Turncoat

VI

BASS stood with one shoulder against the rough clapboards of a house, half-supporting himself against it, and stared down the long slope at the lights of the city. Behind him, in the darkness, the rising wind howled through the dry sorted house. The air was chill on his sweaty skin, and his hurt side was one solid, throbbing pain from chest to groin but he did not move.

He had paralleled the barricade for eight blocks, all the way to the Wall. The Guard was there, too—one man every hundred and fifty yards, standing atop the Wall itself, with a searchlight aimed down into no man’s land.

From where he stood he could see a part of that chain of light, tiny with distance. First came the streetlights of the residential area, dipping in precise converging lines to the cubical bulk of the Store. The top of the building was lost against the sky, but the doorways along its base, like the gaps between the teeth of a jack-o’-lantern, spilled wedges of orange radiance.

Beyond, clear and perfect, other rows of street lights marched up the gentle counter-slope. Then came the Guard’s Winking search beams, outlining the long catenary curve of the Wall; and beyond that Bass could see a wan glow rising from the other side.

The glow was Glenbrook. How often, Bass thought, had he looked at another ghostly light in the sky from the other side of that hill—the glow that was Stamford?

And how often, from the high ground, had he looked over on a clear day and seen the checker-work pattern that looked like rooftops—seen the shapes that looked like copters rising, the crawling dots that counterfeited trucks and buses, all the evidences of ordinary human activity—and seen them only as illusions?

He turned wearily and looked up the slope. Lights were there, too, a long straight line of them—tiny points blink-jaw from the next hill. The line was nearer than it had been half an hour ago.

The Guard was working slowly westward across the city, searching each block in turn, moving the barricade up to the next street, searching again. They were being very slow, very careful. He had perhaps an hour and a half or two hours before they drove him down into the business section again.

The Store’s bell had begun to toll half an hour ago; by now everyone in the city except Bass and the Guardsmen would be inside that enormous building. Once they had contracted their circle to the business area, the rest of their work would be easy.

He was going to die. That was a surprising thing, still; but his fatigue-numbed mind could accept it. The intolerable thing was that he couldn’t strike back; he couldn’t leave any memory of himself behind, even in the minds of his persecutors. Over there in Glenbrook there might be—there must be—others like himself. One after another, they might be thrust into the same grim comedy that he had been acting out; there was nothing he could do to prevent it. The Juggernaut would roll over him, erase him, and move on.

He thought of Consumers and Salesmen, Deacons and Deputies, Executives and Stockholders. He thought of the house he had grown up in—flimsy and rotten, because house-building took too many man-hours, was not profitable enough to the Store—crowded, because it was a sin to curb the size of Consumer families; the Store must have customers. He thought of his father, old at forty; of his mother, who had borne ten children before she died.

He thought of the scanty meals that had been set on their table, and the thin edge of hunger that was never quite warn away; because gluttony was a sin ; because a Consumer didn’t need fat, only muscle, to be an efficient worker; because there were too many mouths, and more every year.

All of it fell into one huge, simple pattern—the walls around men’s cities, and the walls around their minds.

The pressure of the book in the pocket of his cape reminded him of the other book which he had not taken, though it would have been a hundred times more useful if he had got away—the atlas. He felt no curiosity about it now; he knew what he would have seen if he had opened it to the map of the continent.

LINE for line, area for area, the map would have been the same as the one he knew, except that the blank areas would have been filled in, and the filled-in ones blank. Like two parts of an interlocking puzzle, he thought: if you put the two maps together they would make one continuous chart of information, one solid, enormously comforting chart of a world totally inhabited, totally civilized, without fear.

That knowledge was the most important in the world—and there was no way you could communicate it. Even if he had got free of the Stamford Guard, nothing he could conceivably have done would have convinced a single other person of the truth.

If you kidnaped one person a day and showed him the truth, and if one out of a hundred, knowing the truth, could stand up against his angel—which was unlikely—and if each of those kidnaped one person a day in his turn … Bass groaned abruptly and tugged at his hair. There had to be a way; there had to be something he could still do.

Sneak into the Confirmation Rooms, sabotage the machines? They’d fly new ones in the next day, and how often could he do that before he was caught?

Break the Walls down, somehow … no use, the Walls were only a symbol; it was the angels that kept men from crossing over.

Bass started, and went over that thought again carefully. If that was true —and it was—why had the Walls been built of brick when boards would do?

For one thing, he realized; they were afraid of fires starting in the wasteland. It had happened already, or else the wasteland had been burnt deliberately, to prevent it… .

The wind was still rising. It pressed solidly against his back, flapped his cape and his trouser-cuffs around him.

… But the wasteland was too narrow now, he thought. A really big fire would jump the gap.

If a man, Bass asked himself slowly, stood facing that Wall, with an angel’s fiery sword in front of him and a burning city behind—which way would he jump?

For an instant a heart-quickening, vision rose up before him; then it vanished. There was just one thing wrong with it: the citizens of Stamford were all inside the massive, modern, fireproof Store, and would still be there, in all probability, an hour after Bass was dead…

Bass lurched through the doorway of the empty filling station, caught himself by grasping the edge of a desk, and let himself slide down into its shadow. He sat there, head down, until his laboring breath began to come more evenly. It had taken him what seemed like almost an hour, running when he could, forcing his stiff muscles into a fast walk when he couldn’t, to find this place:

It was hard to get up again, but he did it. He picked up the phone, pressed the stud marked “Operator,” and waited, trying to control his breathing.

“Operator,” said a woman’s voice. Bass said, “Get me Guard Headquarters.”

“Your credit card number, please.”

“This is an emergency call,” Bass said. “Put it through, Operator.”

“Yes, sir.”

A pause; a hum. Then: “Guard H. Q., Sergeant Santos. Go ahead.”

Bass took a deep breath. “Listen to me carefully,” he said. “I’m the demon you’re looking for. I’ve—”

The Guardsman’s voice blurted something incomprehensible, tremulously. “Listen, you fool!” Bass said sharply. “I’ve planted an explosive device in the Store. It’s set to go off exactly thirty minutes from now. If you agree to let me go back across the Wall, I’ll tell you where it is. Tell your—”

Another voice broke in. “What’s that? Say that again.”

Bass repeated it. He finished, “It will take me ten minutes to get to another telephone. At the end of that time, if I see that you’re withdrawing your men from the Wall, I’ll tell you where the explosive is hidden. If not, you won’t hear from me again.” He put down the phone, cutting off the man’s voice in mid-syllable.

OUTSIDE, he picked up the five-gallon can he had filled at the pump. The wind was still growing, roaring down to meet him as he climbed the hill again. A ruder gust came as he reached the crest, nearly knocking him off his feet; his hat lifted from his head and went bounding away into darkness.

Back at his starting point, Bass set the can down—its weight had grown fantastically with every step he took—and leaned against a tree until the worst of his weakness and nausea passed. To the east, the winking lights of the advancing barricade had vanished; the Guardsmen were out of sight in the hollow between the two hills. In the other direction, as he watched, the lights along the Wall began to blink out. Bass turned his attention to the orange wedges of light that spilled from the doorways of the Store.

After a moment, they began to flicker.

The Guardsmen were falling back from the Wall—no doubt to form another, less conspicuous line a block or two away—but they were also evacuating the Store.

Bass lifted the can and carried it into the nearest house. In the darkness, he felt his way around the crouching bulks of tables, the spidery traps of tubular-metal chairs; passed through a doorway and went straight to the huge wardrobe closet, crammed with dresses, capes, trousers, so tightly pressed that they were like one solid mass. He pulled out an armload of them, carried them back into the living room, heaped them against an inner wall. He splashed them sparingly with gasoline from the can.

Before he left, he raised a window in the front room and another in the kitchen, and propped open the door between.

At the next house but one he did the same, and so on down the deserted street, working his way southward, until his gasoline was gone. He stood panting raggedly in the living room of the last one; it had taken him a long time, and he had not dared stop to rest. By now more than half of the congregation would be outside the Store, spreading out, filling the streets. There was little time left.

He struck a match from the box he’d found in the kitchen, dropped it onto the piled garments, watched them flare up. He waited until he was sure the flame had caught, then hurried out, down the street, into the next house with an open window. Another match; another pale blossom of fire.

When he came out of the eighth house, he saw a golden tongue of flame rise over the rooftops, down the way he had come.

Coming out of the fourteenth, he heard the faint wail of a siren; then another. Too soon! He had hoped that the choked streets would delay them longer. He ran on grimly, the pavement jolting his body from feet to skull, breath burning his throat; into a house, lighting the match, dropping it, out again without waiting to see that it caught, on to the next.

Three-quarters of the way back to his starting-point, the matches gave out. Bass groped wildly in the dark kitchen for another box, gave it up, snatched the book out of the pocket in his cape, wrenched out a handful of pages before he realized that he could never keep them alight in the gale outside—dropped them and the remainder of the book, mumbling absurdly, “Now I’ll never know if it’s the same text“—plucked a blazing, gasoline-soaked vest out of the fire and ran with it down to the next house.

It worked, but it delayed him. When he came out of the last house, the sirens were very near. Also, a copter was parked in the middle of the street. Two red-masked men were climbing out of it, running toward him.