Another disturbing point was that they had been unable to contact the City Council. The beam had been jammed continuously. Obviously some people had decided to ask the City Council about the matter.
"I think we'd better go quietly to our homes," Carson said with a worried attempt at jocularity. "I'll keep a skeleton staff on and give the rest the afternoon off. I might as well, they'll probably be walking out soon, anyway."
Glad of this for his own reasons, Alan agreed.
He returned to his flat and changed into the nondescript suit he had worn earlier. He had had some trouble getting there, for the corridors were packed.
Angry and excited conversations were going on all over the place. Ordered discipline had given way to disorganized hysteria and it rather frightened him to see ordinary human beings behaving in a manner which, to him, was a rejection of their better selves.
Outside in the jostling corridor he was carried by the crowd to the elevators and had to wait for nearly a quarter of an hour as the mob's impatience grew.
There just weren't enough elevators to take them all at once.
Down, down, down the levels. Into level nine and they milled down the escalators and ramps, Alan unable to go back now even if he had wanted to.
The smoke from the torches of the first level, the smell of sweat, the atmosphere of tension, the ululating roar of the crowd all attacked his senses and threatened to drug his brain as the crowd entered a huge cavern which, he knew, had once been part of an underground airstrip during the years when the City had first been planned.
And at last he saw the Fireclown, standing upon the tall column that served him as a dais, seeming to balance his huge bulk precariously on the platform.
There above him, Alan saw the spluttering mass of the artificial sun. He remembered having heard of it. The Fireclown had made it-or had it made-and somehow controlled it.
"What's this? What's this?" The Fireclown was shouting. "Why so many? Has the whole world suddenly seen the error of its ways?"
There were affirmative shouts from all around him as the crowd answered, somewhat presumptuously, for the rest of the planet's millions.
The Fireclown laughed, his gross bulk wobbling on the dais.
Thousands upon thousands of people were packing into the cavern, threatening to crush those already at the center. Alan found himself borne towards the dais as the Fireclown's reverberating laugh swept over them.
"No more!" the Fireclown cried suddenly. "Corso-tell them they can't come in… .Tell them to come back later. We'll be suffocated!"
The Fireclown seemed baffled by the crowd's size-bewildered, perhaps, by his own power.
Yet was it his own power? Alan wondered. Was not the mob identifying the Fireclown with something else, some deep-rooted need in them which was finding expression through the Clown?
But it was immaterial to speculate. The fact remained that the Fireclown had become the mob's symbol and its leader. Whatever he told them they would do-unless, perhaps, he told them to do nothing at all.
The mob was beginning to chant:
"Fireclown! Fireclown! Fireclown! Speak to us!"
"How shall the world end?" he cried.
"In fire! In fire!"
"How shall it be born again?"
"In fire!"
"And the fire shall be the fire of man's spirit!" The Fireclown roared. "The fire in his brain and his belly. Too long has the world lived on artificial nourishment. The nourishment of processed food, the nourishment of ideas that exist in a vacuum. We are losing our birthright! Our heritage faces extinction!"
He paused as the mob moved like a mighty, restless tide. Then he continued:
"I am your phoenix, awash with the flames of life! I am your salvation! You see flames above." He raised an orange-painted hand to the spluttering orb near the ceiling of the cavern. "You see flames around you." He indicated the torches.
"But these fires only represent the real flames, the unseen flames which exist within you, and the Mother of Life which sweeps the heavens above you-the Sun!"
"The Sun!" the mob shrieked.
"Yes, the Sun! Billions of years ago our planet was formed from the stuff of the Sun. The Sun nurtured life, and it finally nurtured the life of our earliest ancestors. It has nurtured us since. But does modern man honor his mother?"
"No! No!"
"No! Our ancestors worshipped the Sun for millennia! Why? Because they recognized it as the Mother of Life. Without the Sun man could never have been born on Earth! The Earth itself could not have been formed!"
Some of the mob, obviously old hands at this, shouted' "Fire is Life!"
"Yes," the Fireclown roared. "Fire is Life. And how many of you here have ever seen the Sun? How many of you have ever been warmed directly by its rays? How many of you have ever seen a naked flame?"
A wordless bellow greeted each question.
Alan had to fight the infectious hysteria of the crowd. Though it was true that many of the City's populace had never been outside, they had led better and fuller lives within the walls. And there was nothing forbidding them to take a vacation beyond the City. It was a kind of agoraphobia, not the State, which held them back. They had, at any rate, reaped the benefits of the Sun in less direct ways-from the great solar batteries which supplied power to the City.
As if he anticipated these unspoken thoughts, the Fireclown carried on:
"We are misusing the Sun. We are perverting the stuff of life and changing it to the stuff of death! We use the Sun to power our machines and keep us alive in plastic, metal and concrete coffins. We use the Sun to push our spaceships to the planets-planets where we are forced to live in wholly artificial conditions, or planets which we warp and change from what they naturally are into planets that copy Earth. That is wrong! Who are we to change the natural order? We are literally playing with fire-and that fire will soon turn and shrivel us!"
"Yes! Yes!"
In an effort to remain out of the Fireclown's spell, Alan encouraged himself to feel dubiously towards the logic of what he was saying. The Fireclown continued in that vein for some time, drumming the words into the ready ears of the mob, again and again.
The Fireclown's argument wasn't new. It had been said, in milder ways, by philosophers and politicians of a certain bent for centuries-possibly since the birth of the industrial revolution. But, for all this, the argument wasn't necessarily right. It came back to the question of whether it was better for man to be an unenlightened savage in the caves, or whether he should use the reasoning powers and the powers of invention which were his in order to gain knowledge.
Feeling as if he had hit upon an inkling of the trouble, Alan realized that the Fireclown and those, like his grandfather, who opposed him were both only supporting opinions. Any forthcoming dispute was likely to be a battle between ignorance of one sort and ignorance of another.
Yet the fact remained-trouble was brewing. Big trouble unless something could be done about it.
"All religions have seen the Sun as a representation of God…" the Fireclown was saying now.
Perhaps he was sincere, Alan thought; perhaps he was innocent of personal ambition, unaware of the furor he was likely to create, thoughtless of the conflict that was likely to ensue.
And yet Alan was attracted to the Fireclown. He liked him and took a delight in the man's vitality and spontaneity. It was merely unfortunate that he should have come at a time when public neurosis had reached such a peak.
Now a voice was shouting something about the City Council. Fragmented phrases reached Alan about the closing of the levels, an attack against the Fireclown, a threat to free speech. It was marvelous how they accepted the principles of democracy and rejected them at the same time by talk of mob action!