“But when we had to clear out he didn’t lay to bring any papers with him—“
Kordov’s face was avid as if he would drag what he wanted out of Dard by force. “But he gave to you some message—surely he gave some message!”
“Only one thing. And I don’t know how important that may be. I’ll have to have something to write on to explain properly.”
“Is that all?” Kordov pulled a notebook out of his breeches’ pocket and flipped it open to a blank page, handing it to him with an inkless stylus. Dard, equipped with the tools, began the explanation which neither of these men might believe.
“It goes way back. Lars knew that I imagine words as designs. That is, if I hear a poem, it makes a pattern for me—“ he paused trying to guess from their expressions whether they understood. Somehow it didn’t sound very sensible, now.
Kordov pulled his lower lip away from his yellowish teeth and allowed it to snap back. “Hmm—semantics are not my field. But I believe that I can follow what you mean. Demonstrate!”
Feeling foolish, Dard recited Dessie’s jingle, marking out the pattern on the page.
“Eesee, Osee, Icksie, Ann; Fullson, Follson, Orson, Cann.”
He underlined, accented, and overlined, as he had that evening on the farm and Dessie’s kicking legs came into being again.
“Lars saw me do this. He was quite excited about it. And then he gave me another two lines, which for me do not make the same pattern. But he insisted that this pattern be fitted over his lines.”
“And those other lines?” demanded Tas.
Dard repeated the words aloud as be jotted them down.
“Seven, nine, four and ten; twenty, sixty and seven again.”
Carefully he fitted the lines through and about the numbers and handed the result to Kordov. To him it made no possible sense, and if it didn’t to the First Scientist, then he would not have had Lars’ precious secret at all. When Tas continued to frown down at the page, Dard lost the small flicker of confidence he had had.
“Ingenious,” muttered Kimber looking over the First Scientist’s shoulder. “Could be a code.”
“Yes,” Tas was going to the door. “I must study it. And look upon the other notes again. I must—“
With that he was gone. Dard sighed.
“It probably doesn’t mean a thing,” he said wearily. “But what should it be?”
“The formula for the ‘cold sleep,’ “ Kimber told him.
“Cold sleep?”
“We go to sleep, hibernate, during that trip-or else the ship comes to its port manned by dust! Even with all the improvements they have given her the new drive—everything—our baby isn’t going to make the big jump in one man’s lifetime, or in a number of lifetimes!” Kimber paced back and forth as he talked, turning square corners at either end of the room. “In fact, we didn’t have a chance—we’d begun thinking of trying to make a stand on Mars—before one of our men accidentally discovered Lars Nordis was alive. Before the purge he’d published one paper concerning his research on the circulatory system of bats—studying the drop in their body temperature during their winter sleep. Don’t ask me about it, I’m only a pilot-astrogator, not a Big Brain! But he was on the track of something Kordov believed might be done—the freezing of a human being so that he can remain alive but in sleep indefinitely. And since we contacted him, Lars has continued to feed us data bit by bit.”
“But why?” Why, if Lars bad been working with this group so closely, hadn’t he wanted to join them? Why had they had to live in the farmhouse on a starvation level, under constant fear of a roundup?
“Why didn’t he come here?” It was as if Kimber bad picked that out of Dard’s mind. “He said he wasn’t sure he could make the trip—crippled as he was. He didn’t want to try it until the last possible moment when it wouldn’t matter if he were sighted trying—or traced here. He believed that he was under constant surveillance by some enemy and that the minute he, or any of you, made a move out of the ordinary, that enemy would bring in the Peacemen, perhaps before he had the answer to our problem. So you had to live on a very narrow edge of safety.”
“Very narrow,” Dard agreed. There was logic in what Kimber said. If Folley had been spying on them, and he must have or else he would not have appeared in the barn, he would have suspected something if any of them had not shown around the house as usual. Lars could never have made the journey they had just taken. Yes, he could see why his brother had waited until it was too late for him.
“But there’s something else.” Kimber sat down on the stool again, his elbows resting on his knees, his chin supported by his cupped hands.
“What do you know about the Temple of the Voice?”
Dard. still intent upon the problem of the cold sleep, was startled. Why did Kimber want to know about the innermost heart of the neighboring Pax establishment?
The ‘Voice” was that giant computer to which representatives of Pax fed data—to have it digested and to receive back the logical directives which enabled them to control the thousands under their rule. He knew what the “Voice” was, had had it hazily described to him by hearsay. But he doubted whether any Free Scientist or any associate of such proscribed outlaws had ever dared to approach the “Temple” which housed it.
“It’s the center of the Pax—“ he began, only to have the pilot interrupt him.
“I mean-give me your own description of the place.”
Dard froze. He hoped that his panic at that moment was not open enough to be marked. How did they know he had been to the Temple-through that mysterious digester which had picked over his memories while he was unconscious?
“You were there—two years ago,” the other bored in relentlessly.
“Yes, I was there. Kathia was sick—there was just a chance of getting some medico to attend her if I could show a ‘confidence card.’ I made a Seventh Day visit but when I presented my attendance slip to the Circle they asked too many questions. I never got the card.”
Kimber nodded. “It’s okay, kid. I’m not accusing you of being a Pax plant. If you had been that, the digester would have warned us. But I have a very good reason for wanting to know about the Temple of the Voice. Now tell me everything you can remember—every detail.”
Dard began. And discovered that his memory was a vivid one. He could recall the number of steps leading into the inner court and quote closely enough every word that the
“Laurel Crowned” speaker of that particular Seventh Day had spouted in his talk to the faithful. When he finished he saw that Kimber was regarding him with an expression of mingled amazement and admiration.
“Good Lord, kid, how do you remember everything—just from one short visit?”
Dard laughed shakily. “What’s worse, I can’t forget anything. I can tell you every detail of every day I’ve lived. since the purge. Before then,” his hand went to his head,
“before then for some reason it’s not so dear.”
“Lots of us would rather not remember what happened since then. You get a pack of fanatics in control—the way Renzi’s forces have taken over this ant hill of a world—and things crack wide open. We’ve organized our collective sanity to save our own lives. And there’s nothing we can do about the rest of mankind now—when we’re only a handful of outlaws hiding out in the wilderness. There’s a good big price on the head of everyone here in the Cleft. The whole company of Pax would like nothing better than to round us up. Only we’re planning to get away. That’s why we have to have the help of the Voice.”
“The Voice?”
Kimber swept over the half interruption. “You know what the Voice is, don’t you? A computer—mechanical brain they used to call them. Feed it data, it digests the figures and then spews out an answer to any problem which would require months or years for a human mind to solve. The astrogation course, the one which is going to take us to a sun enough like Sol to provide us with a proper world, is beyond the power of our setting up. We have the data and all our puny calculations—but the Voice has to melt them down for us!”
Dard stared at this madman. No one but a Peaceman who had reached the ratified status of “Laurel Wearer” dared approach the inner sanctuary which held the Voice. And just how Kimber proposed to get there and set the machine to work on outlawed formula, he could not possibly guess.