Neq the Sword (20 page)

Not all the people had died at once. More were killed by radiation than in the physical blast--actually a massive series of blasts--and that had taken time. There were desperation efforts to salvage civilization, most of which came to nothing. But one group in America assembled an army of construction equipment and bulldozed a mountain from the refuse of one of the former cities. It was the largest structure ever made by man, and probably the ugliest--but within its depths, shielded from further fallout, was the complex of Helicon: an enclave of preserved civilization and technology. Only a tiny portion of this labyrinth was residential. A larger section consisted of workshops and hydroponics, and one wing contained the atomic pile that generated virtually unlimited power.

"Dr. Jones assures us that's still functional," Vara said.

"It's completely automatic, designed to operate for centuries. It made the first century, anyway. All we have to do is reconnect the wiring at our end."

The name Helicon had been borrowed from a myth of the Ancients: it was the mountain home of the muses, who were the nine daughters of the gods Zeus and Mnemosyne, and were themselves the goddesses of memory and art and science. Poetry, history, tragedy, song--it all reflected the spirit of Helicon as originally conceived. The virtues of civilization were to have been remembered here.

But Helicon had lacked self-sufficience in one vital respect: personnel. The people who first stocked it had been the elite of the devastated world: the scientists, the highly skilled technicians, the ranking professionals. Most were men, and most were not young. The few women, children of the elite, could hardly replenish the enclave in a generation without dangerous inbreeding--and they had substantial scruples about'trying.

So it was necessary to allow limited immigration from the outside world. The prospect was appalling to the founders, for it meant admitting the very barbarians that Helicon was on guard against, but they had no choice. Without enough children to educate in the traditions and technology of civilization. Helicon would slowly die.

They were fortunate, for some elements of civilization had Survived outside. People who later came to be known as the "crazies" because their idealistic mode of operation made no sense to the majority, were quick to appreciate the potential benefits of collaboration. They provided some new blood for Helicon, and pointed out that many barbarians could be safely recruited if they were made to understand that there was absolutely no return. Thus Helicon became the mountain of death--an honorable demise for those with courage. And regular, secret trade was instituted, with Helicon adapting a portion of its enormous technical resources to the manufacture of tools and machinery, while the crazies provided wood and surface produce that was much preferable to the hydroponic food turned out by less-than-expert chemists.

The crazies' vision turned out to be larger than that of the founders of Helicon, for the crazies were in touch with the real world and were necessarily pragmatic about nomad relations, despite the nomads' opinion. They ordered weapons from the Helicon machine shops--not modern ones, but simple nomad implements. Swords and daggers; clubs and quarterstaffs. They issued these to the nomads in return for a certain docility: the weapons were to be used only in formal combat, with noncombatants inviolate, and no person could be denied personal freedom.

Enforcement was indirect but effective: the crazies cut off the supply to any regions that failed to conform. Since the metal weapons were vastly superior to the homemade ones, the "crazy demesnes" spread rapidly as far as their supply lines were able to go. Their services expanded to include medicine and boarding, with hostels being assembled from prefabricated sections produced in Helicon. There was nothing the crazies could return in direct payment for Helicon's full-scale help--but the improvement in the local level of civilization was such that many more recruits were available for both the crazies and Helicon. All three parties to this enterprise profited.

But Helicon remained the key. Only there could high-quality items be mass-produced.

Then Helicon had been destroyed. And the crazy demesnes had collapsed.

"And ours was the best system in the world," Vara concluded. "There are other Helicons in other parts of the world, but they were never as good as ours and they don't have much effect. Var and I discovered that in the years we traveled. To the north they have guns and electricity, but they are not nice people. In Asia they have trucks and ships and buildings, but they--well, for us, our way is best. So now we are going to rebuild Helicon..."

Neq took them inside by way of the passage from the hostel. "This will be our secret," he said. "Converts will have to try the mountain. But the crazies can't send trucks up there, so they will bring supplies for trade to this point. This hostel is seldom used by nomads in the normal course, since it is an end station, not a travel station."

The tunnel curved into its darkness. The lift is on hostel power," Neq explained, reminded again of Neqa and her explanations to him so long ago. "Once we restore Helicon power... but lanterns will do for now."

When they were gathered in the storage room, he opened the panel to reveal the subway tracks. A wheeled cart was there; he had brought it up when he finished the long grisly cleanup job. Only a few of the party could ride it at a time, and it had to be pushed by hand, but it was still quicker to ferry them this way than to make them all walk.

The nomad converts in particular were nervous about thesedepths.

When all were assembled on the platform at the other end, he guided them up the ramp for the grand tour. The nomads were awed, the crazies impressed, and the Helicon survivors subdued. Everything was bare and clean--no doubt quite a contrast to what the former underworlders remembered.

At the dining hall he paused, feeling a chill himself. He remembered the way he had left it, after removing the bodies and cleaning out the charred furniture. He had stacked the salvageable items in one corner, and had left a cache of durable staples in the kitchen area.

One of the tables had been moved. Some of his dried beans had been used. Someone had been here.

Neq concealed his dismay by continuing the tour. "I don't know the purpose of all the rooms, and certainly not the equipment," he said. "We'll be drawing heavily on the experience of those of you who were here before."

Inwardly he was chagrined. He and the crazies had searched for every possible surviving member of Helicon. Compared experiences and his body-count suggested that very few were unaccounted for. Was the intruder from outside? Most of the tribesmen were terrified of this region, and would never enter the mountain even if they could find their way in.

Of course Tyl and his army had forced entry here during the conquest of the mountain, so those men could penetrate Helicon again if they chose. But Neq had sealed over the invasion apertures as well as he could and none of them seemed to have been reopened, and no damage had been done.

Someone had come without fear, looked about, had a bite to eat, and departed. That person could come again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"Yes, she is pregnant," Dick the Surgeon said. "I think under the circumstances she should be excused from, er, circulation. Our children will be our most important asset for some time, for they will be raised in the atmosphere of civilization...."

It was Neq's decision to make, and it would set a precedent, but he was aware of his own bias. Intellectually he knew that the women had to be shared; emotionally he couldn't share Vara. "It's a matter of health," he said. "That's your department."

So Vara did not circulate. Actually the system had not been fully implemented yet; people needed time to settle in to it. There was some problem about the women's arrangements, for they required more privacy than the men's rooms provided, sexual aspects aside. Finally they were assigned rooms of their own, but were expected to make their rounds on schedule.

If the social system functioned with hesitation, at least the reconstruction didn't. The restoration of electric power was much simpler than anticipated. A few cables replaced, a few circuit-breakers closed, a few fixtures tinkered with, a few parts substituted, and there was light and heat and circulating air and sanitary facilities in operation. Helicon had been beautifully designed; they were not building or even rebuilding it. They were merely implementing a system that had been temporarily interrupted.

In a month they were ready to tackle the peripheral machinery: the subway to the hostel, the manufacturing machines. In two months the first weapons were produced: quarterstaffs cut from an endless metal pole extruded from an automatic smelter-processor. There was ore from the monstrous metallic refuse of the mountain--enough for a century's such operations.

Neq realized with a certain surprise that it was working! Helicon was coming back to life, beginning to function again. That simple, significant success had almost been obscured behind the minutiae of daily projects and crises! Actually, Helicon was an entity in itself, performing on its own fashion; the hiatus of years and the change of personnel seemed almost irrelevant to its giant personality.

The signal alarm woke Neq during the night cycle. Night was artificial here, as was day, but they maintained the same rhythm as above. The recently renovated television screen was on.

"We've netted something," Jim the Gun said tersely. "It didn't pass through any of the entrances we know, but it's inside now. I thought you'd want to be on hand."

"Yest" Neq shrugged into his special open-sleeve robe and hurried through the half-lighted halls to Jim's laboratory. He remembered the mysterious visitor. Had he come again?

"I thought it was one of the fringe beasts," Jim said.

"They keep finding new places...." Neq knew what he meant. There were strange creatures in the radiation-soaked outer tunnels of the mountain--mutation-spawned monsters who had shaped their own grotesque ecology. Helicon proper had been sealed off from such sections, but the seal was imperfect, and sometimes rodents and amphibians got through. Once a dead toothy froglike thing had popped out of a flush toilet, and Jim had had to trace the sewer pipes to discover the entry point. It had been hopeless; Helicon's water came from a vast subterranean conduit and departed the same way after passing through a waste-recycling plant. It was too complex to unravel, and dangerous to tamper with, for the water was "hot-- so hot that live steam burst periodically from vents and filled the maintenance passages. Jim had had to settle for a filter in the main drinking-water pipe. Sometimes eerie noises penetrated the walls, as of alien creatures hunting or struggling. The increasing hum of functioning machinery drowned much of this out, and that was a blessing. It was too easy for the nomads to believe in haunts--since, of course, there were haunts.

Jim had rigged an alarm system designed to spot the emergence of any such creatures, so that the holes could be located and plugged. "It's a big one this time," he said, leading Neq to a storeroom as yet unused. The back wall here seemed solid, but Jim had traced skuff-marks in the dust of the floor to a removable panel constructed to resemble stone. "Human or near-human, obviously," Jim said. "He came in from the other side--it seems to be a half-collapsed tunnel with some radiation--and pushed out the panel, then replaced it perfectly. Then on through the room and out to the hall--which is where he tripped my electric-eye system. He was gone by the time I got here, of course--but at least we know how he did it."

Neq felt the chill again. "But he's inside Helicon--right now!" Had he come for beans again--or something more?

Jim nodded. "He passed the eye half an hour ago. I can't tell from the signal whether it's a mouse or an elephant--uh, that's an extremely large animal that existed before the Blast. Elephant. I get several of these each night--"

"The Elephants?"

"Alarms. And I don't know anything until I check personally. Half the time it's one of our own personnel, on some unscheduled business. Or a couple of them. Quite a bit of out-of-turn trysting in these back rooms, you know. I have to be very cautious about checking. The girls share, but they want to get pregnant by particular men..."

Neq knew. He had never cracked down on it because he felt the same way himself. It was his baby Vara carried, whatever name it was to bear.

"So we're late starting, but we can run him down. Block off this exit and flood the halls with flower-narcotic--"

Neq didn't like it. "There are people going about," he pointed out. "We keep a limited night shift going now, and some are on the machines. A whiff of the flower, and equipment could be wrecked. The amount that gets around by accident is bad enough! No, we'll do it by hand. How could a stranger come, and not be seen?"

"He would have to know Helicon," Jim said. "Where to hide, where to step aside--"

"And how to bluff his way through when he did meet people," Neq said. "That makes him dangerous. We don't know his motive."

"It has to be a former member of Helicon," Jim said. "One of our retreads should be able to recognize him?"

"Helicon is open to the old members. Why hasn't he contacted us?"

"Maybe he's trying to."

"All he has to do is yell or bang on the wall."

"Let's go to my lab," Jim said. "If he keeps ducking out of sight, he'll have to trip other alarms."

They were in luck. The intruder tripped several alarms, ducking out of the way as others used the hall. Jim kept no eye-beams set in the main passages, since that would lead to hopeless confusion. It was coincidental, but his emplacements were ideally suited to this type of chase.

"He's going somewhere," Jim said. "See that pattern. I think he's literate--a couple of those dodges were near the dining room bulletin board. Now he knows what he wants. When we figure it out too, we'll be able to intercept him. Catch him by surprise, so he can't hurt anyone."

"Toward the sleeping quarters!" Neq exclaimed, looking at the chart of Helicon on which Jim had set his markers.