Man of Two Worlds Page 22

  When the sun was no more than overhead he glimpsed the outskirts of the city. The forest was at its very edge, almost overrunning it. He had expected, somehow, to find a bright and shining city of great, smooth roads and cast buildings as in Kronweld, because the Statists had access to all of Kronweld’s culture.

  But through the depths of the trees on either side of him he could see ruins, great piles of tumbled masonry that were overrun with forest growth. The Statists were barely holding out against the power of the encroaching forest.

  Beyond the large clearing of the airfield, which he saw ahead of him, he glimpsed the mysterious, half ruined city. The distant, mighty’ citadel was visible even from here, and it was the one structure that showed the power and strength of an advancing, building culture.

  It was obvious that he would have to appear as having come from the direction of the field. A cluster of buildings at the other side indicated where he would have his brand examined and pass into the city.

  He retreated into the forest and left the crumbled remains of the highway. He moved under cover of the foliage to the opposite side of the field. He hesitated a moment before breaking out into the open.

  At that moment he heard a whine in the sky, familiar through hearing it once before. He glanced up involuntarily. A shining dot was growing with incredible speed. He watched it drive towards the field and arc up in a long, graceful curve that reached an apex and then dropped the ship gently to earth.

  Almost at once, a file of passengers began to emerge from the ship and he moved out of hiding to mingle with them as they passed into the building.

  He was apprehensive over his garb, but upon examination of the scene before him all apprehension vanished. An incredible conglomeration of garbs and types of clothing was represented among the travelers.

  That meant one thing to him. It meant that transportation and communication were extremely limited even with this mode of travel to allow such diverse fashions to exist side by side.

  The tall, silent ship was standing so that it overshadowed the nearby buildings. The buildings could almost have been transplanted from Kronweld, Ketan thought. The nearest was surrounded by the same type of white fluted columns in rows as used in Kronweldian architecture.

  He came towards the building as inconspicuously as possible. Keeping just a little apart, he climbed the short flight of steps with the last of the passengers from the ship.

  They passed into a room noisy with the bustle of arrival and greeting. Then he saw that the new arrivals were headed for a counter and were baring their arms for inspection. He hung back to see what the procedure was.

  A uniformed man strolled across from the opposite wall and spoke to him. “Step over to the identification counter, please.”

  It was a mere statement, but it carried to Ketan all the implied force of the Statist world that would destroy without mercy anyone they caught who had not properly passed the test of the Selector.

  Ketan moved towards the counter at the end of the line of travelers. He looked at the faces of those about him. He saw none like those of the Illegitimates. He saw no determined defiance. He saw no rebellion. Only a docile acceptance of the routine that represented a thousand years of tyranny.

  At last the man ahead of him was baring his arm. Ketan saw a flexible tube with a cup-shaped appendage that fastened for an instant over the man’s purple scar. The bored operator of the device nodded and the man moved on.

  Ketan bared his arm and the operator applied the tube without even glancing at Ketan. He held it a moment, then nodded perfunctorily without expression upon his bland face.

  Ketan started to move away and had reached the end of the counter when the voice of the operator came to him. “Just a moment, please.”

  He turned back. The man was frowning as if for the first time in many months a thought were running around in his brain. “Just a moment, please,” he said again, and it was no request.

  XXII.

  Ketan stepped back, fearful that somehow he had slipped and betrayed himself. He waited for a tense moment while the operator frowned over some papers on a desk. In a moment he came back to Ketan.

  “Please step down the hall and go into the third room on your left. They will be expecting you.”

  Ketan searched the man’s face for an instant, but nothing was expressed there. The former blandness had returned. Ketan wondered what would happen if he refused to obey the order. He decided the results would not be worth the risk of finding out.

  But who were they? The pronoun had an abnormal significance the way the stupid-faced operator spoke it.

  Ketan turned abruptly and moved in the indicated direction, counting off the doors. He paused before the third on his left, then pushed it open.

  Two men were seated beside a desk. In a glance he took in the superior materials and fashion of their dress that marked them as Statists.

  Their faces were not more intelligent than that of the operator he had left. There was a quality that he could not name in the gray, cold eyes of the one and the narrow beady ones of the other. If he had been more familiar with Earth ways and expressions, he would have called it cunningness.

  They did not speak as he entered. They surveyed him carefully and calmly, taking in the rough cut of the leather garments, the wind and sand roughened skin of his face and hands. They noted with minute examination the deliberately calm eyes he held narrowed beneath his long brow.

  He felt that each of them was examining him like some new animal specimen for private reasons of his own. But he took advantage of the moment to return their examining gaze.

  The man on the left was short and squat, and his shoulders were so rounded that he had to bend his neck back in order to look ahead. His little eyes looked up beneath the wrinkles on his brow in a way that reminded Ketan of a vicious little animal readying himself to strike.

  The other man exhibited contrasting calm, an almost indifferent expression that lurked at the corners of his mouth in a trace of an amused smile. But his glance was no less intent and keen.

  It was he who spoke first. “Are you one of Igon’s ?” he said.

  An electric warning struck at Ketan. “I don’t know what that means,” he answered.

  The fat man frowned more and the tall one broadened his smile. “Perhaps not,” the latter said. “Perhaps you have not learned of him yet. Nevertheless, you must know that your registration number indicates that you passed through the Selector as a reject. Yet here you are alive on Earth. Can you explain that to the Statists should they ask you?”

  “You are not Statists?” Ketan’s eyes widened in what he hoped was an expression of surprise. At the same time a sickening, sinking sensation was within him. What fools he and William Douglas had been not to know that they would have his number registered as a reject. If these two were Statists, his position was more than desperate. If they were of Igon’s following— how was he to know ?

  “Where did they tell you to find Igon’s headquarters?” the tall one said. “Let us prove who we are by leading you there.”

  Ketan shook his head. “I know nothing of what you are talking about.”

  “Perhaps you can tell us where you left Elta. She would help identify us. You know of her, do you not? And the help she has given Kronweld ?”

  “I never heard such a name before.”

  The short, fat man gave a snort of impatience. “This is all nonsense, Javins. All this stupid talk about an organization of Igon’s. We all know he was done away with before he had a chance to do anything and that was more than sixty years ago. All of them have said the same thing. Let’s get him to the Director and get it over with.”

  “Very well.” The man named Javins sighed in resignation. “I suppose you’re right, Bocknor. But it’s always worth a try. I still believe that daughter of mine made some contact with them, from the reports we’ve had from Anetel. I’d give anything to know where she is. Perhaps he can be made to talk.”

  “Pah! He
doesn’t know anything ! He stumbled through like the rest. We’ve got more important things to do than this. The last three projector units are ready for test.”

  Ketan stood motionless as if congealed in a mold. He stared at Javins. Elta the daughter of this sharp-faced, cruel-eyed Statist—!

  But part of what they said heartened him. They did not know where Elta was. Did that mean that she had not yet arrived? Or that something had happened to her? At least he wasn’t too late to go through the Gateway—if he could escape from the hands of the Statists.

  And yet another unlooked for opportunity was here. The Director! William Douglas had told him unbelievable tales of the creature known as the Director, who ruled the Statists with unyielding cruelty. Might it not be worth some delay to encounter the Director and see what the opposition was truly like?

  As he stood immobile, thinking, the two arose and came around the desk. Touching him on the arm, Javins and Bocknor drew him along and out the door.

  They went down the hall in the opposite direction from which he had previously come and out a door in the side of the building. For a moment, as he passed under the high roof of the portico, he was touched with a sting of nostalgia, for the surroundings were so much like any public place in Kronweld. He found it hard for a moment to realize that he was eons and infinities from Kronweld, that he had no idea of his present position with respect to it.

  “Come along.” Bocknor gave him a shove towards a small, carlike object at the base of the steps. A glance showed Ketan it was much more crude than the cars of Kronweld. Instead of atomics it appeared to have an internal combustion engine using distilled fuel. It smoked and hummed as the fat Bocknor took the driver’s seat and spun the wheel about.

  Seated between the two, Ketan had little freedom of movement, but he craned his neck about as much as possible to get a look at the city.

  The great, the fabulous city of the Statists was a thing of ruin and degeneracy.

  He found it difficult to comprehend the economy and government that must exist here. The entire picture of Earth’s past government and the present rule among the Illegitimates was a confusing mass of indigestible information to his Kronweld-trained mind, but the conditions among the Statists was even more confusing.

  The Statists were few, that was certain. But they ruled the vast millions of Earth in a way that Earth had never seen before. By reason of their stolen science, they formed a malignant, intellectual hierarchy.

  The result was the conglomerate city of Danfer. Artisans, planners, technicians were too few to build a great new city or to even maintain the old ruined one. They had only managed to slow the decay and to build the citadel that housed the majority of the Statists. In other parts of the world Ketan imagined the conditions must be even more primitive.

  Though they had possession of Kronweld’s secrets of metallurgy and machinery, they could only administer their technique by slow hand processes.

  That would explain the existence of single great flyers like the one he had seen side by side with the ruin in the forest.

  Cars like the one in which he rode were few upon the streets. The street itself wound among rubble piles that lay neglected beside dwellings some of which were new in their curious copying of Kronweldian architecture and others of which were simple old buildings patched up with a dozen different styles of design and materials.

  Trees lined the streets in haphazard and uncared-for patterns.

  The car at last entered the central portion of the city and then Ketan saw the structure that loomed all out of proportion to the rest of the city.

  He saw the citadel headquarters of the Statists, the house of the great Selector.

  A thin, but steady line of parents was flowing through a high arched opening in the side of the building. Most of them carried an infant to be submitted to the test of the machine. Ketan had difficulty in understanding how there could be such a steady stream provided by a city the size of Danfer.

  Then he realized there were those who had come by horse and cart and every other possible means from hundreds of distant towns and villages, besides the ones who lived in the adjacent forests and wild lands. William Douglas had said that some traveled for weeks.

  Neither of the Statists had spoken to him since they left the airfield. Now they stopped the car and Bocknor rolled out.

  “Quick, now,” he growled. “The Director expects you. He will not wait in patience long.”

  As he stepped out and glanced up at the vast expanse of the wall of the citadel, Ketan was reminded of the great Edge of Kronweld, except that the wall was gray instead of black. Its expanse blotted out half the sky and the Earth.

  He tried to formulate some plan as they led him inside, but none shaped itself in his mind. He didn’t know the strength or manner of his opposition. He would have to wait.

  In the semidarkness of a large marble chamber the air was cool and music came from some faint source. Kronweld again, Ketan thought.

  They crossed the chamber and entered a tube car that closed upon them and rose and darted through a channel that carried them alternately horizontally and vertically. Then it became motionless and they stepped out. They crossed the corridor and entered a wide, ornate door opposite.

  The room Ketan saw was vast and there were so many items within it that Ketan thought there was no one there but themselves. He had to refocus his eyes, taking each feature and item of the room one at a time. It was literally filled with apparatus and equipment.

  Along the high ceiling ran great racks of cabling interspersed with shield-covered masses of no obvious purpose. On his right, Ketan saw an ebony panel that covered the entire wall. Meters and switches and glass inclosed coils covered its surface. Straight ahead, innumerable banks of tubes glowed and pulsed with blue or yellow light.

  It was as he drew his eyes back from this bank of tubes that he saw the other, almost dwarfed object before the mass of equipment.

  Its central structure was an elongated glass tube, the size of a man, resting horizontally. Into the tube flowed a mass of cabling some from the racks above, others from nearby banked mechanisms.

  Inside the tube was the motionless figure of a man.

  Ketan stared and started forward involuntarily.

  “Wait until he speaks,” Bocknor snarled at Ketan and jerked his shoulder roughly.

  “I am quite ready. Let him come forward. The Director speaks.”

  The voice that filled the room was surging with quiet, suppressed power. It was the voice of a young, sure man who had never known fear.

  Slowly, Ketan advanced. He felt a prickle of the short hair on his neck as he came closer and glimpsed more fully the travesty within the tube.

  It might have been a man once, Ketan thought. The face was like a piece of wrinkled leather. The mouth was sunken and tightly closed in only a suggestion of an orifice. The top of the head, devoid of hair, was yellow, as if the skin had been partially tanned.

  Whether there were eyes or not, Ketan could not tell. Where eyes should have been there were two black, hemispherical cups that rested upon the sockets. They seemed permanently attached to the skin.

  “Not an extremely attractive sight,” the voice said again.

  Ketan realized that those lips had not spoken; they had not spoken for many tara. But the voice—it throbbed with life.

  Ketan advanced slowly until he jarred abruptly into an invisible wall.

  “That is close enough. Protection, you know,” the voice said. “I think we can sec each other well enough now.”

  “Who are you?” Ketan finally gasped. “How do—?”

  “How do I live? Peculiar, isn’t it”—he seemed to be speaking now to the other Statist—“how all these young Seekers from Kronweld ask the same question. You’d think they would be more concerncd with their own fate and existence than with mine.”

  Then, directly to Ketan: “I am always happy to have such solicitous interest, however, because it is your work that makes it pos
sible. By the principles you have worked to uncover, 1 have been able to replace nearly all of the natural functions of this poor body with mechanisms that more than compensate me for the loss of the original equipment.

  “I was blinded many years ago by an accident due to my hastiness in trying to go ahead of knowledge you had furnished us. I was young then and would not be so foolish again. It took the use of my hands and destroyed my legs. But I have managed to exist for a good many years as Director with mechanical substitutes.”

  Ketan observed that from the I cables entering the tube, a network of fine wires went directly to the withered skin of the man’s arms and legs and into his throat. It was as if they were fine hairs growing directly upon his flesh.

  “You are looking closely?” the Director said. “Yes, those wires go directly to the nerves that are left. Motor impulses arc multiplied a hundred thousand million times in those tubes behind me. They, in turn, operate machines that stretch around the world. My voice, too, is merely a mechanical thing controlled by nerve impulses. My own vocal cords atrophied long ago. Food, you see coursing through some of the tubes leading from the machines outside. I am nourished quite well.”

  Ketan had not noticed the blood-red tubes that he now saw running from the back of the transparent container to nearby pumps and mixers. He felt a return of that old sense of revulsion as he realized the full amount of altering that this human mechanism had undergone. But at the same time he was awed and appalled at the amount of alteration that was possible. Not one in a thousand of those who went to the Place of Dying in Kronweld need die, he thought, if such were the dormant possibilities of their Seeking.

  “Well, Bocknor, what shall we do with this one?” The Director’s voice was rich with amusement.

  “Kill him, of course. He’s dangerous.”