that silence. All telecast attempts to interview any of the Immortals on this tremendous subject which was uppermost, overnight, in every mind, came to nothing. They would smile and nod and refuse to comment—yet.
But the plans went on at breakneck rate. And after all, Sam told himself, what could the Harkers do? To deny the public this delightful new toy might be disastrous. You can't give candy to a baby and then snatch it away untasted without rousing yells of protest. The people of the Keeps were much more formidable than babies, and they were used to collapsing into paternalistic hands. Remove the support, and you might expect trouble.
Sam knew he had won a gambit, not the game. But he had too much to do just now to let the future worry him. All this was to be a swindle, of course. He had never intended anything else.
Paradoxically, Sam trusted the judgment of the Harkers. They thought this attempt would fail. Sam was sure they were right. Of course the Logician believed that colonizing would succeed, and the Logician normally should be right. How can a machine err? But the machine had erred, very badly, in its analysis of Sam himself, so it isn't strange that he disbelieved all its conclusions now.
The only way to make the scheme succeed as Sam intended it to succeed was to insure its failure. Sam was out this time for really big money. The public clamored to buy, and Sam sold and sold.
He sold three hundred per cent of the stock.
After that he had to fail. If he put the money into landside development there'd be nothing left over for the promoter, and anyhow, how could he pay off on three hundred per cent?
But on paper it looked beautiful. New sources of supply and demand, a booming culture rising from the underseas, shaking off the water from gigantic shoulders, striding onto the shore. And then interplanetary and interstellar travel for the next goal. Ad astra was a glorious dream, and Sam worked it for all it was worth.
-
Two months went by.
Rosathe, like all the other fruits of success, dropped delightfully into his arms. Sam closed all three of his apartments and with Rosathe found a new place, full of undreamed of luxuries, its windows opening out over the hydroponic garden that flourished as lavishly, though not so dangerously, as the jungles overhead. From these windows he could see the lights of the whole Keep spread out below, where every man danced to his piping. It was dreamlike, full of paranoid splendors, megalomaniac grandeur—and all of it true.
Sam didn't realize it yet, though looking back he would surely have seen, but he was spinning faster and faster down a vortex of events which by now were out of his control. Events would have blurred as they whirled by, if he had been given time enough to look back at them when the moment of reckoning came. But he was not given time ...
-
Rosathe was sitting on a low hassock at his feet, her harp on her arm, singing very sweetly to him, when the moment finally came.
Her violet-blue skirts lay about her in a circle on the floor, her cloudy head was bent above the high horns of the lyre and her voice was very soft.
"Oh, slowly, slowly got she up, and slowly she came nigh ... him ..." How delightfully, the sweet voice soared on the last word! That dip and rise in the old ballads tried every voice but an instrument as true as the lovely instrument in Rosathe's throat. "But all she said"—Rosathe reported in that liquid voice—and was stopped by the musical buzzing of the televisor.
Sam knew it must be important, or it would never have been put through to him at this hour. Reluctantly he swung his feet to the floor and got up.
Rosathe did not lift her head. She sat quite motionless for an instant, curiously as if she had been frozen by the sound of the buzzer. Then without glancing up she swept the strings with polished fingertips and sang her final line. "Young man, I think you're dyin' ..."
The cloudiness of the visor screen cleared as Sam flipped the switch and a face swam out of it that rocked him back a bit on his heels. It was Kedre Walton's face, and she was very angry. The black ringlets whipped like Medusa-locks as she whirled her head toward the screen. She must have been talking to someone in the background as she waited for Sam to acknowledge the call, for her anger was not wholly for Sam. He could see that. Her words belied it.
"Sam Reed, you're a fool!" she told him flatly and without preamble. The Egyptian calm was gone from her delicate, disdainful face. Even the disdain was gone now. "Did you really think you could get away with all this?"
"I've got away with it," Sam assured her. He was very confident at that point in the progress of his scheme.
"You poor fool, you've never fought an Immortal before. Our plans work slowly. We can afford to be slow! But surely you didn't imagine Zachariah Harker would let you do what you did and live! He—"
A voice from behind her said, "Let me speak for myself, Kedre, my dear," and the smooth, ageless young face of Zachariah looked out at Sam from the screen. The eyes were quietly speculative as they regarded him. "In a way I owe you thanks, Reed," the Immortal's voice said. "You were clever. You had more resources than I expected. You put me on my mettle, and that's an unexpected pleasure. Also, you've made it possible for me to overthrow Hale's whole ambitious project. So I want to thank you for that, too. I like to be fair when I can afford to be."
His eyes were the eyes of a man looking at something so impersonally that Sam felt a sudden chill. Such remoteness in time and space and experience—as if Sam were not there at all. Or as if Harker were looking already on death. Something as impersonal and remote from living as a corpse. As Sam Reed.
And Sam knew a moment's profound shaking of his own convictions—he had a flash of insight in which he thought that perhaps Harker had planned it this way from the start, knowing that Sam would doublecross him with Hale, and knowing that Sam would doublecross Hale, too. Sam was the weak link in Hale's crusade, the one thing that might bring the whole thing crashing if anyone suspected. Until now, Sam had been sure no one did suspect.
But Zachariah Harker knew.
"Good-by, Reed," the smooth voice said. "Kedre, my dear—"
Kedre's face came back into the screen. She was still angry, but the anger had been swallowed up in another emotion as her eyes met Sam's. The long lashes half veiled them, and there were tears on the lashes.
"Good-by, Sam," she said. "Good-by." And the blue glance flickered across his shoulder.
Sam had one moment to turn and see what was coming, but not time enough to stop it. For Rosathe stood at his shoulder, watching the screen, too. And as he turned her pointed fingers which had evoked music from the harp for him this evening pinched together suddenly and evoked oblivion.
He felt the sweet, terrifying odor of dust stinging in his nostrils. He stumbled forward futilely, reaching for her, meaning to break her neck. But she floated away before him, and the whole room floated, and then Rosathe was looking down on him from far above, and there were tears in her eyes, too.
The fragrance of dream-dust blurred everything else. Dream-dust, the narcotic euthanasia dust which was the way of the suicide.
His last vision was the sight of the tear-wet eyes looking down, two women who must have loved him to evoke those tears, and who together had worked out his ruin.
-
He woke. The smell of scented dust died from his nostrils. It was dark here. He felt a wall at his shoulder, and got up stiffly, bracing himself against it. Light showed blurrily a little way off. The end of an alley, he thought. People were passing now and then through the dimness out there.
The alley hurt his feet. His shoes felt queer and loose. Investigating, Sam found that he was in rags, his bare feet pressing the pavement through broken soles. And the fragrance of dream-dust was still a miasma in the air around him.
Dream-dust—that could put a man to sleep for a long, long while. How long!
He stumbled toward the mouth of the alley. A passer-by glanced at him with curiosity and distaste. He reached out and collared the man.
"The Colony," he said urgently. "Has it—have they opened it yet?"
The man struck his arm away. "What colony?" he asked impatiently.
"The Colony! The Land Colony!"
"Oh, that." The man laughed. "You're a little late." Clearly he thought Sam was drunk. "It's been open a long time now—what's left of it."
"How long?"
"Forty years."
-
Sam hung on the bar of a vending machine in the wall at the alley mouth. He had to hold the bar to keep himself upright, for his knees were strengthless beneath him. He was looking into the dusty mirror and into his own eyes. "Forty years. Forty years!" And the ageless, unchanged face of Sam Harker looked back at him, ruddy-browed, unlined as ever.
"Forty years!" Sam Harker murmured to himself.
-
PART TWO
Sometimes, when a race is slipping slowly into the long, easy twilight toward extinction, a ruthless crook can be a savior—a furious, lying, cheating, totally amoral egomaniac—
-
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides
along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window
panes;
There will be time, there will be
time
To prepare a face to meet the faces
that you meet;
There will be time to murder and
create,
And time for all the works and
days of hands
That lift and drop a question on
your plate ...
—T. S. Eliot
The city moved past him in a slow, descending spiral. Sam Harker looked at it blankly, taking in nothing. His brain was too filled already to be anything just now but empty. There was too much to cope with. He could not yet think at all. He had no recollection to span the time between the moment when he looked into his impossibly young face in the glass, and this current moment. Under his broken soles he felt the faint vibration of the Way, and the city was familiar that moved downward beneath him in its slow sweep, street after street swinging into view as the spiral Way glided on. There was nothing to catch hold of and focus, no way to anchor his spinning brain.
"I need a shot," he told himself, and even the thought came clumsily, as if along rusty channels where no thought had moved before in forty drugged years. But when he tried his ragged pockets, he found them empty. He had nothing. No credits, no memory, not even a past.
"Nothing?" he thought foggily. "Nothing?" And then for the first time the impact of what he had seen in the mirror struck him hard. "Nothing? I'm immortal!"
It could not be true. It was part of the dream-dust fantasy. But the feel of his own firm cheek and hard, smooth neck muscles beneath his shaking fingers—that was no fantasy. That was real. Then the idea of forty years gone by must be the unreality. And that man at the alley-mouth had lied. Looking back now, it seemed to Sam that the man had looked at him oddly, with a more than passing interest. He had assumed the man was a passer-by, but when he forced his rusty brain to remember, it seemed to him that the man had been standing there watching him, ready to go or to stay according to the cue Sam's conduct gave him.
He groped for the memory of the man's face, and found nothing. A blur that looked at him and spoke. But looked with clinical interest, and spoke with purpose and intent beyond the casual. This was the first coherent thought that took shape in the dimness of Sam's brain, so the stimulus must have been strong. The man must have been there for a reason. For a reason concerned with Sam.
"Forty years," Sam murmured. "I can check that, anyhow."
The city had not changed at all. But that was no criterion. The Keeps never changed. Far ahead, towering above the buildings, he saw the great globe of dead Earth in its black plastic pall. He could orient himself by that, and the shapes of the streets and buildings fell into familiar place around him. He knew the city. He knew where he was, where his old haunts had been, where that lavish apartment had looked down over these glittering ways, and a girl with blue eyes had blown dust in his face.
Kedre's face swam before him in the remembered screen, tears in the eyes, command in the gesture that brought about his downfall. Kedre and Rosathe. He had a job to do, then. He knew Kedre's had not really been the hand behind that poison dust, any more than Rosathe's had been. Zachariah Harker was the man who gave the orders here. And Zachariah would suffer for it. But Kedre must suffer too, and as for Rosathe—Sam's fingers curved. Rosathe he had trusted. Her crime was the worst—betrayal. Rosathe had better die, he thought.
But wait. Forty years? Had time done that job for him already? The first thing he must learn was the date of this day on which he had awakened. The moving street glided toward one of the big public newscast screens, and he knew he could check the date on that when it came into view. But he thought he did not really need to. He could feel time's passage. And though the city had not changed, the people had, a little. Some of the men near him were bearded, so that much was new. Clothes had a more extreme cut than he remembered. Fashions change in rhythm with changing social orders, not meaninglessly but in response to known patterns. He could work it out from that alone, he thought, if his mind were clearer and there was no other way to learn.
The Way swung round slowly so that a corner of the newscast screen loomed into view, and Sam noticed how few faces around him turned toward it. He could remember a time when every neck craned and people jostled one another in their hurry to read the news a little faster than the moving Way would let them. All that was over now. Apathy in direct and easily understood contrast to the extreme new styles showed upon every face. Sam was the only one here who craned to see the big screen.
Yes, it had been forty years.
-
There was something like a bright explosion in the center of his brain. Immortality! Immortality! All the possibilities, all the dangers, all the glories lying before him burst outward in one blinding glow. And then the glow faded and he was afraid for a moment of maturity's responsibilities—this new, incredible maturity so far beyond anything that he had ever dreamed of before. And then the last doubts he would feel about this wonderful gift assailed him, and he searched his memory frantically for knowledge of some drug, some treatment that could produce a catalepsy like this, ageless over a span of forty years. He knew of none. No, it must be real. It could not be, but it was true.
It would wait. Sam laughed dryly to himself. This of all things would most certainly wait. There were more urgent things to think of. Something magical had happened to him, and the result was forty years of sleep and then immortality. But what had that something been?
