Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XVII

Rhame was only a sergeant, but the pilot of the lead popper was a deputy inspector. Once he had enough alcohol in his bloodstream to blot out the nagging drive of the immortals he took command. The other helipoppers questioned his orders, all right. But they obeyed.

The fleet sailed out over the bay, over the city, up towards the mountains.

Underneath them the city lay helpless. It was flat and quiet from above, but at ground level it was a giant killing-pen where blind mobs roamed in terror. A thousand feet over the terrified streets, Cornut could see the fires of wrecked vehicles, the little heaps of motionless bodies, the utter confusion that the plague had wrought. Worse than plague was the panic. The deputy inspector had told him that there were by now more than ten thousand reported deaths in the city, but only a fraction of them were from smallpox. Terror had slain the rest.

Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contented, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.

What could be more painless, for them, than a biological thinner? As myxomatosis had rid Australia of the rabbit pest, so smallpox could control the swarming human vermin that was dangerous to the immortals.

Sergeant Rhame said thickly, 'Bad weather up there. I don't suppose we can go around.' Behind them the poppers trailed in clear air, but ahead, over the mountains, were towering clouds.

Cornut shook his head. He only knew the way St Cyr had gone, as St Cyr had seen it with his own eyes and the old islander had relayed it to him. They would have to fight through the storm.

Cornut closed his eyes briefly. It was war to the death now, and he wondered what it would be like to kill a man. He could understand well enough the motives of St Cyr and the others, waging a jealous battle against every threat, striking down those who like himself might learn of their existence, defeating research that might give them away by concealing it. It was a constant defensive action, and he could understand, he could even in a way forgive, their need to remove the threat. He could forgive their attempts on his own life, he could forgive their try at destroying most of a world.

He could not forgive the threat to Locille. For she was exposed. A few would survive the plague in any event - a few always did - but Cornut was a mathematician, and he did not accept one chance in a million as a sporting gamble against odds.

All these years, he dreamed, and all the while immortals were directing humanity in directions they chose. No wonder the great strides in medicine, no wonder the constant grinding competition between manufacturers for luxuries and comforts. How would it be if the immortals were destroyed?

And yet, he thought, beginning to sober up, and yet wasn't there something in Wolgren about that? No, not Wolgren.

But somewhere in statistical theory. Something about random movements. The Brownian Movement of molecules? That had been on Master Carl's mind, he remembered. The drunkard's walk - the undirected progress that moved from a dead centre ever more slowly, asymptotically, yet never stopped. Straight-line progress was always to an end; if the immortals directed it, it could go only so far as they could conceive.

They were not the future, he realized with sharp clarity. No super-potent force was the future; a kennelman could breed dogs only to his own specifications, he could not give the species the chance at free growth that could go on and on and endlessly on; and - Cornut, said a shrill, angry whine in his brain.

Panicky, he grabbed for the flask of medicinal brandy and blotted out the voice with a choking swallow.

The flask was getting low. They would have to hurry. They dared not get more sober.

Senator Dane stirred angrily and crackled an oath with his mind that sent ripples of laughter through the party. Don't laugh, you damned fools! he thought. I've lost them again.

'Sweety-heart,' caroled the ancient bobbysoxer from South America, Madam Sant'Anna, 'san fairy-ann. Don't cry.' A mental image of a fat weeping baby with Dane's face.

Pistols firing, Madam Sant'Anna skewered with a thousand swords, thought the senator.

Not me. 'What, me worry?' A giggle.

You'll laugh out of the other side of your face. An image of an unmarked grave. An obscene gesture from the senator; but, in truth, he wasn't really worried either. He cast out for Cornut's mind again, but not more than half-heartedly, and when he could not find it he projected a mental picture of a staggering, vomiting drunk that made them smile. The senator hurled a painful thought at one of the dark servants and cheerfully awaited the bringing of his candies.

Senator Dane never drank, but he had observed the shorties drinking, he knew what drinking could do. Sometimes the immortals got the same sort of selective release from alkaloids. Enough alcohol to blot out control, he was confident, would blot out the motor reflexes. They would pile up against a hill, they would crash into each other. Certainly they would never find this place - although Masatura-san's mind had been powerfully clear, and possibly there had been a leak, and - no. St Cyr himself had selected Masatura-san's tribe for the job of extermination. No one could conceal anything from St Cyr. And the place was quite unfindable.

It very nearly was. It had been a resort hotel at one time, used for conventions of the sort that are not meant to be public, pre-empted from a gangster who had in turn preempted it from its (more or less) legitimate builders. The gangster had been a nuisance, and the immortal who killed him had felt rather virtuous as he murdered a murderer.

The hotel no longer had roads leading to it, and there was no other habitation within twenty miles. That had been expensive; but the immortals had known this storm was brewing half a century before and expense was the least important factor in any of their plans. There was room for all of them, seventy-five immortals from all over the world, 'children' of sixty or sixty-five, the oldest of all a man who had been born in the reign of Caligula. (There were very few born before the twentieth century, because of the public-health contribution to their longevity; but those few seemed unwilling ever to die at all.) There were women who, with repeated plastic surgery, had managed to keep themselves in the general appearance, from a distance, of youth. There were visible ancients, like St Cyr with his cyanosis and his scars, the squat old Roman with his great recurring keloids, the hairless, fat black man who had been born in slavery on the estate of the king's governor of Virginia. Colour made no difference to them, nor race nor age; the factor that counted was power. They were the strongest in the world, as they insured by killing off the weak.

They were, however, cowards. They flocked like wild geese to favourable climates, away from Europe in the early twentieth century, away from the Pacific during the bomb tests of the 1950s. They left North Africa well before the Israeli-Arab clashes, and none of them had visited China since the days of the Dowager Empress. Not one had seen an earthquake or a volcano at close range - or at any rate, not after realizing what they were; and every one had, for all his prolonged life, surrounded himself with walls and with guards. They were cowards. They had the avarice of the very rich. There were drawbacks to their lives, but not such a drawback as dying.

In the great hotel, staffed by Sudanese flown in a decade earlier, completely out of touch with the world around them and guarded from even chance contact with a wanderer by a totally unfamiliar tongue, they prepared to sit out the plague. Senator Dane wandered among them, jovial but faintly worried. He annoyed them. The undertone of worry was like a constant mumble to them, irritating. They chaffed him about it, in words of fifty languages (they knew them all) or in thoughts, with gesture and tone. But he infected them all.

Fear is a relative thing. The man who is starving does not fear the sudden early frost that may destroy the crops. It is too late for that; he can only worry about what is close at hand. The well-fed man can worry years ahead.

The immortals could worry a full century ahead. They were Rockefellers of life, dispensing hours and days to the short-lived like dimes; they looked far into the future, and every distant pebble in their path was a mountain. Dane's worry was small and remote, but it was a worry. Suppose, mumbled the fear behind the jolly mask, that they do find our place here. True, they can't do much to us - we can destroy them with their minds, as we always have - but that is a nuisance. We would want to flee. This is our best place, but we have others.

Shut up, thought (or said, or gestured) the others.

He was interfering with their fun. The Roman was demonstrating a delicate balance of a feather on a soap-bubble (he was the strongest of them; it was hard to move physical objects with the mind, but with age it became possible).

But the fear said: We have lost them. They might be anywhere. (The bubble collapsed.) The fear said: Even if we flee, they are not stupid; they might search the house and find our own medics. And then - look then! Then they can end the plague and, with only a few of them dead, some five billion people will be looking for us seventy-five! (The feather floated to the ground. The immortals shouted at him peevishly.)

I'm sorry.

'Don't be sorry, you damn old fool,' cried Madam Sant'Anna, petulantly picturing him in an embarrassingly private blunder. The Roman picked up the image and added a third-century refinement.

But suppose they do get through, sobbed Dane.

'Go,' said St Cyr in his clock-tick voice, angry enough to speak aloud, 'de-stroy the ser-um. Do not spoil our day!'

Unwillingly Dane went, his mumbling worry diminishing in their minds with distance. It stopped abruptly, and cheerfully the immortals returned to their pleasures... It stopped abruptly for Dane too.

He was in the downstairs hall, searching for one of the Sudanese servants, when he heard a sound behind him. He started to turn. But he was fat and he was, in spite of everything, very old.

The blow caught him and he fell heavily, like a bladder filled with lard. He was only vaguely conscious of the hands that rolled him over, the acrid taste of the something - was it liquor? But he never drank liquor! - they were forcing down his throat.

'Got one,' said one of the helicops thickly, staggering slightly.

Senator Dane did not know, but there were a dozen reeling figures around him, and more coming in. As he began to recover consciousness he knew, but then it was too late. It was so still. The voices in his mind were silent!

The alcohol was a barrier. It deafened him, blinded him, marooned him. He had only eyes and mouth and ears, and for one whose life has been illuminated by the rapid flash of the mind itself, that is blindness. He began to sob.

Cornut passed the kitchen where the servants huddled under guard and Senator Dane lay on the floor, and hurried after the helicops. He heard gunfire and felt a queasy panic. This was the moment of truth; in a few seconds now the world would change its complexion for ever, a pastured herd with immortals fattening on its bounty or a brawl of leaderless billions— No. He had not thought that! And in a flash he was in another mind; it was a seepage from the cranky petulance of St Cyr that had touched him then, so close and so strong that even battle and alcohol could not quite subdue it; what he had felt was what St Cyr felt.

Cornut began to run. It was like being in two places at once; he saw the police coming in, shooting; he ran behind them.

The immortals resisted as best they could, but their weapons were no longer appropriate. They were like billionaires trying to buy off a charging rhino or a Hitler attempting to sway an earthquake to his will. They could not prevail against this naked force, they could only die or be taken; and the blurred fury of their minds was like a shout or a stench.

He caught one last clear thought from St Cyr: We lose. There was no other. St Cyr was dead; and all about him police were overpowering the survivors.