Scrambling from his truck onto the next, Pratt made his way around the edge of the crowd. He leaped down onto a mass of ruins; grasping his rifle, he gained a precarious footing and loped rapidly forward. This time he would fire from a few feet away; this time he would be directly in front of Jones.
Dropping to the highway, Pratt forced his way into the crowd. Using the butt of his rifle as a club, he beat his way among them. A bottle burst over his head; for an interval darkness swirled, and he floundered against a mass of wildly struggling human bodies. Then he dragged himself up and crept on.
All at once, he was sprawling. Clutching, the rifle, he rolled to his feet and managed to get to his knees before a gray-clad shape smashed him with a length of pipe. This time he lost teeth; warm blood gushed down his throat, choking him. Blinded, he lay gasping. Huge, crushing boots stamped on his ribs; he shrieked, groped upward, caught hold of a trouser leg, and tugged. The figure stumbled and fell. Pratt rolled on him, his hands around a section of broken bottle. With a swift stroke he cut the man’s throat, pushed the body away, and climbed up.
Ahead of him was a cleared spot, a dead center in the maelstrom of frenzied shapes. Jones stood inert; behind his glasses, his eyes darted frantically. Around him had grouped a knot of organization fighters, a last-ditch defense.
Kneeling, Pratt managed to get his rifle up. Flickering mists danced in front of him; he was suspended in a silent, unmoving interval. Automatically, his fingers squeezed the trigger; there was no noise, only a faint shudder of the gun stock.
He saw Jones stumble, clutch at his belly, and then pitch over on his back. He had only wounded him—got him in the gut, not the head. Cursing, weeping, Pratt fumbled with the bolt. He had failed; he had not killed him.
While he was trying to fire again, a vast gray shape loomed up, drew back its foot, and kicked the gun from his hands. Two more shapes appeared; he experienced a blossoming second of agony, and then it was over. His last instant of life had passed. Between the three of them, the gray toughs had decapitated him.
Sitting on the pavement, spitting blood, Jones sat waiting for the police medical teams to reach him. From where he squatted, he could see the remains of the assassin. Dimly, through a haze, he watched the infuriated gray figures destroy what was left.
It was over. Between his clenched fingers, the living warmth of his blood oozed. He had been wounded; but he was still alive. In his agony there was already the roaring joy of victory.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PEARSON WAS sitting at his desk when the first reports came in. He listened idly; they seemed to come from a long way off, remote and theoretical, without immediate importance. He gave his acknowledgment and turned away from the relay.
After awhile it occurred to him that he had failed. Pratt was dead, and Jones lay groaning in a police hospital. Jones was still alive. Well, that was it.
Getting to his feet, he walked over to the window. Hands in his pockets, he stood gazing out at the dark, nocturnal city. Very little stirred. In the next day or so, police units would round up Jones’ followers in this area. There was no hurry; it could wait. In fact, it could wait forever.
But he had to go through with it. All the way to the bitter end, He had started it; he had to finish it. He did not intend to back out now, simply because there was no hope.
He thought briefly of trying to murder Jones in the hospital, as he lay helpless. No, he had already made his quixotic gesture. He had already proven what he set out to prove, what he had to know.
Jones could not be killed. It was futile. Fedgov was through; he might as well throw in the sponge.
As a matter of fact, he waited two weeks. He waited until the actual figures on the plebiscite began to trickle in. He even procrastinated until the building reeked with the acrid fumes of burning paper: the official documents of Security going up in smoke. When the Supreme Council resigned, Pearson was still standing mutely in his Detroit office, head sunk down on his chest, hands in his pockets.
A few hours before the pale, weak figure of Jones rose from the hospital bed, entered an official car and headed toward Detroit, Pearson put in a call to Cussick.
“I’ll come over there,” Pearson told him. “I’ll talk to you at your apartment; we’re blowing up this building. We don’t want to leave anything.”
The first thing he noticed as he entered Cussick’s apartment was the general untidiness. He didn’t remember it that way. For a moment he stood in the doorway, baffled and disturbed.
“That’s right,” he said finally. “Your wife’s gone. You’re here all alone.”
Cussick closed the hall door. “Can I pour you a drink?”
“You bet your life,” Pearson said gratefully. “A water high.”
“I’ve got a fifth of good Scotch,” Cussick said. He fixed the drinks, and the two of them sat down.
“We’re through,” Pearson said.
“I know.”
“It was a mistake. Of course he couldn’t be killed. But I had to try. You know, the son of a bitch might have been bluffing. It was an outside chance; I wanted to test him. Pragmatic, you know.”
“What comes next?” Cussick asked. “Is there anything we haven’t done?”
Pearson’s hard, relentless face twisted. “As a matter of fact.” he said slowly, “we have—technically—two more hours of authority. It’ll take that long to make Jones the legal government. As of right now, I still have charge of Rafferty’s project.”
“Do you know what the project is? I thought you didn’t know.”
Glaring up at the ceiling, Pearson said: “There are two ships ready. I mean real ships, ships capable of space travel. You know what I mean. Interplan, they call them. Stored down in Ordinance somewhere, ready to go. They’re kept on twenty-four hour alert. Always ready. Always serviced and fueled.” He added: “They’re supposed to be the best. It’s my understanding that they work by automatic beam. Somebody, I forget who, told me once that a pilot station on Venus controls them as soon as they leave Earth. Maybe it isn’t Venus. Maybe it’s Mars.”
“Venus,” Cussick affirmed.
Pearson nodded as he sipped his drink. “You realize, of course, that this is an elaborate little game. Naturally, I know what this project is; I found out the first day. But for the record, I’m talking only about the two ships. They—you understand who I mean—will be divided into two groups, four in one, four in the other. So if one ship fails to arrive, there’ll be the other.”
“On Venus,” Cussick asked, “are there supplies? Some kind of installations?”
“Mountains of supplies. Miles of installations. All we have to do is get the eight of them there.”
Cussick got to his feet. “I’ll notify Rafferty.”
Pearson also rose. “My car’s outside; I’ll drive you to the field. Better yet, I’ll come along.”
Within half an hour they were setting down in San Francisco. Rafferty was asleep; Cussick roused him and delivered the message. Ordinance was notified. The transport Van was activated and the eight Venusians collected into it: seven adults and one baby still in its incubator. Frightened, bewildered, the mutants sat huddled together; timid persons, peering up, blinking rapidly, conversing in low, uncertain whispers.
“Good luck,” Rafferty told them.
Pearson and Cussick rode along with the Van to Ordinance. They supervised the loading of the ships, four mutants in each. The complex safety seals were melted in place and the ships uprighted. As Cussick and Pearson and Rafferty watched from the shadows at the edge of the field, the ships were simultaneously launched. In all, the whole thing took an hour and a half: Jones still had thirty minutes to wait.
“Feel like a drink?” Cussick asked Pearson and Rafferty.
The three of them got thoroughly drunk. In their grim stupor, time and space ceased to have meaning. The world blurred in a chaotic swirl of drifting phantoms, indistinct sounds, shifting colors and shafts of light. Sometime during the process, an event momentarily caught Cussick’s attention.
Four gray-uniformed men stood around them, examining their identification papers with brisk efficiency. Muddled, with a violent effort of will, he focused on them.
“What do you want?” he demanded. But they weren’t interested in him; it was Pearson they were grabbing hold of and carting off. Suddenly horrified, Cussick struggled furiously; in a frenzy he waded in and fought to save Pearson. One of the gray-uniformed figures shoved him down, and another stepped on his face.