Part 3

"They don't really go after polyester. They don't want to stop the stuff. It makes their job easier. You don't have to worry, buddy. Come on, how much you want? You might have trouble finding more for a while."

Craig said nothing. He fumbled for a grip on a packing box.

"You're from Out, aren't you, buddy? You ain't used to us here yet. Most of my customers are from Out. What jam'd you get into?"

"I got ten units, I think," Craig evaded.

"It ain't none of my business what you done. Nobody around here is going to ask you any questions. Long as you got units, you get poly like the big shots that come over here all the way from Uptown."

"Yeah," said Craig. "Gimme what I get for ten units and let's beat it out of here."

"Myself, I never been Out. Not even Luna. Never wanted to. I stay here and have my little business--you can call it a business. You'll see, buddy, there are millions of guys like me. The controllers don't stop us. We're respectable. A damned sight more respectable than those...."

"All right," snapped Craig. "Let's get out of here."

"You got it bad, huh? This poly will fix that up. It's pure. You just come back to old Nave and get poly."

"How ... how you get out of here?" asked Craig, nauseated.

"Get lost pretty easy in the dark, huh?" The man was beginning to mock him.

Craig lashed out suddenly at the unseen face in the darkness. He caught the thin throat in his left hand. His right left the packing box and cocked to deliver a blow. But he began to fall and had to let go.

"Okay, buddy, okay," the other man said soothingly as Craig was forced to catch himself. "I _like_ ex-spacemen. I know lots of you. I sell you poly. You don't want to get tough with me."

He shoved a block of ten small cubes into Craig's hand and, while Craig fished for his wallet, he produced a tiny, narrow-beamed flash. The transaction was quickly over. The cube was small enough to be forced without much difficulty into Craig's jacket pocket.

The man led him back across the littered yard, through the empty store building, and out the front door. When Craig emerged onto the street once more, a uniformed figure was standing nearby.

"He'll need two," whispered the man from behind him.

Craig reached into his pocket and mechanically fumbled two of the small cubes of waxlike substance from the loose package. He placed them on the outstretched hand of the Civil Control officer. The officer did not look in his direction at any time, but accepted the offer and walked slowly on toward the station.

Craig continued aimlessly down the long street. His head cleared as he walked and once more began to form a kind of vague plan. There was anonymity to a street such as this. There was also a kind of freedom. Everywhere in the universe, there were such streets. Neutralized streets, where a kind of compromise was reached between law and lawlessness. They were permitted because it was always necessary to provide such a place for those who were not permitted elsewhere. Those who would not fit, could not be "rehabilitated," could neither be jailed nor permitted complete freedom.

Controllers of one kind or another patrolled such streets, keeping them in a kind of check--or, more accurately, in a kind of containment. But no amount of control would ever completely stamp out the likes of Nave, the bootlegger.

Perhaps here, on this street, Craig could be "lost." Here he might find security for a time in anonymity, security and time to find a way ... to what? He did not know.

"Mister! Mister!" cried a thin, high voice from somewhere to his left. "Here, quick!"

It was a young boy of perhaps nine or ten. Craig caught sight of him as he motioned urgently. He wore a shabby, torn version of what appeared to be a space service uniform.

"I'm not buying anything, son," Craig said, pausing briefly.

"Come here, quick!" insisted the boy, his eyes large in a dirty face. "You already bought too much."

The boy was motioning him to follow. He had stepped between two buildings. Craig approached him with suspicion.

"What did you say?"

"Slip in here quick! You bought from Nave the peddler. You bought poly, didn't ya?"

"How did you...." Craig began.

"Tell you later. Slip through here quick or they'll send you to _Hardy_!"

The genuine fear of the youngster conveyed itself to Craig. With effort he forced his body through the space between the old buildings. At first he did not intend to follow the boy, but only to stop him for an explanation. The boy, however, continued down the tight corridor formed by the buildings.

"There's a window soon," he said from ahead of Craig. "Hurry. You lost time with that peddler."

Lost time? Cursing himself for becoming involved again in something he did not understand, Craig nevertheless followed as best he could. It was a tight squeeze and he found himself becoming breathless.

"Dive down!" shouted the boy, looking back with terror in his eyes.

Instinctively Craig did so. The rough walls tore at his suit.

"Stop!" shouted a voice from behind Craig. "Stop or we fire!"

Craig suddenly felt the sill of a window which opened into the building to his left. He quickly pulled himself into it. There was a sickening whine and a part of the window disintegrated in a cloud of splinters and plaster.

"Through here," said the boy from the semi-darkness. "They'll blast their way inside in a minute!"

Craig found himself in another empty building. He followed the boy through a doorway and felt his way as he half ran along the dark hall.

"Who are _they_?" he panted.

"Controllers."

"Civil Control?"

"Sure. You must be pretty important. I didn't get it all. But they say the controllers checked up on you after.... I'll explain later."

The hall ended in a dim room piled high with plasmolite packing boxes in great disarray. The boy chose a box and lifted a lid.

"Follow me. It's a passage."

"Where to?"

"No time now. Down here."

The passage, which seemed to be constructed of plasmolite boxes, seemed somehow lit by daylight, although Craig could not actually see the source of the light.

The tunnel ended in broad afternoon daylight. As he climbed out he saw a large clearing surrounded by ruins.

"We're just inside the old city," the boy said. "We're safe now--unless those controllers are willing to take more chances than I think."

"Wait a minute, son. You said 'old city.' You mean that this is a part of pre-war Los Angeles?"

"Well, sure."

"But that's supposed to be...."

"Radioactive? Most of it, anyway. Good thing, too. Otherwise we'd have no place to go."

"Look, kid, you better explain," said Craig. "You were right about somebody being after me, but I don't get the 'we' business. Or how you knew all about this."

"All right, mister, but let's get away from here. Those guys won't come through to here, even if they find a way--I don't think. But they're gettin' smarter and you're pretty hot right now."

The boy led the way to what appeared to be a completely demolished building.

"Used to be the old library," he said.

They circled the heap of plaster, brick, and twisted steel. On the other side Craig saw what appeared to be a window. The boy let himself down through it.

Craig was amazed to find a large, relatively clear area inside, probably part of an old room that had been spared by some freak of the blast.

"You _live_ here?" Craig asked the youngster incredulously.

"Part of the time." The boy brought up an old crate and offered it to Craig as a chair. "Listen, mister, I don't know who you are. You're an ex-spaceman and that's enough for me." There was a slightly amusing attempt at adult hardness about him. "You shouldn't have wasted time with Nave. You should have got out of there."

"Why?"

"I don't know. What you done, anyway?"

"I don't remember. Passed out at a bar...."

The boy showed disgust. He glanced at the pocket which contained the polyester.

Craig smiled. "I don't use this stuff. At least not enough to deserve what you're thinking." He tossed the remaining cubes on the littered floor of the room.

The boy maintained his look of scorn for a time, but then softened. "I was afraid you got kicked out of the service for that."

"How did you know I was ever in it?"

"Easy. You don't know how to walk on a planet yet. Anybody can tell."

"I didn't get kicked out," Craig said. "I came here to take a civil service job."

"It'd almost be better if you had been."

"I didn't know about Terra. None of us had any idea."

"I know," said the boy sadly. "My father quit, too. _He_ quit to marry my mother. That was before it was ... so bad."

"Where--" Craig began, then bit off the question.

"Oh, gee, mister, Terra's in an _awful_ bad shape! They took ... my parents. They hunt us down. They...."

Craig approached the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. "What's your name, son?"

"Phil."

"Phil what?"

"I don't know exactly. My father had to use so many names toward the ... end. He once had only one name, but I guess even he forgot what it was."

* * * * *

They prepared to spend the night in the old library room, but first Phil left it and made his way into the wilderness of rubble. He returned dragging a packing box of plastic insulating material, out of which they fashioned a crude bed. Despite the thousands of questions that paraded across Craig's mind, he waited each time for the boy to speak.

"I can't take you any further until...."

"Until you know more about me?"

"In a way. _They'll_ let me know."

Craig would have risked much to identify the "they" Phil referred to, but he did not ask the question. As he watched the boy preparing the dimly lit room for the night, he felt sure Phil could be trusted. He was almost frighteningly mature for his age.

The room was well hidden, for the once great library lay in a powdered ruin about it on all sides but a part of one. Only by accident or knowledge would a stranger recognize it in what was literally a world of rubble. During the moments of silence between the boy's volunteered statements, Craig tried to visualize the awful catastrophe that had befallen the old city. Piles of powdered masonry restricted his view greatly under the gathering night. He could see a scant city block through the window, but he knew the wreckage around them must extend for miles.

"You don't have to worry, mister...."

"Craig."

"Mr. Craig. They don't come in here at night."

"Radioactivity?"

"Yes. Not right here, but all around, everywhere."

"What?"

"It's all around us. You go through it to get here, but you can't _stay_ anywhere but a few places like this."

"How do you know all of these things, Phil?"

"Oh, we know, all right. We had to find out."

"You must have ion counters," he said in what he hoped was a casual tone.

"We have lots of things."

Craig was thoughtful for a minute. The boy was obviously on his guard now.

"Those empty buildings?" Craig asked tentatively.

"They built them too close," said the boy. It seemed to be a safe subject. "They built them up as close as they thought was safe. Space is very valuable here. But they built them too close."

"Yet the 'we' you speak of live even closer?"

The boy bit his lip and eyed him suspiciously in silence.

"Look, kid," Craig said very deliberately, "I'm not a controller and I'm not interested in a bunch of petty thieves."

The effect was just what he had intended. "We're _not_ thieves! And we're not traitors, either! We're...."

The boy was almost in tears. Craig waited a moment, then continued in a soft voice. "Phil, I'm just beginning to realize what a rotten place Terra is. From just what I've seen--it isn't very much--I can imagine such a system producing a great many 'we' groups like yours. I don't know who you are or what you are, but you can't be any worse than what I've already seen of Terran officials. Tell me, kid, what's it all about? And is there any way out of here? I mean--_way_ out!"

"You may tell him, Philip," said a quiet voice from the window entrance. "Like us, Philip, Mr. Craig is an enemy of tyranny, though he doesn't realize it yet."

Craig instinctively jumped back to get out of range of the window, meanwhile feeling around for something that could be used as a weapon. But the boy ran to the silhouetted figure in the window.

"Mr. Sam!" he cried eagerly.

Craig relaxed his hold on a strip of heavy metal. When the man had entered, the boy pulled a ragged black cloth across the window once more. He then ignited a small oil burning lamp in a carved-out nook in the wall.

"It's all right, Philip, nobody is following me," the newcomer said.

Craig studied his face. It was an old face covered by a stained gray beard. With a shock Craig recognized the man as a tramp he had seen earlier on the street, napping, sprawled in a doorway. Now for the first time he saw the eyes. Sharp and clear, they caught up the yellow light of the oil lamp and glowed warmly as they turned to Craig.

"I am 'Mr. Sam,' Mr. Craig. You might know me by the full name, Samuel Cocteau, but I doubt it. Even the names of the infamous do not penetrate space."

"I guess not," Craig agreed. "But you said something about my being an enemy of tyranny."

"Whether you like it at once or not, you are temporarily one of us--one of the 'we' Philip has been speaking of. But all of that in due time. Right now it is necessary for us to leave here."

"They're going to try to find us _tonight_?" asked Phil, startled.

"Yes, a tribute to Mr. Craig," said the old man. "A Geiger team is being readied at the station."

Craig started to protest as the boy began hurriedly to pick up his few possessions in the room.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Craig," the man said. "I must ask you to decide now whether to trust us and our judgment. There is grave danger for you if you are caught by the Civil Control. The report I have received is that you are largely unaware of the 'crimes against the state' you have committed. The Civil Control hoped to capture you before you find them out. But that, of course, is my word only. There is no time to give you proof, even if I had it."

Craig's mind whirled under the sudden onslaught of new facts. He had followed a peddler without knowing why he did it. He had bought polyester he had no use for. He had followed a boy who beckoned to him. Now--how much longer was he to move haphazardly through Terra like a cork on a wind-blown sea? Who were these strange fugitives who said he was one of them and who lived in the heart of a radioactive city?

"Well, Mr. Craig?" asked Cocteau quietly.

Craig glanced at the boy. The child's eyes were wide and pleading in the dim light of the oil lamp.

"Let's go," Craig said.

* * * * *

Darkness was swiftly falling on the wilderness of heaping ruin. The three made their way toward what Craig at first thought was an unbroken wall of rubble. The near-horizontal rays of the sun tipped the white mass of broken stone with brilliance, and gave the entire scene an unearthly quality. Below the towering rubble mountains, long black shadows were reaching toward what Craig knew to be the living city.

Cocteau took the lead and set a fast pace for a man of his age. He took a highly devious path through the "mountain," or what began to seem to Craig needlessly difficult and that outlined them against the bright western sky. At one point Craig left the invisible path of the older man to avoid an exhaustingly steep rise.

"Follow me exactly," warned Cocteau in a sharp voice. "There is only one relatively safe path through here."

"They'll see us against the sky!"

"It cannot be helped."

But there was no indication that they were followed. They pushed onward, scurrying over heaps of weathered plaster and brick. The old man seemed to avoid with great care places where metal girders were visible.

The exertion together with walking directly into the setting sun made Craig begin to feel the old nausea return. He resisted it for a time, but it would not be repressed, particularly as he strove to maintain his balance on difficult climbs. Once he stumbled on a splintered building stone and fell. It was a long minute before he could regain his feet and mutter a feeble, "Sorry."

"We must push on, Mr. Craig," was Cocteau's only comment.

"It's safe here for a _minute_, isn't it?" Craig panted, dizzy and breathless.

"There is no safe place here, Mr. Craig."

They continued their winding way through the growing darkness. For Craig it became a nightmare of stumbling over the endless piles of sharp stones. His mind spun sickeningly and he retched as he half ran along the path Cocteau set for them.

"Please, mister," breathed the voice of Phil behind him. "It isn't so far now."

Doggedness carried Craig onward long after awareness left him.

* * * * *

He became conscious suddenly, as though by an injection of stimulant. He found himself surrounded by a number of figures, including Cocteau and a white garbed man, evidently a doctor.

"You are quite safe now, Mr. Craig," said Cocteau warmly. "Welcome to the _City of We_."

"Where are we?"

"Deep in the old city, in a place where the radioactivity is negligible," the man answered as the doctor took his pulse. "This is Dr. Grant and these others are members of the _Liberty party_."

"Liberty!"

"You've heard of it?"

"Yeah, you're pretty unpopular, aren't you?"

"Unpopular? Let us say that all of Terran _officialdom_ is dedicated to exterminating us."

"The committee on something-or-other asked me about my attitudes toward the Liberty party," said Craig, rising to a sitting position on the cot.

"And at the time you had a lack of attitude, which most likely was unacceptable to them," supplied Cocteau, smiling. "Well, you may be interested to know that you are considered one of us by most of Terra just now."

"_What?_"

"That is correct," said another of the group. "It seems you were in a bar in--ah--in a somewhat less than fully conscious state...."

"But I didn't know anything about the Liberty party."

"No, nor is it alleged that you actually mentioned the party in so many words," continued the white-haired man, smiling. "But it seems that you did make certain statements in the presence of certain persons that did indicate a definite predilection...."

"That's crazy," said Craig angrily.

"Of course," Cocteau agreed.

"Furthermore," the other man said, "you are charged with wilful abandonment of duty and 'acts indicative of your desire to shun the best utilization of your talents in behalf of the state of Terra.'"

"In other words," explained Cocteau, "you applied for a job on a private space freighter. Without permission to do so."

Craig was silent. He lay back down on the cot and tried to absorb the data he had just received.

"So I'm accused of belonging to something I don't know anything about?"

"Then I'll tell you briefly about us. You have a right to know the magnitude of the crime with which you are charged." Cocteau took a seat by Craig's cot. The others also found chairs.

"But first a brief bit of history--a history that you have never heard before. Not your fault. It is not allowed to penetrate Terra's atmosphere."

"I don't know much about Terra," Craig interjected. "I'm just finding out how much I don't know."

"God, I wish the rest of the Universe could find out with you!" said one of the group.

"Yes, the history of Terra is almost lost now. That is, the part of it that followed the Great Wars of seventy-five years ago. You know of those wars; you have just walked through one of the physical results of them. No nation or alliance of nations can be said to have won them, but the wars had a most profound effect upon Terra. More than anything else, they made men reach to the stars, if only to escape the deadly conflicts of Terra.

"Ideological issues were involved, naturally, but the underlying cause of the Great Wars was the struggle for power. The world was disunited. Peoples were divided from peoples by an almost inconceivable number of unimportant distinctions. These were ethnical, national, racial, cultural--name any brand of prejudice and you'll find it existed then.

"Incredibly enough, the destructiveness of the Great Wars accomplished a kind of unity. Gone were the once proud aggressive nations. Gone into oblivion. Gone, too, were the systems of economics and sociology of which men were once so sure. There was a kind of 'plague-on-both-your-houses' attitude among the peoples of the world. There was a large measure of anarchy following the Great Wars. Not a violent, active anarchy of hate and terror, but of apathy and weariness. Apathy at the outcome of false conflicts, and weariness of the self-defeating strife of man against man.

"At first men produced by the full extent of their labors barely enough on which to survive. Only gradually did they regain their ability to produce surpluses once more. Of course, surpluses mean exchanges--trade. And trade requires order and system.

"The first ten years following the Great Wars was a period of gradualism in all things. Peoples united in small groups. There were no political or racial divisions. The units were built upon functional lines. They were natural and free. Above all, they were cooperative.

"It was not communism. Men knew all too well the mental and physical slavery of that brutally rigid system. It was not rugged individualism either. Rugged individuals during this period either starved or were driven out by the starving.

"This natural, cooperative unity spread and became more complex. There came into being natural associations of units. Not exclusive but inclusive associations that linked all who would join and could produce surpluses. Productivity increased thereby. Men were intelligent enough to avoid many of the old abuses.

"Ways were found to harness the productivity of each man and woman. Genuine efforts were made to avoid misfits, to make those who produced fit. It was realized, Mr. Craig, that the unhappy man will infect others with his misery, and the trouble he will cause is much more difficult to undo than to prevent in the first place.

"There were, of course, mistakes, false starts. But the new-found system of world-wide unity proved flexible. It was multiple-based. To a very large degree, all men fitted into it logically and naturally. It was the first truly 'grass-roots' economic and social system in the history of man. And it was a great tribute to his ability to work out his destiny, particularly since it came after a tragedy that was so enormous and devastating.

"The list of its successes is incredible. For in a decade the age-old problem of poverty seemed to have disappeared. There were no significant outbreaks of disorder and lawlessness--indeed, there was comparatively little need for a written law. The principle of mutuality and cooperation was too strongly conditioned into the people.

"Scientifically, the first half of the new century, a scant twenty-five years after the last bomb was dropped, was the greatest in man's history. Man reached the stars. He began to know the molecule, the atom, the electron. He pushed the frontier of his knowledge deep into both microcosm and macrocosm.

"But a fatal flaw had long before developed in the structure, wonderful as it was. It was an age-old flaw. It was one that was disguised by the very nature of the new system. When it was recognized, that flaw had so weakened the system that its spread was all but inevitable. It is a flaw that will always plague man to a certain extent, but one that must keep us eternally vigilant.

"It is this: the greatest human good comes not in how well you learn to control man and keep him from harming himself. What determines it is how completely you learn to free him.

"Conversely, the law provides that no control system, however devised, will succeed in bringing happiness and security to man to any greater extent than it permits the fullest expression of his nature.