Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CRAWFORD motioned to the chair beside the desk. Vickers saw with a start that it was the same chair he'd sat in when he'd come to the office, only weeks ago, with Ann.

"It's nice seeing you again," said Crawford. "I'm glad we can get together."

"Your plans must be going well," said Vickers. "You are more affable than when I saw you last."

"I'm always affable. Worried and scared sometimes, but always affable."

"You haven't picked up Ann Carter."

Crawford shook his head. "There's no reason to. Not yet."

"But you're watching her."

"We're watching all of you. The few that are left."

"Any time we want to, we can come unwatched."

"I don't doubt it," Crawford admitted, "but why do you stick around? If I were a mutant, I wouldn't."

"Because we have you licked, and you're the one who knows it," said Vickers. He wished he were half as confident as he hoped he sounded.

"We can start a war," said Crawford. "All we have to do is lift a finger and the shooting begins."

"You won't start it."

"You played your hand too hard. You've pushed us just a bit too much. Now we have to do it — as a last defense."

"You mean the other world idea."

"Exactly," Crawford said.

He sat and stared at Vickers with the pale blue bullet eyes peering out from the rolls of flesh.

"What do you think we'll do?" he asked. "Stand still and let you steamroller us? You tried the gadgets and we stopped them with, I admit, rather violent methods. But now there's this other thing. The gadgets didn't work, so you tried an idea, a religion, a piece of park bench fanaticism — tell me, Vickers, what do you call this business?"

"The blunt truth," said Vickers.

"No matter what it is, it's good. Too good. It'll take a war to stop it."

"You'd call it subversive, I suppose."

"It is subversive," Crawford said. "Already, just a few days since it started, it has shown results. People quitting their jobs, walking away from their homes, throwing away their money. Poverty, they said, that was the key to the other world. What kind of a gag have you cooked up, Vickers?"

"What happens to these people? The ones who quit their jobs and threw away their money. Have you kept a check on what happens to them?"

Crawford leaned forward in his chair. "That's the thing that scares us. Those people disappeared; before we could round them up, they disappeared."

"They went to the other world," said Vickers.

"I don't know where they went, but I know what will happen if we let it continue. Our workers will leave us, a few at first and then more and more of them and finally…"

"If you want to turn on that war, start reaching for the button."

"We won't let you do this to us," Crawford said. "We will stop you somehow."

Vickers came to his feet and leaned across the desk. "You're done. Crawford. We're the ones who won't let you and your world go on. We're the ones…"

"Sit down," Crawford said.

For a moment Vickers stared at him, then slowly eased his way back into the chair.

"There is one other thing," said Crawford. "Just one other thing. I told you about the analyzers in this room. Well, they're not only in this room. They are everywhere. In railroad terminals, bus depots, hotel lobbies, eating joints..

"I thought as much. That's how you picked me up."

"I warned you once before. Don't despise us because we're merely human. With an organization of world industry you can do a lot of things and do them awfully fast."

"You outsmart yourself," said Vickers. "You've found out a lot of things from those analyzers that you didn't want to know."

"Like what?"

"Like a lot of your industrialists and bankers and the others who are in your organization are really the mutants you are fighting."

"I sad I had to hand it to you. Would you mind telling me how you planted them?"

"We didn't plant them, Crawford."

"You didn't…"

"Let's take it from the start," said Vickers. "Let me ask you what a mutant is."

"Why, I suppose he's an ordinary man who has some extra talents, a better understanding, an understanding of certain things that the rest of us can't grasp."

"And suppose a man were a mutant and didn't know he was, but regarded himself as an ordinary man, what then? Where would he wind up? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief? He'd wind up at the top of the heap, somewhere. He'd be an eminent doctor or a smart attorney or an artist or a highly successful editor or writer. He might even be an industrialist or banker."

The blue bullets of the eyes stared out from Crawford's face.

"You," said Vickers, "have been heading up one of the finest group of mutants in the world today. Men we couldn't touch because they were tied too closely to the normal world. And what are you going to do about it, Crawford?"

"Not a single thing. I'm not going to tell them."

"Then, I will."

"No, you won't," said Crawford. "Because you, personally, are washed up. How do you think you've lived this long in spite of all the analyzers we have? I've let you, that's how."

"You thought you could make a deal."

"Perhaps I did. But not anymore. You were an asset once. You're a danger now."

"You're throwing me to the wolves?"

"That's just what I'm doing. Good day, Mr. Vickers. It was nice knowing you."

Vickers rose from the chair. "I'll see you again."

«That,» said Crawford, "is something I doubt."