Horn grunted sullenly. As his colleagues strode off toward drinks and ease, he glared at the prisoners. “You pull any goddam thing,” he snarled in unconscious mimickry, “and I cut you apart.” He fingered the hilt of the fighting knife in his belt. Then, with his back to the doorframe, he began to throw a pair of dice morosely.
“Why did you lie about me?” Dr. Swoboda asked in a low voice.
Lacey started, but the words were calm and not the prelude to an attack. He could just make out the physicist’s form in the light that filtered through the open door. He did not reply.
“You can’t just be a boaster who thought he’d denounce somebody important,” Swoboda went on. “I don’t think anyone in Underground but May herself really thinks that what I’ve done is important.” He paused. “Oh,” he said, “of course—anyone Underground. But by now the State had probably decided the blackout eight months ago was caused by the load from me starting up a fusion powerplant.”
“You’ve built a fusion plant?” Lacey said, snorting as if incredulous.
“Of course,” Swoboda repeated, and it was an instant before Lacey realized that the words were in answer to his question. “It would have been the one hope for the world itself, but that was impossible. Still, there’s a self-sufficient colony in the, in the Basement now. Perhaps that will be able to continue, whatever happens to me.”
“One hope for this whole island to be blown to slag,” Lacey gibed. He brushed a spot cleared of varied garbage and sat down on the floor. “Go on,” he said, “you wouldn’t have built a fusion plant down here with all those people living over it. Why, I hear it wouldn’t even be possible to shut one down safely if it was to blow up.”
“Nonsense!” the physicist snapped with more spirit than he had shown since being taken into custody. “All that it takes to shut down the plant is to open the fuel feed and chill the reaction. Two turns on a petcock! And the rest of you’re saying is just as absurd. People have always wanted to live fifty years in the past, and that was all right . . . but it isn’t all right any more, it’s suicide! Yesterday’s fears are going to kill us, kill all human civilization.”
“Such as it is,” Lacey chuckled. He felt a sudden added coldness when he realized that he was no longer merely leading his quarry on, that he was actually becoming involved in the discussion.
“That’s the point, you know,” Swoboda said, returning to the emotionless delivery with which he had begun the discussion. “I couldn’t convince the authorities that what I was offering would be safe. They wouldn’t even let me experiment in an unpopulated area. They were afraid the newshawks would watch the scanners. They’d report that the laws were being flouted—and they’re stupid laws!—and that a ‘bomb of unguessable destructiveness’ was being built; and every person who’d had anything to do with approving my project would be voted out or fired. Myself, I’d go under a Psycomp to have my brain cleaned. But whatever the risk—without power for growth, what will this City be in ten years? What will the world itself be like in fifty? What kind of death would be worse?”
Lacey shrugged. “You’re talking to the wrong guy,” he said.
The physicist sighed. “No doubt, no doubt; but there isn’t anyone else to talk to, is there?” He glanced toward Horn, who looked up from his dice to glower back. “No human being, at any rate.”
Swoboda started to clear a place on the floor, but he was too nervous to sit. He began walking and turning, a pace in either direction so as not to foul the chain. “I felt like this three years ago,” he said, “when I finally realized that I was never going to be allowed to build even a pilot model. The energy source that could save civilization, and it could never be built because the world saw too much and understood too little. That’s when Leah Geilblum visited me.” The physicist looked at Lacey. The Southerner’s eyes had adapted to the dark well enough to catch a sheen of remembered hope in the older man’s expression.