Sola looked at her sadly. "He was your father."
"That's why he did it! He thought I was dead. You talk about a few weeks berserk--He planned it for years, then he followed Var for years. Nothing had happened to me! And you--you sent Var to kill the man who might harm me, when no one had. Who are you to judge? But Neq saw his wife--Dr. Jones' own secretary, a beautiful and literate woman--Neq saw her raped by fifty men, and then they cut off his hands and dumped him in the forest with her corpse. He should have died then--but he brought "that tribe to justice. Now he wants to stop all outlaws by rebuilding Helicon. And you hypocrites quibble about the past!"
"Where is Var the Stick?" Sola asked quietly.
Vara couldn't answer.
"I slew him," Neq said.
Their faces told the story. Many of these people had known Var, and more had heard of him. They were hardly ready to accept his killer as their leader. And why should they?
"It was an accident," Tyl said. "Neq thought Var had killed Soli in her childhood, as we all thought. He reacted as we all did. Before he learned the truth, Var was dead. Because of that error, Neq put aside the sword. Now I speak for his sincerity--and so does Vara."
"So we noticed," Jim said, in a tone that made Vara flush furiously.
Jimi was looking at the vine.
"Show your weapons," Tyl said to Neq.
Neq unveiled the glockenspiel. There was a murmur of amazement, for none of them had seen it before.
"Use it," Tyl said.
Neq looked about. The faces were grim and sad--grim for him, sad for Vara, who was crying without shame. These people evidently shared his vision of a new Helicon, but the example of the prior one frightened them. It frightened him too, for he had seen it in ruins.
Perhaps Helicon could not function without bloodshed, direct or indirect. Perhaps there was no way to restore the old society. But it had to be tried, and now was the time, and this was the group. He could not let it all slide away just because of the confused scruples of the moment.
They needed a leader. If he did not assume command, no one would. He was far from ideal, but there was no one else.
Neq turned to Dr. Jones. "You asked me to find out why Helicon perished, so that we could prevent it from happening again. How did the leadership fail? I do not know. Perhaps it will fail again. Perhaps Helicon is doomed. But this is a risk that must be taken."
Dr. Jones did not respond.
Neq looked for his little hammer, but couldn't find it. So he tapped out a melody slowly with the pincers, touching the glockenspiel lightly so as to avoid the unpleasant metallic effect. Then he sang.
As he sang, he looked first at one person, then another. The song had special meaning for him, as every song did, and while the melody was venting itself through his lung and mouth and instrument he believed it. Its pre-Blast originators could not have honored its precepts--but he was hammering out warning.
It was as though he were meeting each man in the circle and conquering him with his syncopation. And each woman was vulnerable to the sincerity of the song, the vibrant emotion of it. While his voice and hammer were in harness Neq the Glockenspiel was potent even in the face of their unified distrust.
He finished that song, and sang another, and then another. It was as though he were marching out of the haunted forest again, and in a way he was, for there was nothing but song to do the job that had to be done. Vara began harmonizing with him, the way Neqa'tad done long ago, and slowly the others formed into a circle about him, compelled to echo the words.
He sang. The very room wavered and flowed, shaping itself into an ugly badlands mountainside girt by tangled metal palisades, irregular stone battlements, a tunnel under the awful mountain, a vast cavern filled with ashes. Helicon formed, and Helicon's promise infused the group. From death came life--the mountain of death that meant life for the finest elements in man. The dream became tangible, thrilling, eternal; a force that no living man could deny.
At last he stopped. They were his, now, he knew. His dream had met their caution and prevailed, however illogically. Helicon would live again.
Then he saw the vine-box. Jimi had covered it, so that the flowers had opened in their darkness, and the narcotic had seeped into the room while Neq was singing.
Tyl must have seen it happen, and let it be, for Tyl was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Fifty strong, they unloaded at devastated Helicon. The mountain appeared much the same from the outside--a looming, forbidding mound of refuse.
"We shall not need to kill in Helicon's defense," Neq said. "We will accept those who climb to the snow line. If they are unsuitable, we will send them far away. No one who comes to us must be allowed to return to the nomad world."
The others nodded. They all knew the mischief such returns had made in the past. Had Helicon truly kept to itself, instead of dabbling in nomad politics, the original society of the crazy demesnes would have survived unbroken. It had been a lesson--one that Neq himself had learned most harshly of all.
The nomads were the real future of mankind. The crazies were only caretakers, preserving what they could of the civilization the nomads would one day draw upon. Helicon was the supplier for the crazies. But Helicon and the crazies could not make the civilization themselves, for that would be identical to the system of the past.
The past that had made the Blast. The most colossal failure in man's history.
Yet by the same token the nomads had to be prevented from assuming command of Helicon, either to destroy it or to absorb its technology directly. There must not be a forced choice between barbarism and the Blast. The caretaker order had to be maintained for centuries, perhaps millennia, until the nomads, in their own time, outgrew it. Then the new order would truly prevail, shed of the liabilities of the old.
That, at least, was Dr. Jones' theory. Neq only knew that they had a job to do. Perhaps the others understood it better than he did, for even the scattered children in the group were subdued.
"To many of you, the interior will be strange," Neq said. "Think of it as a larger crazy building, gutted at the moment but about to be restored by our effort. Each person will have his area of responsibility. Dick the Surgeon will be in charge of group health, as he was before; he will check the perimeters with the radiation counter-- the crazy click-box--and set the limits of safety by posting wamers. Only with his permission--and mine--will anyone go beyond these. The mountain is a badlands; the kill-spirits still lurk.
"Jim the Gun will be in charge of mechanical operations; restoring electric power, making the machinery functional. Most of us will work under his direction for as long as it takes. A year, perhaps. Without the machinery Helicon can not live; it will bring in air and water and keep the temperature even and make our night and day. Some of you are--were--crazies; you know more about electricity than Jim does. He's in charge because he's a leader and you are not. Had there been leadership among the crazies, Helicon might never have fallen, and would certainly have been rebuilt before this."
They nodded somberly. Leaders existed among the nomads, but the crazies didn't operate the same way. In time the new Helicon would amalgamate its disparate elements and rear its own leaders and technicians and be a complete society in itself. Right now everything had to be makeshift.