In the first light of morning, Stirling examined the effects of the blotch gun charge which had caught Melissa. There was a hand-sized blob of the strange metal at her waist, where she had been hit; and rigid tentacles radiated from it lapped around body and limbs. He discovered that the streamers could be uncoiled individually if he held them tightly and was careful not to let them snap back. The blotch gun’s efficacy depended on trussing the victim so securely that he was unable to exert any leverage to free himself. The only drawback to his releasing Melissa was a social one: the fast-moving tentacles had traversed every part of her body.
“Perhaps,” Stirling said as he worked to separate metal, clothing, and skin, “I should leave your arms till the end. This sort of thing always earns me a slap on the face.”
Melissa looked up at him with a wickedness he had not expected. “You mean this is the way you usually get your women?”
“I don’t need to use force,” he said haughtily. “Some-tunes I just sneak up from behind and chloroform them.”
Melissa laughed easily, seemingly at peace with her world, now that she was going back to the village. Stirling was amazed at her inability to understand that the He, as she and the other villagers knew it, was virtually a thing of the past. The vacation in the sky was drawing to a close.
He stood up and cautiously looked out of the nest of tall winter wheat in which the sled was lying. There was no sign of pursuit; but he thought he could detect figures moving on the roof of the He’s central power station projecting up out of the haze several miles behind.
“Lomax seems to have taken over the power station,” he said. “They really mean business, Melissa. How many months or weeks does Johnny think you’ll be able to hang on now?”
“Victor,” she replied, using his name for the first time, “Johnny didn’t take over the village by muscle power alone. I know Dad didn’t like him; but he has qualities which Dad might have recognized if he hadn’t been growing timid and afraid towards the end.”
“But what can he do when a thing like this is sprung on him?”
“That’s the point. It wasn’t sprung on him. Johnny knew about those men the first day they arrived a month ago to build their headquarters. He’s been making plans —and I think you ruined them by breaking away just when you did.”
Stirling felt swamped. “Plans! Have you been up here so long you’ve forgotten what you’re up against? The Food Technology Authority, the Government, and the people of the United States’—that’s what you’re up against. What plan could compensate for odds of a million-to-one against you?”
Melissa looked unperturbed. “Johnny says it isn’t force that counts—it’s leverage.”
“Come on,” Stirling said heavily. “We’d better leave this thing and go on to the village on foot.”
It was mid-morning when they neared the village, but there was no sign of the thin columns of smoke from the central cooking fires. Stirling was scanning the grass-shrouded tank structures on either side as they reached the area representing the community’s northern limits. Even his practiced eye could detect no life; and he decided the villagers had moved out, or were better at concealment than he had realized.
“I thought we had seen the last of you,” a voice said from behind.
Stirling spun around and saw Paddy walking a few paces to the rear. He was carrying a rusted, but obviously still functional, pistol in one brown hand.
“Put that thing away,” Melissa said quickly. “You can tell Johnny he’d have seen the last of me if Vic hadn’t been there.”
Paddy shrugged. “You tell him. He doesn’t listen to me much.”
When Stirling was shepherded into the Council’s hut, it looked pretty much as it did the first night he had seen it. The same faintly burning glow-globe—brought by some thoughtful rebel many years earlier—was casting a sickly light over the matted walls. Johnny was, as usual, stripped to the waist, and his eyes burned at Stirling through reddened rims. He looked like a human time bomb.
“I hear you brought Melissa back. Is she all right?”
Stirling almost winced as he heard the reedy caricature of a voice which issued from the prosthetic at Johnny’s throat. He nodded.
“For that much, thanks.”
Stirling felt a pang of guilt which prompted him to explain. “I like Melissa. I wasn’t doing you any favors, Johnny.” “You weren’t doing me any favors.” Johnny laughed. “Oh, brother!”
Stirling allowed some time to pass in silence to give the emotional potentials a chance to subside. “Listen, Johnny. I’m truly sorry about all this, but isn’t it time you woke up? I dislike the F.T.A. as much as you do—if for different reasons—but you’re fighting them the wrong way.”
“How would you do it?”
“With publicity. The Authority has taken a risk by moving into the lies with the elections coming up this year, and they didn’t expect to find anybody already in residence. That’s your lever against Lomax and the others. Make enough noise and you’ll tear down the walls of Jericho.”
Johnny traced patterns in the dust at his feet. “How about a radio broadcast from the He direct to everybody in the States?”
“Ideal—but how would you do it?
“From the power station.”
“You’d never get near it. Lomax has men all over it, and there’s no cover for miles around.”
“Yeah. He has now. Before you gave the whole show away there was no … Anyway, there is still a way we can get in. Will you help? I need at least ten men.”
“Ten?” Stirling began to feel uneasy. “But you’ve over a hundred here already. Why do you need another volunteer?”
Johnny looked up, smiling crookedly, and Stirling felt a sensation which had not troubled him hi months—an icy awareness of gray clouds prowling beneath his feet.
“Johnny, you’re not…”
A woman screamed outside, and the sound was choked off by the angry rattle of machine rifles. Stirling and Johnny dived for the door. They found Paddy kneeling in the grass, hands holding his stomach, while deltas of blood coursed over his knuckles. West of the village four of the large sleds were shuttling just above soil bed level, and gunners on board them sprayed everything in sight.
Stirling lay prone in the long grass and watched the big sleds waltz and skid across the sky as their rifles searched through the village by filling the air with howling ricochets. It took less than three minutes for the gunners to empty their magazines; but time itself seemed to have been shocked into immobility. When the sleds finally skimmed away on full boost, silence came down hard for a few seconds; then, somewhere in the distance, a child began to cry. Johnny jumped to his feet and went to Paddy, who had fallen on one side.
“He’s dead,” Johnny said as Stirling approached. Something had added a new degree of distortion to his voice, beyond what the failing prosthetic could do. “He didn’t even like me.”
“The bastards,” Stirling whispered in disbelief. “The dirty bastards.”
“Well, how about it, big brother? Do we hit the power station?”
Stirling looked at the fifteen-foot eastern wall of the He, beyond which the invisible wind-rivers ran free, and his mouth went dry. “Is that the only way?”
“That’s the only way, big brother. Over and under.”
They waited until the following morning and set off at first light to cover the maximum distance before dark.
Stirling climbed the crude ladder which had been raised in the lee of a water tank where it could not be seen by F.T.A. observers using binoculars. At the top he looked down once. Far below him lay arctic kingdoms of tumbled clouds, and beyond that again—visible through ragged tears in the vapor fabric—the gray Atlantic waited implacably. Microscopic ships trailed their miniature white chevrons through the close-packed corrugations of ocean waves.