Part 3
Later he turned, moved back until he was facing the door through which he had entered. He kept the food-capsule near his mouth as the door opened and she stood there looking at him strangely.
Then she strode toward him, long slim legs and an easy imperious stride. The metallic-silk skirt that came half-way to her knees tinkled like a thousand infinitely tiny bells.
She said, "The records have been checked. One of our ships failed to get out of Earth's atmosphere when we came here a century ago. We had assumed the ship had burned up. It has been suggested that you are from Earth, that you found that ship. It would be odd if you were one of the Equalitarian soldiers who fought against us a hundred years ago."
Danton shrugged. Self control was difficult now. He had to resist an urge to reach out, put his fingers around her throat. She seemed weaponless, and it could be accomplished rapidly enough. There would be a great deal of personal satisfaction. But he still clung to the shreds of his duty. His duty to Seers, to Earth millions who could so easily die under the bombs of an enemy they had never been allowed to know even existed. Or was that the real reason? _Maybe I don't really want to kill her._
"Think whatever you wish. I've told you the facts. I know nothing about such a ship. If you believe such a fantastic idea, then where is this ship now?"
"You'll answer that," she said. She moved nearer, nearer than necessary for conversation. How ageless and smooth her face was, he thought. Smooth and pale. And her eyes like exotic books, concealing strange and terrible secrets.
He shrugged again. "It doesn't matter much to me," he said. "My offer still stands. Take it or leave it. As I said, this capsule will kill me in seconds. After that the troubles are all yours. You won't be able to escape. Those mongrels out there, as you call them, they don't need Earth. They have minds of their own."
"That's impossible! They're mongrels."
"You think you have them set solidly and forever in a static mold, just the way you want them? The perfect slavery--culturally molded, so they don't even realize they're slaves. That's the idea? It isn't working out that way. They're human, with minds too complex--they can never be wholly predictable. Of course you could send an agent to Earth to find out. It would reduce the odds against us."
"Us? But you've asked to become one of the Oligarchs."
"Yes. I would prefer that, frankly. But it isn't too important. I'm interested in your system for only one reason--because you never grow old. You will notice that I am growing old, hair graying, wrinkles creeping in around my eyes. I don't like that. To be ageless like you, I would bargain."
"You seem so sure of yourself. I almost believe you."
"I am sure of myself. The mongrels can manage a successful revolt. But with the information I can give you, you could put down that revolt. I can't say about the next revolt, or the one after that, or any of the revolts that will go on as long as there are men who have minds for figuring out reasons for revolting. If you try to force the information from me, I'll take the poison."
"Would you really do that?"
He nodded.
"We could go out there and get the information directly from the mongrels."
"From them, you would find out nothing. The mongrels don't know anything. Only the leaders know, the scientists, the secret underground. You would never find them. The revolt is latent in every man beyond these walls, in every man and woman and child. The leaders know how to bring out that latent desire to revolt, when the time comes. There will be adequate weapons, too. Like the ones those three ships were blasted with."
He touched her throat. He felt the stirring of the pulse. A flush rose to her cheeks. "Show me why you haven't grown old during this last hundred years, Rhone, as I have."
Her face was near his. He could see the trembling in her lips, the enigmatic brightness of her eyes. "You're attractive," she whispered. "And that's odd, that a mongrel could be attractive."
"There are differences among the mongrels," Danton said. He moved his hands down her arms. She shivered a little. "And maybe there's a need in you that makes me seem something I'm not."
"That may be, yes. Maybe it isn't so easy to live forever. We have all you would think anyone would want here. But there are so few of us. And the men--always the same, with faces the same and walks the same and--"
"Then you really are the same Rhone, the Oligarch of a century ago?"
"Yes."
"And it's true, you never grow old?"
"It's true. We won't grow any older. And we'll never die."
She looked into his eyes and the seconds went by and time dissolved around Danton. And he thought: the lies I have told here--are they really a conscious effort to deceive? Do I really want, unconsciously, to become an Oligarch? Why not? He had wondered about it before. Immortality. A system depending on eternal warfare for its existence. Was this not his system after all?
"Come," she said, and took his arm. "I'll show you. You interest me. You're a diversion, soldier. I'll show you what we are."
* * * * *
They sat in a small spherical car. It made no noise. It slid silently over the smooth floor by working a simple lever around. It darted like a silver beetle. First she took him back to a place he remembered well. The Pit.
She didn't seem to see things actually. She talked with a calm detachment, and sometimes her thoughts seemed far away. Danton's thoughts weren't far away.
She was saying, "The war goes on outside the walls. Their culture is one of war, and that is all they know. We established it that way. We intend to keep it that way. You see this is the Pit; here the bodies come, the ones who have died. Here the bodies are sorted roughly onto the conveyor belts which take them to the Dismembering Wards."
The car whirred them away. The next station, gleaming white rooms, shining and sterile. Danton felt the perspiration streaming down his throat.
Electronic machinery examined the bodies, mechanical hands removed them from the conveyor belts with deft selectivity, deposited them on wheeled, white slabs.
"You will notice," Rhone said calmly, "that the bodies have come through an antiseptic room, and their clothing dissolved. Now they are ready for dismembering."
Men in white moved silently down the line and did their work with sharp, quick strokes. Scalpels and tiny whirring saws and the bodies slowly dwindling into isolated parts. There was no blood, no mess, everything was efficient and thorough and clean.
"The usable body-parts are selected here," Rhone said. "Notice the departments along the walls by each slab? They are refrigerated. They contain separate sections for each of the salvaged body-parts that are worth preserving."
Behind glass in the walls, Danton saw neatly placed parts of the bodies. Hearts, fingers, hands, legs, feet, bone sections, eyes and interior organs. Kidneys, spleens, livers, carefully preserved, neatly arranged and labeled and waiting.
Danton slowly licked his lips. Her voice seemed far away now, droning like an insect on a lazy day far from anywhere, and the endless length of that room seemed dust-mantled and still, so still, he thought, and unreal; but it was real.
"From here, any part of a human body can be replaced by our surgeons. Here is the source of our immortality. When any body organ becomes worn, it is replaced. We are stocking our body-banks, soldier. As you can see."
Danton could see. What he saw was blurring a little though, and his legs seemed numb when he tried to move them.
"Why does it affect you so?" she was asking him then, and he turned and looked at her.
"Why?"
He didn't really know, or else his brain wasn't functioning at the moment. Why? It was beyond horror. It was alien, and yet why should it be alien? As a soldier, why should he find it disturbing? He had been conditioned, and his conditioning had allowed him to destroy millions by pressing buttons, by directing missiles he never saw in flight to a target he never saw dissolve in a great white-hot flame.
Here it was planned, and here death had some transcendental meaning.
"There's one more thing for you to see," she said.
A dimly-lighted series of chambers. She pointed them out. Refrigerated banks. As far as Danton could see, the long chambers were lined with huge banks. Each filled with spare body-parts.
"You see the pattern now, soldier? We started with a select group. From among the Oligarchs only the elite of the elite was selected to come here to Mars. There are fifty of us now, as there were fifty then. No children, of course. Why complicate things?
"Our slaves out there know nothing except that they must fight the Redbirds. Theirs is a war society. We arranged it and we've perpetuated it, and now it's the only life they know--unless your story of a revolt is true, of course, which I can hardly believe. They have only the crudest weapons. The kind of weapons we fought with on earth, soldier, left little for body-salvage, did they? We feel we've found the only way of being immortal. Why does it affect you like this, soldier? Doesn't it seem logical and fair to you?"
* * * * *
Danton didn't say anything. He couldn't. His throat was dry and his blood hammered past his temples. She was putting the question to him, all right; and in a way it was the same question he had asked himself more than once. To an efficiently conditioned soldier class, killing was an end in itself. Why not go on from there, carry it out to its final denominator?
"The brain never wears out," she was saying, "the only damage possible to it is due to the wearing out of supplementary body-parts, and they are seldom used to such a point. And even parts of the brain can be replaced. We have blood banks, of course. We cannot die of natural causes. If death comes from any kind of violence or accident, we can bring that body to life again.
"We are storing up reserve body-parts to keep us strong and un-aging for as long as one would care to imagine. When we are ready, of course, we shall return to Earth. We have kept that in mind, naturally. We are almost ready now to return. On Earth, of course, the same system will be established--but there our system will of necessity be slightly different. Perhaps wars will not necessarily go on unceasingly. There will be breathing spells ... it won't matter particularly to us."
She looked at Danton closely. "First we shall wipe out most of the population. We only need a small stabilized population to provide for us."
"What about the Redbirds?" Danton said. His voice sounded weak. It was weak. "This is their planet, doesn't--"
"Their bodies are too alien," she said. "They can't be of any benefit to us. Except, of course, they provide conflict for the mongrels."
Danton closed his eyes. There was no more confusion. He knew now where the road led if you stayed on it to its end. It ended here with bodies stacked up in refrigerators. It ended with the cancellation of all human values, except the values of the fifty select--and they were no longer human in any familiar sense.
He felt sick, very sick. It might be embarrassing, he was so sick. He said, "I don't feel very well. Maybe I could rest here for a few minutes?"
She laughed. She stopped laughing, and Danton heard the sound of doors sliding and the approach of softly moving feet. Two Oligarchs--Guards, evidently, for each wore a flash-gun at his side. And between them--
Danton didn't quite believe what he saw, and if what he saw was true, he didn't know whether to be glad or not. Keith and Van Ness. The latter was terribly wounded, his face a red smear, blood soaking his side. And Keith--Keith, Danton had decided, was a dangerous man.
One of the Oligarchs said, "We brought them directly to you, on Weisser's orders. Weisser talked to them, then sent them down here. He said that you would know--"
She raised her hand and the Oligarch guard stopped talking. Danton looked at Keith's rigid, white face. Keith's lips thinned back over his teeth as he grinned at Danton. "Captain," he said. "I guess you beat me to the punch. I see you're already on friendly terms."
Van Ness moaned softly and fell to his knees. He stared sightlessly from his broken face.
Danton said, "I thought you two were gone for good."
"So did we," Keith said. "But the Redbirds dropped us over a tower, down a chute. I don't know why."
Rhone said, "The Redbirds fight for us too. We pay them. For every body they bring to us, they receive pay. A kind of drug."
She stared from Danton to Keith, then at Van Ness. "You three seem to know one another. I'll find out from Weisser." She started to tune in the communicator on her wrist. Keith stopped her. "Don't bother," he said. "I've already talked to Weisser. This man here has been lying. I'll tell you the truth."
Danton had been afraid of this. "Keith! Don't tell them anything!" But he knew somehow that his own game was over. It had never had a chance. Even without Keith's selling out, it wouldn't have had a chance. It was walking the road bravely that counted, anyway....
Keith said, "I'm talking, and I'll be glad to talk."
Danton shouted, "Keith! Don't do it. Don't tell them anything. You don't realize what they are!"
"It doesn't matter," Keith said, "what they are. I've been on the wrong side. Maybe I was always an Oligarch, and it's probably the same with you, only you're just too stupid to admit it. You think I want to go back to Earth, even if we had a chance to do it, which we'll never have? I hate Earth, and maybe I always have hated it--the way the New Order remade it! It's sane! Everyone an angel, filled to the hair roots with the milk of human kindness. We found it no place for us. Weisser says he'll take me in. I know where I belong!"
* * * * *
Rhone stood up in the car, looking into Danton's face. "It's true then. The three of you are from Earth. I thought they were planning a culture down there that couldn't possibly be aggressive. How could they have sent you?"
Danton's eyes went from face to face, round the immediate area of the vast chamber. Keith was grinning thinly, watching him narrowly. This was it, and there seemed nothing to do but to go down fighting in the classic vein. A futile gesture, but what else?
He said, "It was done in secret. Only we three and one other knew about the flight." Tell the truth. It might keep them from invading Earth for a while. If they thought Earth had an army they would strike before Earth grew any stronger. The truth might keep them quiescent for a while longer. "The new social system there, it has no conception of warfare or violence. You wouldn't understand it. And they wouldn't understand you, not now."
"You used our ship to get here," she said. "That would indicate that you have no ships of your own there?"
Danton nodded. Keith laughed, a thin high laughter. He moved toward Rhone. He dropped to one knee and raised his hands to her. "They have no armaments, no ships. Psychologically they have no power to resist. Weisser said I could become one of you."
Danton pushed Rhone from the car. He shoved the control lever and the car whirled violently, slammed into the foremost Oligarch guard, sent him spinning across the metal floor. The car swerved again, struck down the other guard. Danton jumped free, ripped the weapon from the man's waist. The guard was groaning and his hands were sliding about vaguely over the floor.
The hand-gun was familiar. It was similar to the flash-guns used by the guards on Earth a century before; there would have been no need to have altered that weapon.
Keith ran at him, kicked out, and Danton fired. Keith went to his knees and looked at Danton dully and then fell forward. He rolled over and lay there, grinning blankly at nothing at all.
Deliberately, without feeling anything, Danton burned the life out of the two Oligarchs who had lain stunned where they fell. As he spun back, the woman stood stiffly almost up against him. He had expected her to attempt to run away.
She said softly, "I know what it is now. It's because you're human. It's human to grow older. It's human to die. Maybe we have the wrong idea, or maybe we've approached it wrong, I don't know. It doesn't matter now. I--"
He pressed the flash-gun toward her. She didn't seem to notice the gun. She continued to look at his face, into his eyes, searching, for something he couldn't tell what, and he didn't care.
"Did you know you have gray eyes," she whispered, "and that they deepen, get darker and darker?"
"No."
"No. No one ever told you."
Mara had told him. He barely remembered that time when she had told him.
She put her slightly opened mouth against his lips and pulled him closer.
He pulled the trigger. Her body quivered as though from the kiss, and then he stepped away and she fell at his feet. He wasn't thinking now. There was no time for that. He lifted her, carried her toward one of the refrigerated banks. Her skin had turned a mottled ugly color and her eyes were open and rigid. Quite suddenly her eyes moved up into her head, and ugly groups of purple little veins appeared underneath the skin.
He put her on the frosty floor of the huge bank. Around her, like some hideous garnishing, were eyes that looked at her accusingly. He dragged the two Oligarch guards and Keith's corpse into another bank, slammed the heavy door. Van Ness groaned and Danton lifted him into the car.
"I can't see," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see. I'm dying."
"Hang on," Danton said. "Only fifty Oligarchs, understand, Van? Forty seven now. Maybe less if those seven I shot down in the pit didn't all recover. Maybe we can get some more of them, Van!"
"I'm dying," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see."
* * * * *
Danton tooled the car. As he approached doors in the long tubular halls, the doors opened automatically, closed again behind. There were turns, drops, risings, more doors, other halls.
He stopped the car. Lost, alone, somewhere. Only fifty of them--no, forty-seven now at most. They wouldn't have too large a structure here. Somewhere there would have to be a central power source. If he could find such a power unit, strike at the heart--
He shook Van Ness. He felt for the heart. It was still beating. Van Ness moaned, "I'm dying. If I could see--"
"Do you know what I'm saying, Van? Can you hear me?"
"Yes ... sure I can hear you."
"Listen to me. We're in the Oligarch's fortress. I don't know how big it is. But it seems to be one unified structure. There has to be a central power source here. You were an engineering expert. Where would it be? Van, listen. There are only a handful of Oligarchs here now. We stand a slim chance...."
"But I can't see--"
"I can see."
"Yes--a central power source. I remember the words to an old song, Captain. You know, soldiering used to be a great sport. There was one about a chocolate soldier with a uniform so pretty...."
"_Van Ness!_"
"Yes."
"Where would they build that central power room? Up? Down?"
"Down."
He started the car moving. Oddly curving and angling corridors bending with geometrical precision. He saw an elevator door and he pressed the button; the door opened and he drove the car into it. Down, fast, sickeningly fast.
"Bottom ... clear down," Van Ness mumbled. "Start from there. I can't see--"
Danton kept the elevator dropping and then it stopped. He hadn't stopped it.
He stepped to the side as the door slid open. He hit the entering Oligarch, hit him with a short hard blow in the solar plexus and when the man gasped and bent forward, Danton brought his knee up. Bone and cartilage crunched. The man slewed to one side, and Danton hit him again and the man smashed into the wall and slid down toward the floor.
"I can't see," Van Ness said. "But what I hear has a sweet sound."
Danton dragged the Oligarch up, held him against the wall. The man sagged and lifted his hands to protect his face. His lips were torn, his nose bleeding. He stared dazedly at Danton, his eyes filled with terror, shock.
"Wha--" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped into the scream.
"I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units."
The man shook his head, no.
Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them back again.
"Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts from your banks won't put back together again."
The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind.
* * * * *
The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment, though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been. "Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!"
"Yes...."
Danton told what he saw. He was Van Ness' eyes. The generators, huge oscilloscopes, vacuumtube voltimeters, electronic power-supply panels, rolls and skeins of hook-up wire, shielding of every color, size and shape, panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers, long solid surfaces of gleaming bakelite, color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances....
Van Ness told Danton what to do. Van Ness took a long time to say a few words, and after that he didn't seem to be able to say anything else. He didn't move either. Danton released the force of the flash-gun, left the gun in the position Van Ness had indicated, its beam burning deep into the heart of the complicated soul of the Oligarch fortress.
He would have taken Van Ness with him, but Van Ness wasn't interested anymore. He was dead. Danton left him. He would remember Van Ness alive as long as he was capable of remembering anything. Van Ness as clay he had already forgotten.
He ran toward the elevator. As it whirred upward, he felt the reverberation, the trembling, the beginnings of a low deadly murmuring. The elevator continued to rise smoothly, carrying Danton and the car, but Danton felt a giddy swaying like that of an earthquake.
A social system strictly of the top-down variety. But in the final analysis, the top wasn't the mind of Rhone or of Weisser. It was something above both of them, above the Oligarchs. Machines. And above the machines, generators and switches and volts and tubes.
The electronic interdependence was going insane within the fortress, like the intricate cellular structure of a mind within a skull.
In a hall somewhere in a catacomb of metal, Danton sat in the car, wondering which way to go, wondering if it would make any difference now, feeling the fortress above, below, all around him, breaking apart.
What about the Oligarch spaceships? Perhaps they were someplace else, away from here, and they would survive the destruction of the fortress. And maybe one or two or three Oligarchs would also survive. Even one ship, one Oligarch, returning to Earth, would be one too many.
He was looking at the far door as it slid open and a car sped through, skimming along the polished metal floor frantically, desperately. The occupant of the car, a woman, took no notice of Danton. Her face was damp and pale with fear as her car sped past. Her machines were forsaking her. Her efficiency, her gadgets and the tremendous power that had existed for so long at her fingertips, were disintegrating, and she appeared to be disintegrating with them.