By elevator the four mutants had descended to the street level. Staggering, groping numbly, they followed Doctor Rafferty across the lobby, toward the wide doors that led to the street.
No pedestrians or cars were in sight, Cussick observed; the police had successfully cleared everybody away. At the corner one gloomy shape broke the expanse of gray; the Van was parked, its motor running, ready to follow.
"There they go," a doctor said, standing beside Cussick. "I hope Rafferty knows what he's doing." He pointed. "The almost-pretty one is Vivian. She's the youngest female. The boy is Garry—very bright, very unstable. That is Dieter, and his companion is Louis. There's an eighth, a baby, still in the incubator. They haven't as yet been told."
The four diminutive figures were visibly suffering. Half-conscious, two of them in convulsions, they crept wretchedly down the steps, trying to stay on their feet. They did not get far. Garry was the first to go down; he tottered for a moment on the last step and then pitched face-forward onto the cement. His small body quivering, he tried to crawl forward; sightlessly, the others stumbled along the sidewalk, unaware of the prone shape among them, too far gone themselves even to register its existence.
"Well," Dieter gasped, "we're outside."
"We—made it," Vivian agreed. Sinking wearily down she rested against the side of the building. A moment later Dieter lay sprawled beside her, eyes shut, mouth slack, struggling weakly to get to his feet. And presently Louis slid down beside them.
Chagrined, dazed by the suddenness of their collapse, the four of them lay huddled feebly against the gray pavement, trying to breathe, trying to stay alive. None of them made any attempt to move; the purpose of their ordeal was forgotten. Panting, struggling to hold onto consciousness, they gazed sightlessly at the upright figure of Doctor Rafferty.
Rafferty had halted, hands in his overcoat pockets. "It's up to you," he said stonily. "You want to go on?"
None of them answered; none of them even heard him.
"Your systems won't take the natural air," Rafferty continued. "Or the temperature. Or the food. Or anything." He glanced at Cussick, an expression of pain on his face, an acute reflection of suffering that startled the Security official. "So let's give up," he said harshly. "Let's call the Van and go back."
Vivian nodded faintly; her lips moved, but there was no sound.
Turning, Rafferty curtly signaled. The Van rolled instantly up; robot equipment dropped to the pavement and scuttled up to the four collapsed figures. In a moment they were being lifted into the Van's locks. The expedition had failed; it was over. Cussick had had his view of them. He had seen their struggle and their defeat.
For a time he and Doctor Rafferty stood on the cold night sidewalk without speaking, each involved in his own thoughts. Finally Rafferty stirred. "Thanks for clearing the streets," he murmured.
"I'm glad I had time," Cussick answered. "It might have been bad... some of Jones' Youth League Patrols are roaming around."
"The eternal Jones. We really don't have a chance."
"Let's be like these four we just saw; let's keep trying."
"But it's true."
"It's true," Cussick agreed. "Just as it's true your mutants can't breathe out here. But we set up road-blocks anyhow; we cleared the streets and hoped to hell we pushed them back this one time."
"Have you ever seen Jones?"
"Several times," Cussick said. "I met him face to face, back in the days before he had an organization, before anybody had heard of him."
"When he was a minister," Rafferty reflected. "With a church."
"Before that," Cussick said, thinking back. It seemed impossible that there had been a time before Jones, a time when there had been no need of clearing the streets. When there had been no gray-uniformed shapes roaming the streets, collecting in mobs. The crash of breaking glass, the furious crackling of fire...
"What was he doing then?" Rafferty asked.
"He was in a carnival," Cussick said.
CHAPTER TWO
HE WAS twenty-six years old when he first met Jones. It was April 4, 1995. He always remembered that day; the spring air was cool and full of the smell of new growth. The war had ended the year before.
Ahead of him spread out a long descending slope. Houses were perched here and there, mostly privately-constructed shelters, temporary and flimsy. Crude streets, working-class people wandering... a typical rural region that had survived, remote from industrial centers. Normally there would be the hum of activity: plows and forges and crude manufacturing processes. But today a quiet hung over the community. Most able-bodied adults, and all of the children, had trudged off to the carnival.
The ground was soft and moist under his shoes. Cussick strode eagerly along, because he, too, was going to the carnival. He had a job.
Jobs were scarce; he was glad to get it. Like other young men intellectually sympathetic to Hoff's Relativism, he had applied for the government service. Fedgov's apparatus offered a chance to become involved in the task of Reconstruction; as he was earning a salary—paid in stable silver—he was helping mankind.
In those days he had been idealistic.
Specifically, he had been assigned to the Interior Department. At the Baltimore Antipol center he had taken political training and then approached Secpoclass="underline" the Security arm. But the task of suppressing extremist political and religious sentiment had, in 1995, seemed merely bureaucratic. Nobody took it seriously; with world-wide food rationing, the panic was over. Everybody could be sure of basic subsistence. War-time fanaticism had dwindled out of existence as rational control regained its pre-inflation position.
Before him, spread out like a sheet of tin, the carnival sat assembled. Ten metal buildings, displaying bright neon signs, were the main structures. A central lane led to the hub: a cone within which seats had been erected. There, the basic acts would take place.
Already, he could see the first familiar spectacle. Pushing ahead, Cussick made his way among the densely-packed mass of people. The odor of sweat and tobacco rose around him, an exciting smell. Sliding past a family of grimy field laborers, he reached the railing of the first freak exhibit, and gazed up.
The war, with its hard radiation and elaborate diseases, had produced countless sports, oddities, freaks. Here, in this one minor carnival, a vast variety had been collected.
Directly above him sat a multi-man, a tangled mass of flesh and organs. Heads, arms, legs, wobbled dully; the creature was feeble-minded and helpless. Fortunately, his offspring would be normal; the multi-organisms were not true mutants.
"Golly," a portly, curly-headed citizen behind him said, horrified. "Isn't that awful?"
Another man, lean and tall, casually remarked: "Saw a lot of them in the war. We burned a barnful of them, a sort of colony."
The portly man blinked, bit deep into his candied apple, and moved away from the war veteran. Leading his wife and three children, he meandered up beside Cussick.
"Horrible, isn't it?" he muttered. "All these monsters."
"Sort of," Cussick admitted.
"I don't know why I come to these things." The portly man indicated his wife and children, all of them stonily gobbling up their popcorn and spun-sugar candy. "They like to come. Women and kids go in for this stuff."
Cussick said: "Under Relativism we have to let them live."
"Sure," the portly man agreed, emphatically nodding. A bit of candied apple clung to his upper lip; he wiped it away with a freckled paw. "They got their rights, just like everybody else. Like you and me, mister... they got their lives, too."