City at World's End

Chapter 13 EMBATTLED CITY

With a sinking heart, Kenniston stared at Hubble and listened to the sharpening voice of the city. Carol spoke, and the words reached him from a long way off.

“Never mind me, Ken. I’ll get home all right.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve got to get hold of the Mayor right away… Stay in off the streets, Carol.”

He kissed her swiftly on the cheek, and she turned away, walking fast.

Kenniston hesitated, feeling that he ought to go with her, but Hubble had already started on and there was no time for punctilio. After all, there was no danger—not yet.

He caught up with Hubble. People streamed past them, going the other way, toward the portal. Frightened, belligerent people, their eyes a little too bright, their voices too loud. Kenniston and Hubble were almost running, but even so, it took them some minutes to reach the plaza in front of City Hall. As they crossed it, jeeps loaded with National Guardsmen pulled away from the government building and went tearing off down the boulevard. The men were wrapped to the eyes in heavy clothing, and Hubble groaned.

“They’re going outside. Now what the devil has that idiot done?”

They raced up the steps and into the building. In the Council chamber they found the Mayor with Borchard and Moretti and most of the Coun-cilmen. Garris strode up and down, his face mottled, his eyes glittering with the courage born of fear. He turned to Kenniston and Hubble as they came in, and there was a curious blankness in his look, an absence of reason that made Kenniston lose what little hope he had.

“So they’re going to try to rush us away from Earth,” said Garris.

“Well, we’ll see! We’ll see how far they’re going to get with that!” His voice shook, his pudgy hands were clenched. “I’ve called up all units of the National Guard, and did you see those jeeps? They’re on their way to Old Middletown, to bring the field guns from the Armory. Guns, Hubble, guns! That’s the only way to show ’em they can’t order us around!”

“You fool,” said Hubble. “Oh, you fool.”

It was too late in the day to call the Mayor a fool, and Hubble found it out. Borchard snarled at him, “He’s acting with our complete approval.

Listen, Mr. Hubble, you stick to your science and we’ll handle the government.”

“That’s right,” said Moretti. He said it two or three times, and the remaining council members backed him up.

Hubble faced them. “Listen to me!” he said. “You’re all scared so blind you can’t see what’s in front of you. Guns! All the guns we’ve got won’t make a pop like a toy pistol compared to what they can bring against us if they want to. These people have conquered the stars, can’t you understand that? They can conquer us with no more than that ray they’ve got on the ship, and violence will only anger them into doing it!”

Garris thrust his face close to Hubble’s. “You’re afraid of them,” he said. “Well we’re not. We’ll fight!” The Council cheered.

“All right,” said Hubble, “go ahead. There’s no use arguing with idiots. The only chance we had of beating this thing was to behave like civilized men. They might have listened to us, then, and respected our feelings. But now…” He made a gesture of negation, and the Mayor snorted.

“Talk! A lot of good your talking did. No, sir! We’ll handle this our way, and you can be thankful that your Mayor and Council haven’t forgotten how to defend the rights of the people!”

His voice rose almost to a shout to carry the last words to Hubble, who had walked out with Kenniston close on his heels.

Outside in the plaza, Kenniston said abruptly, “There’s only one thing to do—talk to Varn Allan. If she’d agree to call off her dogs for a while, things might simmer down.” He shook his head, making a wry face. “I hate to admit to that blonde bureaucrat that we’re governed by a bunch of half-witted children, but…”

“You can’t really blame them,” said Hubble. “We are like children, faced with the unknown, and since we can’t run and hide we have to fight. It’s just that they’re taking the wrong way.” He sighed. “You go out to the ship, Ken. Do what you can. I’m going back in and struggle with His Honor. If I’m patient enough—Oh, well, good luck.”

He went back inside, and Kenniston retraced his weary steps toward the portal.

The crowd had doubled since he had last seen it. It pushed and swirled around the portal, spreading out on both sides along the wall of the dome. Out on the plain the lights of two ships gleamed, and the people watched them, a low murmur running through them like the first mutter of wind before a storm. The company of Guardsmen in full kit had taken up their station in the portal, a barrier of olive-drab picked out with the dull gleam of gunbarrels.

Kenniston went up to them. He nodded to some of the men he knew and said, “I’m going out to the ships—important conference,” and started through the line. And they stopped him,

“Mayor’s orders,” the lieutenant said. “Nobody goes outside. Yeah, I know who you are, Mr. Kenniston! But I have my orders. Nobody goes outside.”

“Listen,” said Kenniston desperately, manufacturing a lie. “The Mayor sent me, I’m on his business.”

“Bring me a written order,” said the lieutenant, “and we’ll talk about it some more.”

The line of guns and stolid men remained unmoved. Kenniston considered trying to crash it, and gave that up at once. The lieutenant was watching him suspiciously, so suspiciously that an uncomfortable thought occurred to Kenniston. He spoke the language and he had worked closely with the star-folk, and the good people of Middletown might just possibly take him for a traitor or a spy…

“If the Mayor sent you,” the lieutenant said, “he’ll give you an order.”

Kenniston went away, back to the City Hall. And he spent the rest of the night cooling his heels with Hubble, outside the guarded door behind which the Mayor, the Council and the ranking officers of the National Guard were drawing up a plan of campaign.

Shortly after daybreak an orderly came in hastily, and was admitted to the guarded room. Immediately the Mayor, the Council, and the officers came out. Garris, haggard, heavy-eyed, but triumphant, caught sight of Kenniston and said, “Come along. We’ll need you to interpret.”

Feeling old and hopeless, Kenniston rose and joined the little procession. Falling in beside him, Hubble leaned over and murmured, “Talk fast, Ken. Your knowledge of the language is our one last ace in the hole.”

They reached the portal at almost the same time as the party from the starships. Varn Allan and Lund were the only ones in the group that Kenniston recognized. Of the others, one was a woman of mature years, and the remainder were men of varying ages. They stared, more in wonder than in apprehension, at the line of soldiers, Varn Allan frowned.

The Mayor marched up to her, as the line reformed to let him and his party through. A soiled, haggard little man, devoutly convinced of his own wisdom and secure in the knowledge that his people were with him, his courage screwed up to the last trembling notch, he faced the strangers from the stars and said to Kenniston, “Tell them this is our world, and we give the orders here. Tell them to get into their ships and go. Inform them that this is an ultimatum which we are prepared to enforce.”

The crowd behind him roared approval.

A faint uneasiness had appeared in the faces of the star-folk. That mob yell, the armed soldiers, and the attitude of the Mayor must have roused a doubt in them. And yet Varn Allan spoke quite calmly to Kenniston, hardly waiting for the Mayor to finish.

“Will you please have way made for us?” She indicated the newcomers who were with her. “These officials head a large staff of experts on mass migration. They will begin preliminary planning of the evacuation, and it is important that you cooperate…”

Kenniston interrupted her. “Listen,” he said, “you take your officials and get back to your ships.” The crowd was beginning to move forward a little, pressing up against the line of soldiers. Individual shouts came out of it, ugly, threatening counterpoint to the growling undertone. The Mayor shifted nervously from one foot to the other, “Did you tell her?” he demanded. “What’s she saying? Did you tell her?”

Kenniston cried out, “Go back to your ships, and quickly! Can’t you see that mob’s about to break loose?”

But still Varn Allan did not seem to understand. “There’s no room for further argument,” she said, as though her patience was at an end. “We are here on direct orders from the Board of Governors, and I must ask you to…”

Speaking very distinctly, Kenniston said, “I am trying to prevent violence. Go back to your ships now, and I’ll come out and talk to you later.”

She stared at him in utter astonishment. “Violence?” she said. And again, “Violence? Against officials of the Federation?”

It crossed his mind that that was something she had never seen nor heard of. In the momentary silence between them, the surge and rumble of the crowd grew louder, and abruptly, Norden Lund laughed.

“I told you that you were taking the wrong way to deal with savages,” he said. “We’d better go.”

“No!” Secure in her pride, in the authority vested in her by the Federation of Stars, in her proven ability as an administrator, Varn Allan was not going to run before the shouts of a mob. She turned on Kenniston, her voice perfectly steady and sharp as a steel knife.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “When an order is issued in the name of the Board of Governors, that order is obeyed. You will so inform your Mayor, and require him to disperse his people—and at once!”

Kenniston, clenched his fists and groaned. “For Christ’s sake…” he began, and then the Mayor, the overanxious, bellicose, and frightened Mayor, set the spark to the ready tinder.

“You tell ’em they’d better get out in a hurry!” he cried, loud enough to be heard clearly by the front ranks of the crowd. “Tell ’em to get out, or we’ll run ’em out!”

Run ’em out!” yelled a man, and another, and a hundred others. “Run ’em out!” The crowd roar rose to a howl. The press of men and women surged forward through the portal, and even if they had wanted to the soldiers could not have held them back.

Kenniston caught a kaleidoscopic glimpse of faces—the middle-aged woman official with her mouth open in a scream, the incredulous eyes of the men that did not credit what they saw, Varn Allan’s cheeks flaming a sudden angry red, Lund already backing away, a study in mingled fear and triumph.

Varn Allan said, “If you dare to touch Federation officials—”

“Get back to your ships!” yelled Kenniston. “Get back!” The first wave of the mob was upon them, all shouts and fists and trampling feet. They were howling for Varn Allan because she was the leader. Kenniston saw the danger. He grabbed her wrist and began to run toward the Thanis, hauling her along. The other officials, including Lund, had taken to their heels. It was amazing how they could run.

He dragged Varn Allan along, and for some seconds she did not resist.

He realized later that it must have been the first physical violence she had ever encountered, and that she was too astonished by it to think of resisting at first. Then, all at once, she cried out passionately, “Let me go!” and set her heels hard into the dust.

The crowd was boiling after them, and it was no time for niceties. Kenniston gave her wrist a jerk that snatched her off balance and began to run again, yanking her bodily along. And then, as the Thanis loomed fairly close ahead, he missed his footing in the loose sand and stumbled, and she wrenched herself free from him.

During the moment that he floundered in the treacherous sand, Kenniston saw the first pallid beam flick out from the ship. It swung in a wide arc, bringing a sudden uproar from the crowd. And then it hit him, and this time the shock was strong. He dropped forward into the sand and lay there like a dead man, utterly still and knowing nothing.

He came back to consciousness, lying flat on his face in a bunk with Gorr Holl’s powerful fingers kneading the nerve centers along his spine.

He groaned, and the Capellan exclaimed in relief.

“Thank the gods you’ve come round! I’ve been working on you the last couple of hours!”

Kenniston sat up painfully. He saw in a small windowless cabin, furnished with a desk and a chair designed to accommodate Gorr Holl’s huge proportions, and it dawned on him that he must be inside the Thanis. “How did I get here?” he asked. It was difficult to speak. His tongue, like the rest of him, was numb and leaden.

“Varn Allan had you brought in. She realized afterward that you were trying to haul her out of trouble, and knocking you out was a mistake.

She wanted you fixed up as quickly as possible.”

Kenniston was too groggy to be sarcastic. He groaned again, and mumbled, “What’s happened, Gorr?”

“Plenty—and all of it bad. Look here.” He touched a stud, and a square section of the metal wall became perfectly transparent, a window.

Kenniston struggled to his feet and looked out through it, at the distant, gleaming dome of New Middletown. And he saw the men of Middletown laboring in the ocher dust before the portal, digging trenches, filling sandbags, drawing up the lines of war.

Gorr Holl pointed out across the dreary waste toward the far-off ridges. Kenniston looked, and saw the brave small cavalcade that toiled down from them, out of the old town. He saw the shrouded field guns, the whole mobile force of the Middletown battery of the National Guard—the little guns that came to bark defiance to the Federation of Stars.

Gorr Holl said, “They gave us three hours to pack up our traps and go—long enough to get their battery in position. After that, they’ll start shooting.”

“The fools,” Kenniston whispered. “The poor bloody fools!” He could have wept with pride, in spite of his full realization of the extent of that folly.

The time was almost up. Those hurrying limbers would reach the portal and swing around, and soon then the men of Middletown would cast the die of their own destruction.

“I’ve got to stop this, Gorr,” he said. “Somehow, I’ve got to stop it!”

Gorr Holl studied him with a curiously intent, measuring look. He said, “How much are you willing to risk on a try? No, wait before you answer. It won’t be easy. Especially for you, with your background, it won’t be easy.”

“Get to the point,” said Kenniston. He grasped almost fiercely at the hint of hope. “Come on! What is it?”

Gorr Holl said, “There are other dying planets beside your Earth. And as I told you, we primitives cling to the worlds of our birth just as your people do. There has been a—well, call it a conspiracy, between the primitive races to stop mass migration, and our whole plans center on the process Lal’lor told you about, Jon Arnol’s process of reviving dead worlds, which has been forbidden by the Federation. Kenniston, we could make Earth a test case!”

“In other words,” said Kenniston slowly, “you want to involve me and my people in a movement to help your peoples buck the Federation law?”

“Quite frankly, yes. But it’s to your benefit, too. If you win, you’ll have Earth and we’ll have our own worlds, to stay on. If you lose well, you’ll be no worse off than you are now.” He put his great paw on Kenniston’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Varn Allan is on the televisor now, getting authorization from Vega Center to use force in carrying out her orders.

Think fast, Kenniston!”

Kenniston thought. It was like moving blindfold through an unfamiliar maze, but he could sense some of the outlines, the undercurrents of disaffection that flowed between the stars. He had no right to involve himself and Middletown in a struggle that he knew almost nothing about… But there beyond the window were the trenches filled with angry men, and the dusty limbers wheeling down, and how could they be worse off than they were now? If there was even an outside chance…

“What do I have to do?” he asked.

Gorr Holl grinned. “Good,” he said. “And remember, you’ll have allies in this thing! Now come on with me, and I’ll tell you on the way.”