It is thirty seconds after ten o’clock. Seven hundred girls are striking matches and clicking lighters.
Twelve miles from Omaha, a radar-radak technician frowns as he studies the pip on his screen. He adjusts for a new focus, and, as he puts the track on automatic, he runs his eye down the list of EXP flights. On automatic track the height, speed, and direction appear below the screen.
Speed is a constant. Direction almost due south. Altitude decreasing at the rate of a half mile a second.
His next moves are deft and quick. He punches the station alarm button, then throws open the switch which sounds the alarm instantaneously in twelve interceptor stations and puts them in direct communication with his board.
A nurse lays out the salve to be applied to temples and electrodes. The technician checks the dials on the shock equipment. The young state psychiatrist shuts the door of his room behind him and walks down the hall without haste.
Alert is flashed to interception points. Five more screens pick up the image and tie in the interception stations. Rocket tubes, six hundred of them, ten at each interceptor station, are so tied in with the automatic track on the screens that they point, unerringly, at the proper interception point in the predicted track of the screen pip. If the pip had been shown as coming straight down, manual control of firing would have been automatically cut out. No human hand could have moved quickly enough.
At the master control station SW, outside El Paso, a hard-faced colonel cuts out all manual control at the interceptor points, and takes over the decision. There are six buttons under his fingers. Each one discharges one full ten-round from the designated interceptor point.
The mike is close to his lips. He watches the screen. “Course change,” he says in a flat tone. His words boom loudly in a small room in Washington. The small room is beginning to fill rapidly. “Velocity down one half. Target now heading straight up. Continuing loss of velocity. Either unmanned with defective controls, or manned incompetently.”
The speaker above the colonel’s head says, metallically, “Intercept when we get a predicted course toward any critical area.”
A major standing near the colonel says, “This will give the Kinsonians a bang.”
The colonel doesn’t answer. He is thinking of his son, of the eruption of crazy, bloody, irrational violence that had ruined his son’s life. His iron face does not change. He remembers the voice of Walter Howard Path.
“New direction north-northwest. Altitude three hundred thirty miles. Within range. Velocity down to five hundred miles per hour. Altitude three hundred, velocity four seventy.”
“Intercept,” the speaker says.
Taut fingers poise over the buttons.
“Intercept,” the speaker says. “Acknowledge.”
Twenty-five years of discipline balanced against the memory of the stunned, uncomprehending look on the face of a boy.
“Recommend stranger be permitted to land.”
He hears the major’s taut gasp, sees the major’s hand reaching to punch the buttons. He turns and smashes his fist against the major’s jaw.
Flat, emotionless voice. “Believe stranger preparing to land Muroc.”
Video in the lounge at Fonda Electric. Radio in the room where amphetamine is working its frantic magic in Atlanta. Music from the pocket pack in the broker’s pocket, faint against the hard roar of the wind as he tumbles over and over, down and down. Timber Mulloy, taking a breather, tuning in to hear one of his own records. Bedside radio in Grosse Point singing softly to something at the base of a full-length mirror. Radio playing soothingly on the desk of the floor nurse as a young psychiatrist walks toward the shock room, passing the desk...
“... We interrupt this program to inform America that, at this moment, a space ship of unknown origin is attempting a landing at Muroc. The ship answers the description given by Lane to Walter Howard Path in what was believed to be a hoax. Word has just been received that the first attempt at landing was unsuccessful. Further news will be reported as soon as received. We now return you to the network programs in process.”
Jord Orlan left the case of dreams and returned to his chambers. He had bitten through his lower lip and the taste of blood sickened him.
He sat alone and tried to rebuild something in which he could no longer believe. A structure had collapsed in his mind, and the shards of it were useless.
He saw, in memory, the great ship, its ancient hide pocked by space fragments, sitting on the surface of an alien world. Outside, where there had been six ships, there were now five.
He had slid into the mind of a spectator, and he had seen Raul and Leesa taken in a vehicle from the side of the ship to a distant building. He had seen them, in one of the dreams, thinner than they had been when they left. At one point he had moved close enough to hear Raul speak, his voice thin with strain, yet exultant, speaking the Earth language awkwardly, clumsily because he was speaking from memory alone.
“The Doctor Inly and Doctor Lane. It is them we must see quickly.”
There was nothing left to believe. And he remembered the Law. Such travel meant an end to the dreams. He saw, ahead of him, the long empty years, full of nothing but the games that were now pointless.
He knew what he had to do. He found a heavy tool in the lowest level. By the time he had finished what he had to do, his hands were raw and blistered.
And he went down to his people to tell them that the dreams had come to an end.
Nineteen
Sharan stood beside Bard Lane. They stood close together and looked through the glass wall of the studio. Raul and Leesa sat behind a table, the cameras focused on them, the interviewer at the end of the table. With the help of Bard and Sharan, Raul and Leesa had won the right to dress as the people around them, rather than in the conspicuous style of the Watcher colony.
“How long is this going to go on?” Sharan asked wearily.
“It will go on just as long as they are the only two outsiders on this planet. That sort of novelty will never wear off.”
“So you better hurry with Tempo Two, my friend, and go grab off some people from Marith and Ormazd. How is it going?”
“Good, now that the Pan-Asia group decided to come in on it. They’re still a little wary of our generosity in giving them access to the whole works.”
Sharan looked at Leesa through the glass. “She’s very patient, isn’t she?”
“She explained that to me. It’s a sort of... penance, you might say. For what she has done in the past, what her people have done. How do you like her English?”
“Not anywhere near as quaint as it was, at least.” Sharan giggled. “Know what I remember, Bard? The time you described her as probably being bald and built like a twelve-year-old child.”
Bard Lane remembered too. He looked at the slim, delicate, dark-haired girl. She met his glance and made a small shrug of patience. He said, “She told me that on her world she was considered some sort of a brute-woman. Here she’s just a pretty girl who looks a bit more fragile than the average. And your Raul could lose himself in any crowd.”
“He could not!”
Bard grinned. They listened to the closing minutes of the program. “Now, Mr. Kinson, you say that the Watchers have not contacted you or your sister in any way during the weeks you have been here with us.”
Raul frowned. “I do not understand that. I do not see why they have not done so. It would be so easy.”
“Now I have something that may come as a surprise to both of you. We have just received tabulated data from all law enforcement agencies covering the time you have been here. There has been an unprecedented drop in crimes of violence. Violence is still with us, of course. Until we learn the secrets of that other world you told us about, it will probably always be with us. But motiveless violence, inexplicable actions — they seem to have gone way down.”