Part 4

She would be intent only on escape, of course, not realizing that without her machines, she was doomed. But she might find a temporary escape from the death around her, the metal walls of the gigantic coffin.

Van Ness was gone. And Keith--convinced that soldiering was an end in itself, rather than a means to an end--had found the inevitable end for a soldier.

Danton wondered about that. He knew one thing--that the test was yet to come for him. He was not sure yet that Keith had not been right....

He followed the woman through a door into a chamber. It was a nice room, Danton thought. A great deal of pleasure had drifted through this room, and in it, time had probably never meant anything. Perfumed incense. Music, drifting, still rising from somewhere, pneumatic couches--but underneath something was cracking open, veins and arteries of power choking, blocked off; but the power had to go somewhere; short-circuit, the madness of a great machine-mind.

The woman had opened a panel, and beyond her, Danton could see the Martian afternoon. He had never seen a Martian afternoon before. It was beautiful, he thought, though he was hardly in a position to study or appreciate it properly. Then he saw what she was doing--the woman was escaping out the panel. There must be some way she was planning to get safely to the ground outside. It seemed to be a long way down.

But she wasn't worried about that.

She jumped. She looked back at Danton, her face pale and twisted, then she jumped. Danton ran, looked out. He looked out just in time to see her body hit. It was too far down for anyone to go that way. Her body bounced a little.

* * * * *

Insane, Danton thought. They had each become such component parts of the bigger machine that very likely they were all going crazy now, right along with the machine. And the machine wasn't going to last much longer either, insane or otherwise. It was beginning to quiver, to shake and shudder, and its metal skin was beginning to groan and twist. Its metal joints were grinding together, its skein nerves wrenching and singing.

Danton looked around hurriedly. He saw the wires again, everything suspended by wires, shiny and strong. He gave a heavy table slab--legless, of course, a suspended disc of metal--he gave it a tremendous shove and it began to swing to and fro; it made a heavy pendulum, swinging wider and wider, and it began to crash into other suspended things, into chairs and into weird sculpture, crashing through structural images and distorted faces of metal. It made a sound like off-key bells bonging and clanging.

Wires finally snapped with a whine and Danton felt the hot sharpness as a strand cut across his arm, sinking in like the slash of a knife. He pushed the table slab to the wall, against the window. He managed to get several strands of the wire tied together by complicated knot designs. He yanked down an ornamental drape that seemed to have a swirling life of its own, made sheaths for his hands from finely-woven metallic-cloth, and looped the wire three times around the metal sheathing.

He slid down toward the ground. It was further down than it had seemed from above. The wind was high and cold and strong. He began to sway dangerously and the wind threatened to tear him from the wire.

He glanced upward. The structure of the Oligarchs was huge, a shining silver metal thing of coldness rising up out of bare rocks. It was built on the side of a cliff, very high, and very far below was a valley. Perhaps it was the valley in which he had landed ... no, that must have been far away from here. He saw no lake. But, of course, the valley itself stretched windingly away further than he could see.

He ran out of wire. He managed to lift his weight with one arm enough to unwrap the wire coils from the other. That gave him another three feet. He dropped. Pain came from a wrenched ankle and the shock of the weight on his bones. But he hit running and he kept on running.

For somehow, though he had killed her, she was alive.

Just before dropping he had seen her, running away from the Oligarch tower. Running along a steel walkway. A fine-mesh railing separated the walkway from a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet. It was Rhone. She was running fast, too. Very fast.

He ran hard. He didn't feel the pain in his ankle. He couldn't afford to feel anything now except urgency. The cold thin air burned.

She stopped and he stopped too, flattening against the hard rust-colored rock. She was pushing a lever or something; whatever it was it got results. A silver nose projected outward from the cliff, slanting slightly upward; it blossomed out as though someone were blowing a silver bubble from stone. Out and out. It stopped.

It was a spaceship, all right. Danton figured that the power shut-off had prevented her from reaching the ship from a subterranean route. Evidently rigged for such an emergency, the wall of the cliff could also summon the ship out into the open, prepare it for blasting off from a cradle cut down into the cliff like a giant cannon barrel.

When the outer door in the side of the ship opened, Rhone ran for it. Danton was right behind her. She heard him just as she went through and into the air-lock. She turned, her mouth opened, and then he struck her with his shoulder, carried her on through the inner air-lock door and into the tubular corridor leading forward into the control room.

He dragged her forward with him as the doors closed behind him. The controls were the same in principle as those of the ship he had brought from Earth. Once set, they were automatic. He strapped Rhone in the shock-seat at the side. He strapped himself into the chair before the control panel....

* * * * *

Seers, Secretary of Social Security, was a fat man with a serious round slate-gray face. He looked at Danton thoughtfully, waited. Outside the office of Sociology Section in New World Square, the sky was a soft and promising blue.

Finally Seers said, "Well, Danton, what happened then?"

Danton shrugged. "First I dropped enough atomic fire to finish destroying the Oligarch fortress completely, and to get any ships that might have been left inside the mountain. There's nothing there now but a big black crater. I don't think there will ever be any need to worry about the Oligarchs anymore. I landed the ship in the Pacific in as isolated a spot as I could find--midway between New Zealand and Cape Horn. Then I contacted you by short wave. And here I am and here you are. And I guess that's all there is."

"Why did you bring Rhone back?"

"I had no choice," Danton said. "I guess when I killed her and put her in the refrigeration bank, that saved her life. Some surgeon did a quick job on her." Danton leaned toward Seers. "If all of it, or any of it, really happened."

"What makes you think it didn't?"

"For one thing, I'm back here alive, an impossible mission accomplished. For another--I--well, this time I _want_ to be reconditioned."

"Your experience has changed your outlook, Danton?"

"Considerably. I--want to be changed. I want to be someone else, anything else. I've seen things too horrible to remember anyway. I'd rather forget everything. It could all have been delusion, hallucination rigged up in your psyche labs. As Keith said--you boys are good at that sort of thing. If that's how it was--it was good therapy. There's a doubt in my mind, you see. It _might_ have happened, and just the bare possibility that it did happen is enough to make me gladly volunteer for reconditioning."

Seers nodded. "I'm very glad you're approaching it this way. It will make the processing easier to perform, and the new personality easier to maintain. We probably will never need your kind again, Danton. Now that the Oligarchs are gone, the last threat to our new system is gone with them. The chance of some other intelligent life-form being in the universe at all is remote, and the further chance that they would take aggressive action against Earth makes the whole thing something we can logically ignore."

"That's fine," Danton said.

"You've seen where the psychology of war would lead, inevitably. If you can justify killing human beings at all, the final result is bound to be, in some form or another, what you saw on Mars."

"If I actually saw it. If I was on Mars at all."

Seers signaled through the intercom. A door opened. Rhone stood there, a tablet in her hand, and a pencil. She sat down and crossed attractive legs. Very attractive legs, Danton thought.

"Miss Tannon, this is Richard Danton. Mr. Danton, my new secretary, Miss Tannon."

She nodded, turned her nose down once more, very business-like, into the tablet.

Danton thought, It's Rhone all right. A reconditioned Rhone. They must be good at their reconditioning to change an Oligarch mind into that of an efficient secretary. Danton said, "What about the others up there on Mars?"

"We'll take care of them, peacefully of course," Seers said. "We have plenty of time. We won't bring them back. We will set up our new system there."

Danton listened to Seers' dictation. "To Chief Psyche-adjustment Administrator. From Seers, Department of Social Security. Subject: Voluntary reconditioning of Richard Danton. To take place at once under the jurisdiction of...."

There was more. Danton didn't hear it ... and later they injected something into his veins and he sat there, feeling Richard Danton dying, for the last time, going away. Richard Danton, fading out, all around him bit by bit, cell by cell, dying, never to awaken again. And remembering what he had experienced on Mars, Danton thought: It's as good a reward as anyone could ask. Goodbye, Richard Danton. It was nice knowing you, but Goodbye....

* * * * *

_His name was Burton. John R. Burton._

_He was as happy as anyone could expect to be. His wife loved him and he loved his wife. Their children were very well adjusted, as was everyone of course in the New World System._

_Burton worked ten hours a week in a coal mine, though the job was merely one demanding the overseeing of machines. The rest of the week was one of leisure devoted to gardening, hobbies, play, music. There was no more hate, no violence, no feelings of insecurity. It wasn't that everyone loved everyone else particularly. It was just that no one was afraid of the future anymore._

_And Burton was no longer bothered by bad dreams either, and so he was what one might consider perfectly happy, perfectly adjusted._

_The perfect happiness of one who does not remember._