As he bent over the table, scribbling a note into a corner of the document, Rachel Esthersdaughter, accompanied by several members of the Female Society, came out of a passageway nearby and stood behind him, Rachel, like the women with her, was again wearing an enormous neck-to-ankles cloak whose pockets were filled with equipment. She twinkled her eyebrows at Eric.
“The neutralizers all ready to be used?” the Aaron asked, not looking up from the document. “Good. You know your posts—move off. Racheclass="underline" you, of course, will stay with me at headquarters, wherever headquarters happens to be. Now, tell me, girl—I’m thinking of making this man of yours a section leader—do you like the idea? Fm sure you do. The leadership of Section 15 was vacant once you told us of Jonathan Danielson’s death. Young man, do you think you can handle the lives and destinies of almost two hundred people? There will come a time when you will be alone in that position, when you will be exclusively in charge. Rachel will be your executive assistant, of course. I’ve put you down for it, and we’ll settle the whole matter some time after your initiation. Let me see: we’ll need the approval of a Council of the People, as well as the members of Section 15. No problem, there. To move on, however—”
“I don’t think I can do it, sir!” Though Rachel had shut her eyes in a wince, he was pleased and astonished to find that he had actually managed to cut in.
The Aaron was even more astonished. He looked up from the document, turned around and studied Eric. Evidently, he was rarely interrupted. His flow of thought was listened to, taken as orders and acted upon.
“Eric, my boy,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Please do not waste my time with modest noises. I am grappling with a major transition in the life of an entire people; I cannot be deflected for the purpose of administering first-aid to your ego. You commanded a group as large as this in the cages of the Monsters. You have been educated by Rachel, here, one of the finest minds among us. Anything else you need to know, I’ll teach you myself, on the way. And if you’re concerned about your front-burrow back-ground, let me tell you this: in terms of our ultimate destination, the final goal of our plan, that background fits perfectly. You are an Eye, which none of us ever—”
“Pardon me, sir!” Eric broke in again. “But that’s the reason I don’t feel I can do it. It’s not my capacity for leadership I’m questioning—it’s the Plan. Let me explain,” he said hurriedly to the Aaron’s terrifying frown. “I didn’t have any suspicion as to what the Plan was until I got here. I thought it was some combination of Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, a new way of hitting back at the Monsters. Then, when I heard about the ship, I had the Wild idea that you people were going to take it over, to use their own weapons against the Monsters. All right, it was naive of me—I admit it. But what you’re actually planning has nothing to do with hitting back at the Monsters. You’re just running away from them.”
The frown slowly disappeared from the old man’s face. He nodded, as if to say, “Oh, that problem.” He hitched himself carefully up on a corner of the table and thought for a bit. “Try to understand me, Eric,” the Aaron said at last, in a totally different kind of voice. “Try to understand me: put your preconceptions aside for the moment. Alien-Science, Ancestor-Science—we were the first to believe in each of them, here in the Aaron People, and we were the first to discard each of them, many auld lang synes ago. The Plan we have in mind does combine both Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, but that is purely accidental. The Plan, we have come to believe, is the only real and valid way in which man can hit back at the Monsters. We are not running away from them, even though our position here has become more than a little untenable. We are running amongst them—directly amongst them, do you hear?—where we can hit back at them most effectively.”
“Hit back at them how? As vermin?” Eric asked bitterly. “As vermin, stealing odds and ends from them for the rest of our existence as a race?”
A gentle, compassionate smile appeared on the Aaron’s deeply lined face. “Eric, what do you think you are? What do you think you’ve learned to be best all through your life in the burrows? Do you think you could change tomorrow and go back to planting crops or tending cattle—as your ancestors did? And if you could, would you want to?”
Eric opened his mouth and shut it again. He did not know what to say. He did not know what to think. Rachel slipped her hand into his and he found himself gripping it desperately.
“That’s why we feel our Plan is thoroughly realistic. Our Plan recognizes a fact, Eric: that there are probably more people alive on Earth right now, living in the huge houses of the Monsters, than ever before in human history. And there’s something else about human history that our Plan recognizes.”
Clasping his arms on his chest, the Aaron shut his eyes and began rocking himself back and forth. His voice changed once more, this time to a kind of chant. “Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin—and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone.”
25
Nine days later, Eric stood on a ramp leading up to the Monster spaceship and, by the light of the moon, checked off on a repeatable slate the 192 members of Section 15 as they mounted past him on the way to embarkation.
He would never have believed it was possible to move literally thousands of men, women and children—the entire population of the Aaron People—so rapidly and so smoothly over such a vast distance. They had come from the very bottom burrows, over a route that went around and around in a gently ascending spiral through the layers of insulating material that packed the walls, all the way to a topmost hole that opened on the roof itself. They had lost not a single individual by accident or in battle, though they had passed across the territories of a hundred different tribes. Heavily armed men had seen to that, heavily armed men and experienced diplomatic officials who knew exactly when to negotiate, when to threaten and when to buy. Flying squads of trained emergency workers had swarmed to the scene of anything at all unusual; scholars and scouts had cooperated in selecting, from maps made long ago for this very journey, the best approaches and the most economical shortcuts.
It had been an incredible experience, an amazing performance by a whole society. But it had been in preparation for at least a full generation. Every one of the Aaron People had known exactly what to do.
He would never have believed what the Outside looked like—even after all that Rachel and the others had told him—until he had stood on the roof in the screaming sunlight and seen what it meant to have no ceiling at all, to be unable to observe a wall anywhere. At first, he had fought the terror—rising in his throat like a flood of vomit—simply to preserve his standing in the eyes of his section; but as he heard the whimpers behind him and realized that there were no sturdy explorers among his followers, only homebound artisans and their families, he had forgotten his own panic and gone among them, cheering and chiding and making suggestions. “Then don’t look up if it’s so upsetting.” “Take care of your wife, you—she’s fainted.” “When you feel you just can’t take it anymore, try kneeling and putting your hands on the floor of the roof. It’s there, and it’s solid.”