Then they were gone. Cussick lay on the floor beside the inert shape of Rafferty, among overturned stools and broken glass. Gradually, reluctantly, the frigid gray of sanity crept back into his mind. Pearson had been arrested.
Outside the bar boomed a growing cacophony of sounds: the roar of motors, shrieks, shouts, marching feet, exploding shells.
The remaining half hour had passed. Jones was in office. The day of the Crisis Government, the new world order, had begun.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE cramped, low-ceilinged shop cabin, a small figure sat hunched over a workbench; soldering gun gripped in both hands, he moodily pondered a tangled mass of electronic parts and wiring. Except for the hum of the gun’s coil’s the cabin was silent. Nothing stirred. The metal walls of the cabin were cold, smooth, impersonal. Storage compartments, stenciled with code numbers, covered every flat surface. No space had been wasted; the cabin was a square block of efficiency.
The transistors, relays, and heaps of wiring spread out on the bench formed the steering mechanism of a signal rocket. The signal rocket itself, six feet long and four inches in diameter, stood propped up in the corner, a thin metal skin minus its insides. Pasted on the wall behind the bench dangled greasy, crumpled schematics. Blue-white light flooded down from a flexible snake-lamp. Repair tools of every kind sparkled metallically.
“I can’t do it,” Louis said aloud, for his own benefit. Suddenly he began feverishly tearing wires loose and resoldering them in alternate combinations. For ten minutes, solder steamed and sizzled and activated the mechanism of the rocket. Tubes lit up; electricity moved through the circuit.
Nothing happened. In a flurry of activity, he again jerked leads loose, switched them at random, and resoldered them.
Blowing and spitting on the cooling metal, poking at the smoking terminals, he watched anxiously as tie circuit carried power one final time.
Still nothing.
He set the time switch for ninety seconds, the interval Dieter had computed. Tik-tok went the mechanism. Tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok until he couldn’t stand it; cutting down the interval to five seconds he waited in a controlled hysteria until the relays snapped shut, and the clicking ceased.
His wristwatch told him it was still a second off. In ninety seconds it would be eighteen seconds off. Or worse; maybe it would never trip. Maybe the signal rocket would shoot past the other ship, out into the darkness, without ever releasing its magnetic pick-up grapple. The hell with it. He didn’t know enough about electronics.
“I’m no good,” he said, speaking in general, meaning himself and not merely what he had done. Meaning himself and his whole life. In the small shop cabin his voice squeaked back at him, a thin and brittle sound… but a sound, nevertheless. Any sound was welcome.
“You — ,” he said to the tangled remains on the bench, expressing himself from the bottom of his soul. There was nobody around to hear, so he thought of a few more terms and uttered them aloud. It sounded odd to hear his little voice bleating out obscenities. He was surprised, almost shocked. Rage vanished, and shame took its place.
“Irma could fix it,” he said unhappily. And then he was overcome with fright. Pure, sheer, fright. Very quietly he closed his eyes and screamed. Like a man with something terrible caught in his throat, he sat stiffly at the workbench, fingers curled like talons, skin cold and clammy, tongue extended, shoulders hunched, mouth locked open, shrieking out the fear inside him.
And it wouldn’t help, because they wouldn’t hear him back on Earth anyhow. I’m out here, he was yelling. I’m trillions of miles out here, alone. There’s nothing around me; I’m falling by myself, and nobody knows or gives a damn. Help me! Take me back! I want to go home!
And all the time he realized it was infantile stupidity, because, in fact, he was not alone: Dieter and Vivian and the baby, Laura, were along with him, plus a titanic metal ship as long as four city blocks, weighing thousands of tons, crammed with a billion dollars worth of turbines, safety devices, supplies. So it was all nonsense.
Trembling, he reached out and touched the wall. By God, it seemed real enough. What more could he ask? Could it get any more real? What would it look like if it were more real? His thoughts went around and around, without a flywheel, spinning crazily, faster and faster.
He crossed to the door, yanked it absolutely shut, bolted it, peered through the crack, and was satisfied. He was locked in; even if he went completely berserk, it would be all right: nobody would see him, nobody would know, there was no harm he could do. He could wreck the whole shop cabin, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Not like running amuck outside, where he could get at the delicate automatic pilot.
The metal walls of the shop cabin had a bright, metallic quality. They looked like metal foil, thin as paper, even thinner. A fragile metal hide between him and the emptiness. He could feel it out there; putting his hand against the wall, suffering incredibly but forcing himself, he stood actually touching the outside emptiness.
He could hear it. He could sense it, practically smell it. A cold musty smell, like moldy paper. A deserted trash heap blowing around at night; wind so faint that it was invisible, stirring so slightly that no motion was felt, only the sense of presence. It was always there, outside the ship. It never ceased.
Resentment took the place of fear. Why hadn’t they fixed up communication between the two ships? And why hadn’t they fixed up some sort of sound? There was no sound; the turbines were off—except for occasional shattering split seconds when side jets came on momentarily to correct the course. How did he know the ship was moving? He listened, but he heard nothing; he sniffed, he peered, he reached out his hand, but there wasn’t anything there. Only the metal foil wall, seemingly thinner than paper, so fragile that he could tear it to shreds.
On and on he pondered. Around and around. And all the time the ship and its invisible companion were getting nearer to Venus.
In the other ship, Frank was in the communications room, bent over the receiver.
“In the first seventy-two hours of the Crisis Government,” the faint, static-laden voice of the Earth announcer stated, “there has already been a marked change in the people’s morale.”
Irma and Frank glanced at each other cynically.
“The previous apathy and futility that characterized life under the Fedgov system has vanished; the man in the street has a new zest, a new purpose in life. He now has confidence in his leaders; he knows that his leaders will act; he knows his leaders are not corrupted by intellectual paralysis.”
“What’s that mean?” Syd asked dryly.
“It means they act first and think second,” Irma said.
The voice raved on. In the corner, the tape recorder was taking it all down. The four people listened avidly, not wanting to miss a word, loathing everything the voice said.
“It’s so—silly,” Irma said. “So sort of stupid and trashy, like bad advertising. But they believe it; they take it seriously.”
“The wheels are rolling,” Garry stuttered. “Grinding it out. Swords sharpened cheap—hey, a new business. If we ever get back to Earth. Swords sharpened, armor polished, horses shod. Our slogan is: Everything in Medieval Equipment. If it’s medieval, we have it.”
Nobody was listening to him; the announcer had finished and the three adults were now sunk in gloomy thought.
“We’re lucky,” Frank said, after awhile. “If we were back there the People’s Crusade Against the Invading Horde would be after us. We’re not a horde, and we’re not invading, but otherwise we fit pretty well.”
“It’s a good thing somebody thought to send us away,” Syd observed. “Was it Rafferty’s idea? That whole business at the end was so confused… I’m still not sure what happened.”
“Rafferty was out there,” Garry asserted. “I saw him hurrying around. He yelled something in at us, but I couldn’t hear him.”
“Obviously,” Frank said, “they had all this set up; they didn’t build these ships that morning. Somebody—probably Rafferty—planned to get us off Earth. That much we can assume. The real problem is: what the hell lies at the other end?”
“Maybe they just wanted to get rid of us,” Irma said uneasily. “Sort of dump us out into space. A one-way trip.”
“But,” Syd pointed out, “if they just wanted to get rid of us, they could have done it years ago. Done it cheaply and easily, without going to all the trouble of building the Refuge, and these ships, all the equipment geared to our needs. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s Venus like?” Irma asked Garry. “You read books—you know everything.”
The boy flushed. “A barren waste. No air, no life.”