Gordon R. Dickson (22 page)

"Why?" he said,
looking down at her.

"Because
you're one of them, one of us."

"Am I?" he asked. His voice
deepened; and he stared at her, unwaveringly. "What I am, I made myself. I
broke my own prison. I threw away my Key, alone. I sat by myself on that
mountain and what I found, I found myself, without their leave and without
their help. I did what I did for you, and for me. I bought my freedom and I'm
not going to trade it back again."

"But
this hasn't anything to do with you! It's about the rest of the world."

"Isn't
it my world? Aren't the people in it my people, as ' much as theirs?
"

"No. No!" she clenched her hands
together. "We have to work together that's all."

He
looked at her with a strange light in his eyes. "There's no
have
to
any
more," he said. She looked up at him and shook her head slowly, pain on
her face. "Oh, Kill"

"There's
not even any
have
to
between us, any more."

"Kill"
she cried. "Don't say that! Don't ever say that. I'm always with you,
against them, against anyone, against everything!"

His face softened. He put his arm around her
shoulders again; and she clung to him. "I know," he said.

"You'll
forgive me if I don't undersand any of this," put in McElroy. Kil looked
over at him.

"It's
just that we've reached an end to force," he said. "You'll see."
He looked down at Ellen. "I think we better go now."

Ellen
let go of him and stepped back. She turned and led them across the wet and
shining floor to a disk elevator set against one of the rising walls. They
stepped together onto one disk and dropped downward.

They
passed several levels, opening on the corridors of what seemed to be dwelling
quarters, and finally stepped off before a small, but solid door, the only exit
from the equally small hall or alcove in which they had alighted.

"The
auditorium," said Ellen, nodding at the door. She went forward and opened
it. The voice of the old man she had called Chase, speaking in measured
accents, came through to their ears. Ellen beckoned; and Kil, with McElroy,
came up and went through the door.

He
found himself on the small, semi-circular floor of what looked like an
overlarge lecture room. The flat side of the floor was backed up against a high
wall, from which projected a small stage, perhaps six inches above the floor,
on which stood a lectern and, behind it, Ellen's great-grandfather. Around the
rest of the room rose steeply, tier on tier, an amphitheatre of crowded seats,
all filled by listening people.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

There
were, in that room, between three and four
hundred people, ranging from the very young to the aged, though the young
predominated. Meeting their combined gazes with a discernment that would have
been entirely foreign to him a few weeks earlier, Kil was able to sort out
perhaps six generations, of which those of Ellen's age were clearly in the
majority. There was a curious openness about the faces of the younger ones that
puzzled Kil with a sense of haunting familiarity, before he suddenly realized
where he had seen something like it before. It was next-of-kin to the wide-eyed
interest of very young children and animals, those who had not lived long
enough in the world yet to make the acquaintance of Fear.

Chase,
the old man, had stopped speaking as they entered; and he turned to look at
them as well. His eyes picked out Ellen and Kil, swung to McElroy, and back to
Kil again.

"Why did you bring this man?" he
asked.

"Because I thought he ought to be
here," said Kil.

"Why?"

"Because I've been trying to find
you—" broke in McElroy, quickly. "There's an emergency—a matter of
life and death for everyone in the world. I had to find you."

Chase's eyes glared at him for a
moment,
then softened.

"We
all know you, David," he said gently.
"By
reputation, if nothing else.
You're a good man; but—what can
we
do for you?"

McElroy came two swift steps forward toward
the lectern. He spoke directly to the old man in a tense and eager voice.

"Listen—"
he said, "I know why you were set up here. You were set up at the same
time Files was set up; isn't that right?
Files was
only a temporary solution to the problem of keeping people from blowing
themselves up. You were to find a permanent one; isn't that right?"

Chase stood looking down at him for a moment.
A look of pain crept across his face. Finally, he nodded. "Yes," he
said.

"Well,
now's the time," said McElroy. "Files
is
licked. The Police are licked. We're up against something now Files can't
check. It's up to you."

Again
the look of pain crossed Chase's face. Slowly he shook his head.

McElroy stared.

"No?"
he cried, like a man who has just heard his own death warrant read aloud.

"David—"
said the old man, with effort, "we haven't anything for you. You don't
know—"

"I
know you've had a hundred years!" said McElroy, furiously.

"David,"
said the old man again, "you don't understand. A hundred years ago.
we
knew, here in our Project, that occasionally a rare
individual was able to do things in apparent contravention of physical laws.
Today, after all those years since they gathered us and isolated us here to
work for a solution, we only know those same things are being done not in
contravention, but
outside
the ordinary laws of physics."

"What do you mean?"

"It's—not
easy to explain. When these things happen-when we make them happen—there's no
transfer of energy. The causes and effects operate below the level of energy;
that's why we call this Sub-E, Sub-Energy. We've discovered a new field of
science. We've found out that the physical laws can be merely the
manifestations of a philosophy of the individual mind. Through the system of
that philosophy the physical universe can be partially manipulated.
But by each person only for himself.
For example,
I
can walk through walls; but I couldn't take you by the hand and lead
yo"u through them. That's both the blessing and the curse on this Sub-E of
ours, because on account of that aspect of it, it can't ever be used to hurt
someone else—but by the same token, it can't be used to help them,
either."

McElroy leaned forward, his face etched with
passion.

"Then teach people how to use it for
themselves!" he said.

"If we only could!" answered Chase.
"If we only knew how!
But that's just what we
don't know. For those who already have the ability, we can do a lot. We can
teach them and train them to large and complicated uses of their talent. But to
kindle the fire of it in a cold mind—that's the thing we've never succeeded in
doing, even with some of our own people in the Project that've been with us
from the beginning. Rarely, an adult individual gets it—suddenly and
without warning from nowhere, the way Kil
—" he looked
at Kil, "—did. Children always get it—they seem to accept it instinctively
if they're raised as ours are, with adults who have it. But those already grown
up can't—" he stopped and lifted his hands hopelessly.

"Can't? Why not? What
does it take anyway?"

"It
takes," Chase stumbled, "an act of will, of faith somehow. You've
got to believe you can do what you want to do, without reservation. Children
can believe that way because they build their world on faith. Adults—"
again he stopped; and shook his head.

McElroy stayed planted
before him.

"You
must!" he said between clenched teeth. "You must—" Chase shook
his head.

"We
can't," he answered. "David, do you think we want people to have this
any less than you do? It's just that we haven't found the answer, where it
lies. And all we can do is
go
on looking for it."

"But
there's no more time—" McElroy broke off, biting his lower lip. Chase
looked intently at him.'

"Why
not?" he asked.
"Why not more time?"

McElroy
opened his mouth; then hesitated. He closed it again. Behind them the door
through which Kil and he and Ellen had just entered swung open once more.

"Won't
you tell them, then, Dave?" asked a new voice, from beyond it. "Then
I'll have to."

All
the eyes in the room swung about, to look. The door was ajar; and, as they
watched, slowly and ponderously through the opening, entering one by one with
due care not to touch each other, came two figures completely encased in
glittering magnetic armor. Oxygen tanks hung from their backs, the voice of the
one that spoke coming from a speaker chest-high on the smaller of the two, a
slim and pleasant looking young man.
Beside him, the larger,
a gigantic man, held, in addition, the heavy, awkward shape of an
oxygen-catalyst flame thrower, the one unstoppable weapon capable of cooking a
man, even inside the magnetic armor.
For all its brutal size and weight
the big man held it casually in one hand. For the big man was Toy; and the
smaller man was Mali.

Silence
held the room. Fantastically, the audience was not disturbed or alarmed. The
odd, fear-free faces of the seated people rested on Mali and Toy only with
surprise and curiosity until Mali, who had been running his eye along the front
row of seats, pointed to one old man.

"Try him," he
said.

Toy
swung the muzzle of his weapon up and pressed the trigger. Kil saw sudden fear
leap into the eyes of the man and understood suddenly that this must be one of
the original project members who had never achieved Sub-E. But, even as he
tensed to jump forward, Ellen was quicker. In the same second, she had stepped
in front of the old man. The white, spurting flame struck her, wrapped her, and
flared ceilingward, holding her for one brief second in its roaring heart like
some new, slender phoenix, fire-triumphant, burning yet unconsumed. Then Toy
released the trigger, the flame and roaring Vanished; and Mali chuckled in the
sudden stillness.

"Just
testing," he said, lightly. "You can throw that away now, Toy."

The
giant tossed the thrower from him. It fell loudly and heavily on the polished
dark floor of the amphitheater and rolled twice to a stop.

"Who're
you?" demanded Chase. The old man's face was white with horror and anger.

"The
one Dave didn't want to tell you about," Mali smiled at him. "My
name's
Mali,
and I head the combined Societies. I
followed Kil here." He nodded across the space that separated them.
"Hello, Kil."

Kil looked grimly back at
him.

"Melee's dead,"
he said, bluntly.

For a second, a thin film gauzed over Mali's
eyes. They seemed to go blind and opaque, like the eyes of a man who turns
inward to gaze at his own soul.

"Yes—on
Tuesday, wasn't it?" he murmured. "I turned around for just a moment
in the corridor—and she was gone-just last Tuesday—"

A
shiver
trembled
him for a moment. Then his eyes
cleared and he looked back at Kil and smiled.

"You've
been a good guide," he said. "We planted a small tracer set in the
bone behind your left ear during the Search. Didn't you feel anything there
when you woke up? We've never been far behind you since."

"I want to know what
you're doing here?" snapped Chase.

Mali looked at him.

"I've
come to collect this last piece of my world," he said. "Collect your
world?" Chase stared at him, dumbfounded. "My world," replied
Mali. He looked at McElroy.
"Eh, Dave?"

McEIroy's eyes were ice
behind which banked fires burned.

"Yes," he said,
expressionlessly.

"I don't understand
you," said Chase.

"Do
you see this?" asked Mali. He moved his hand to his waist. The magnetic
field covering his fingers flowed into the magnetic field about his body; and
the fingers closed on a small, tan box at his belt, the thumb resting on a
little button atop the box. "If I push this down, it'll send out a signal
that will result in certain—mechanisms being put into action at various points
about the .world. And once that's done, you won't have to worry any longer about
the people who don't have Sub-E."

Chase stared at him, puzzled.

"This is nonsense," he said.

"No. Remember the Lucky War? Remember
what Files and the Police were set up to guard against? Well, you waited too
long to take over from them. That's what Dave here was trying to tell you.
Whether the world lives or dies is up to me."
   
'

Chase's wrinkled eyelids
slowly drew up and back. His eyes opened and his face stiffened. Slowly, as if
with great effort, he turned his head from Mali to look at McElroy.

"David," he said,
"this can't be true—"

"Why
not?" said McElroy, in a dead voice. "Why do you think I—the Police
would admit we're licked? Why do you think he's so sure of himself?" He
stood slightly spraddle-
legged,
shoulders hunched a
little, head thrust forward, his gaze burning on Mali.

"But—"
Chase turned back to Mali and his voice struggled. "You couldn't. It'd be
wholesale murder—you wouldn't—"

"Why
wouldn't he, Chase? Why wouldn't he?" said McElroy, his gaze still fixed
on Mali. "They are CH bombs?"

"Of course,"
answered Mali. "Didn't you know?"

"Not in details,"
said McElroy.

Chase was staring at Mali
in horror.

"What
right have you got—to even think," he said, "of murdering four
billion human beings?"

"As
much right as the next man," retorted Mali, looking up at him abruptly.
"What's four billion anyway, but a number? What's it to you? Tell me, are
you four billion times as shocked as if I'd told you I was going to murder just
one manr

"You're a devil," said Chase hoarsely. "No—you're
the
devil!"
                  
- '

"I'm
a man!" said Mali. He smiled a little and softened his voice. "Just
like you, Chase."

"But the only ones who could come
through something like that would be us—the ones with Sub-El
Would
you want to kill yourself, too?"

"Of course not," answered Mali.
"I'm safe for the moment here in my armor. It's just a matter of staying
safe for a month or so afterward. And then, after the radiation's gone; and the
wind's blowing the stink out of the dead cities—I can start the world over
again in my own way with my own people that I've got tucked away in a safe
place."

He looked up at the old man. The empty
silence grew between them.

"So you see," said Mali, softly.
"It
is
my world. I own it— and all of you. Or would
you want to be the one to defy me and make me push this button?"

"It's too late,
Mali," Kil said.

Mali looked at him
quizzically, and smiled.

"Too
late?
Why, Kil?"

"Because
I've found the answer these people have been seeking for a hundred yars,"
he answered. "I know how to make it available to anyone—Sub-E."

The eyes of all the room
were upon him.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

There
were
two
in
the
room
that
he
must
convince.

In the little suspension of time, the
momentary breath-caught silence that followed the second of his announcements,
it seemed to Kil that time gathered itself like a breaking wave, poised for a
second above the frail craft, the
Santa Maria
of
his discovery and conviction. The winds that thrust him forward were all of the
spirit. The ocean that dragged him back was all man's centuries of stubborness
and slowness to believe. Mali was looking at him from the middle distance with
an interest as cruel and sharp as a crouching cat's.

"What new fairy tale's this, Kil?"
he asked in his soft voice.

"No fairy tale,"
he said. He turned to Chase.
"The truth."