“You too?” His voice grew a bit worried. “About twenty minutes ago somebody over here woke me up to tell me the same thing. I told him to go check everything from top to bottom and then went back to bed. I had a hard night over here arguing with Judge Philots. Somebody in one of the free-fall sectors pushed off too hard and smashed his head. Two One-Eyes found him and tried to help him, but he died. Now the good Judge wants to press charges on them for interfering with a citizen. So I yelled at him all evening till he got tired. But I’m bushed too. What about this radiation business? I knew we’d hit light sand yesterday — ”
Suddenly there was a burst of static in which I could detect voices that lasted for nearly a minute. Then it stopped and Captain Riche said, “Hey, what happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everything’s all right over there?” But in the middle of my sentence the static started again, and this time the attention lights all over my desk began to blink at me.
I answered the closest one.
Meeker from Communications answered, “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s happening on Epsilon-7. They’re trying to contact us, but something’s way the hell wrong.”
“Switch me on, will you?”
“Okay.”
The static returned, and with it the unintelligible voices. Meeker overrode it once more with: “Turn on your video, Captain, and I’ll relay what I’m getting.”
I switched on the large screen above my desk. It went from gray to black, and a handful of luminous disks appeared against the far speckling of stars. It was the radio view of all the cities.
Somehow they cut through the static and the voices — which I now realized was one voice echoing back on itself again and again — were briefly intelligible:
“…Epsilon-7; this is Epsilon-7, emergency red, emergency red, can anyone read me, can anyone read me…Epsilon-7—”
The other Cities must have all been tuned in by now. Finally another voice came over, static-free: “This is Captain Vlyon of Alpha-8. I read you clearly. Go ahead.” Apparently Alpha-8 was having a lot less trouble with interference than we were.
“Thank God. This is One-Eyed Pike, calling from the One-Eyed Quarter of Epsilon-7. The rest of them are dead, the whole official quarter. I don’t know, they went crazy or something. Someone came, or something, a man with green…” Static again, and when it cleared Captain Vlyon was saying: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your story. Please calm down, Pike, and tell me again.”
“The whole damn ship nearly exploded, I think. Maybe forty minutes ago. It was night cycle in the City, but there was a huge jerk — everybody woke up. A couple of people got hurt, and then they started to go crazy, because they didn’t know. And in the Concourse — I didn’t see, but they told me — a figure, all on fire, with green eyes began to walk. No, I don’t understand it. But they died. Twenty minutes ago, a group of us tried to get into the official sector, and there were corpses all over — just dead, all over, and a few screaming still, trying to tell us, and then we saw a light, and we fled back here.”
“Now look a minute, Pike — ”
“Now you look! Goddamn it, you come here and get us out! We’re hiding out in the web, but you can take the shuttle boats across. For God’s sake, come over here and get us out of this — ” Over Pike’s voice came a scream; then Pike cried out. Then I saw why Meeker had put me onto visual.
One of the circles — Epsilon-7—wasn’t right. There was a nimbus around it and the ship was quivering. Then suddenly the radio went dead, and on the screen Epsilon-7 began to break up. First it crushed in; then five or six fragments sped off in different directions as though they had been hurled. What was left just cracked apart like an eggshell. Within five minutes the twelve-mile hunk of metal was torn to bits in front of my eyes and the pieces scattered through space.
By now there must have been people on all eleven remaining Cities watching what I had just seen. For ten minutes there was silence. I was beyond speech.
Finally Captain Alva’s voice came through. “Captain Vlyon, are you still there? What happened?”
A very strained voice came back. “Yes. I’m…still here. I don’t…”
He didn’t finish. I felt that perhaps Captain Vlyon was not the same man whose voice we had heard before; I don’t mean anything mysterious. Were any of us the same?
“I don’t know…” he whispered.
Third entry:
The shock had worn off, and in the cessation, the rumor has fled over the City. Light sand continues, but compared to the destruction of a City, that’s no problem. There is a still panic, with no way to protect ourselves. Judge Cartrite greeted me affably this morning: “Well, at least one good thing has come out of this. A good many people have returned to the rituals.”
I suppose he expected me to be overjoyed. Meeker and three other communication engineers in three other Cities had enough presence of mind to record everything that went on that evening. Communications was busy all morning making a detailed comparison, as well as trying to unscramble some of the staticked-out sections. They cleared up perhaps ten more words by the end of the afternoon, which added nothing to what we already know. There was a depressing intercity conference that afternoon, during which we were supposed to offer suggestions.
First, five minutes of silence; then fifteen minutes of embarrassed, preposterous speculation. Finally the meeting was abandoned.
It was nearly dinner hour when Captain Alva called me again.
“What’s happened now?” I asked. “Something come up?”
“Just more trouble. Somehow the rumor got out that the One-Eyes on Epsilon-7 had taken it over and managed to blow it up.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s nothing serious, but there’s talk of putting rigid enforcement on the Norm again.”
“Who came out with that idea?”
“I don’t know. The idea that the City could just go up like that is too much for most of them. You can almost watch each person turning around and around, looking for someone to blame it on. The One-Eyes are the easiest.”
“But why?”
“Oh, the reasoning works something like this: the last report we got from Epsilon-7 came from a One-Eye, so therefore they were the last people in charge of the City; therefore they must have taken it over from the officers and so on and so forth.”
“And managed to destroy the whole City?”
“Don’t ask me. One of the ritual groups here has already incorporated it; they get themselves high on ether, then all stand around while their leader puts out the left eye of a large doll. Then everyone moans and has visions of destruction.”
“Ether?” I asked. “I don’t like that at all.”
“Neither do I. As far as I’m concerned, the rituals can get as involved as they want to, but I draw the line at the use of narcotics.”
I agreed with him. “I just hope this ritual business doesn’t get completely out of hand. This afternoon I got a complaint from Parks — he’s my head Market Research man — about the kid he’s training to be his assistant. Parks told me that the kid always brought a little pad of paper and pencil to work with him and would take it out and doodle on it occasionally. Parks always thought the kid was using it to figure out something. But when the kid came in today, Parks couldn’t get any work out of him. He just sat there and doodled, and when Parks asked him why, he said that his ritual group always wrote down certain signs when certain categories of thoughts entered their heads. He wouldn’t say what they were, but apparently he was thinking them all the time and had to sit in the corner making circles, crosses, and parallelograms.”