As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern Illinois stays in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of policy any complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate investigation, lest worse should follow.
By 9.45 a.m., De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira(Japan), and Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and ‘to take such steps as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and all that that implies.By 10 a.m. the Hall was empty, and the four Members and I were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling ‘My leetle godchild’ – that is to say, the new Victor Pirolo. Our Planet prefers to know Victor Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired enthusiast who spends his time near Foggia, inventing or creating new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees; but there is another side to his nature – the manufacture of quaint inventions, of which the Victor Pirolo is perhaps not the least surprising. She and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his latest ideas. But she is not comfortable. An ABC boat does not take the air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up rocket-fashion like the ‘aeroplane’ of our ancestors, and finds her level at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the ABC Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of what used to be known as ‘war.’ Only a week before, while visiting a glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole, but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be used in earnest.
Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chartroom divan: ‘We’re tremendously grateful to ’em in Illinois. We’ve never had a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I’ve turned in a General Call, and I expect we’ll have at least two hundred keels aloft by evening.’
‘Well aloft?’ De Forest asked.
‘Of course, sir. Out of sight till they’re called for.’
Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h., and we were two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lanes.
‘Now,whereisthisIllinoisDistrictof yours?’saidDragomiroff. ‘One travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in North America!’
De Forest, whose business it is to know his own responsibilities, told us that it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on the road to nowhere in particular, was about an hour’s run from end to end, and, except in one corner, as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber – fifty-foot oak and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois), whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy. There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn might bring the old terror of crowds and blackmail back to the Planet. So news-sheets were not.
‘And that’s Illinois,’ De Forest concluded. ‘You see, in the Old Days, she was in the forefront of what they used to call “progress,” and Chicago—’
‘Chicago?’ said Takahira. ‘That’s the little place where there is Salati’s Statue of the Nigger in Flames? A fine bit of old work.’
‘When did you see it?’ asked De Forest quickly. ‘They only unveil it once a year.’
‘I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,’ said Takahira, with a shudder. ‘And they sang MacDonough’s Song too.’
‘Whew!’ De Forest whistled. ‘I did not know that! I wish you’d told me before. MacDonough’s Song may have had its uses when it was composed, but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave behind.’
‘It’s protective instinct, my dear fellows,’ said Pirolo, rolling a cigarette. ‘The Planet, she has had her dose of popular government. She suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has no – ah – use for crowds.’
Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light, ‘Certainly,’said the white-bearded Russian, ‘the Planet has taken all precautions against crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population to-day? Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think, but – but if next year’s census shows more than four hundred and fifty I myself will eat all the extra little babies. We have cut the birth-rate out – right out! For a long time we have said to Almighty God: “Thank You, Sir, but we do not much like Your game of life. So we will not play.”’
‘Anyhow,’ said Arnott defiantly, ‘men live a century apiece on the average nowadays.’
‘Oh, that is quite well! I am rich – you are rich – we are all rich and happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only I think Almighty God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of the Crowds and the Plague. Perhaps He will send us nerves. Eh, Pirolo?’
The Italian blinked into space. ‘Perhaps,’ said he, ‘he has sent them already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does not forget the Old Days; and – what can you do?’
‘For sure we can’t remake the world.’ De Forest glanced at the map flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. ‘We ought to be over our ground by nine tonight. There won’t be much sleep afterwards.’
On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me for dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours’ sleep ample for their little lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with less than eleven out of the twenty-four.
By ten o’clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless, except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single traffic-directing light – its leading beam pointing north – at Waukegan on our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of a house-light or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole wasone inky, apparently uninhabited waste of high forced woods. Only our illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county, as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls, urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General Communicator, brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her own privacy in the timber she grew for that purpose.
‘Oh, this is absurd!’ said De Forest. ‘We’re like an owl trying to work a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let’s land, Arnott, and get hold of someone.’
We brushed over a belt of forced woodland – fifteen-year-old maple sixty feet high – grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm, dark night towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry, smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.
‘Pest!’ cried Pirolo angrily. ‘We are ground-circuited. And it is my own system of ground-circuits, too! I know the feeling!’
‘Good-evening,’ said a girl’s voice from the verandah. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! We’ve locked up. Wait a minute.’
We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents round our knees were withdrawn.
The girl laughed and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and we could hear the snort
and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile away, behind the guardian woods.
‘Come in and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m only playing a plough. Dad’s gone to Chicago to— Ah! Then it was your call I heard just now.’
She had caught sight of Arnott’s Board uniform, leaped to the switch, and turned it full on.
We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards from the verandah.
‘We only want to know what’s the matter with Illinois,’ said De Forest placidly.
‘Then hadn’t you better go to Chicago and find out?’ she answered. ‘There’s nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.’
‘How can we go anywhere if you won’t loose us?’ De Forest went on while Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their dignity is touched.
‘Stop a minute – you don’t know how funny you look!’ She put her hands on her hips and laughed mercilessly.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered from the Victor Pirolo in the meadow.
‘Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!’ Arnott called. ‘Sort it out gently, please.’
We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the verandah roof, frightening a nest full of birds. The ground-circuit was open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.
‘How rude – how very rude of you!’ the maiden cried.
‘Sorry, but we haven’t time to look funny,’ said Arnott. ‘We’ve got to go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I’d go into the cellars for the next two hours, and take mother with me.’
Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the humour of the thing took and doubled him up with laughter at the foot of the gangway-ladder.
‘The Board hasn’t shown what you might call a fat spark on this occasion,’ said De Forest, wiping his eyes. ‘I hope I didn’t look as big a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on the earth is that? Dad coming home from Chicago?’
There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the timber, fuming and sparking furiously.
‘Jump!’ said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the none-too-wide door. ‘Never mind about shutting it. Up!’
The Victor Pirolo lifted like a bubbly and the vicious machine shot just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.
‘There’s a nice little spit-kitten for you!’ said Arnott, dusting his knees. ‘We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she plays a cultivator at us!’
‘And then we fly,’ said Dragomiroff. ‘If I were forty years more young I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!’
‘I,’ said Pirolo, ‘would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a dirty plough; a – how do you say? – agricultural implement!’
‘Oh, that is Illinois all over,’ said De Forest. ‘They don’t content themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now where’s your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against this wench.’
Arnott pointed to the black heavens.
‘Waiting on – up there,’ said he. ‘Shall I give them the whole installation, sir?”
‘Oh, I don’t think the young lady is quite worth all that,’said De Forest. ‘Get over Chicago, and perhaps we’ll see something.’
In a few minutes, we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.
‘That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there is Salati’s Statue in front of it,’ said Takahira. ‘But what on earth are they doing to the place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays? Drop a little, please.’
We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines – the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red before our astonished eyes.
‘It is the Old Market,’ said De Forest. ‘Well, there’s nothing to prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn’t interfere with traffic, that I can see.’
‘Hsh!’ said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. ‘Listen! They’re singing. Why on the earth are they singing?’
We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the edge of that glowing square.
At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and levellers. Then the words came up clearly – the words of the Forbidden Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips – poor Pat Macdonough’s Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague – every silly word of it loaded to sparking point with the Planet’s inherited memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago – innocent, contented little Chicago – was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few generations ago!
‘Once there was The People–Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!
(Then the stamp and pause):
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
Once there was The People–it shall never be again!’
The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the melting walls.
De Forest frowned.
‘I don’t like that,’ he said. ‘They’ve broken back to the Old Days! They’ll be killing somebody soon. I think we’d better divert ’em, Arnott.’
‘Ay, ay, sir!’ Arnott’s hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of the Victor Pirolo ring to the command: ‘Lamps! Both watches stand by! Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!’
‘Keep still!’ said Takahira to me. ‘Blinkers, please, quartermaster.’
‘It’s all right – all right!’ said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap. I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in absolute darkness.
‘To save the sight,’ he explained, and pushed me on to the chartroom divan. ‘You will see, in a minute.’
As he spoke, I became aware of a thin thread of almostintolerable light, let down from heaven at an immense distance – one vertical hairsbreadth of frozen lightning.
‘Those are our flanking ships,’ said Arnott at my elbow, ‘That one is over Galena. Look south – that other one’s over Keithburg. Vincennes is behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet’s in position, sir’ – this to De Forest. ‘As soon as you give the word.’
‘Ah, no! No!’ cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man tremble. ‘I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to be a little kind to them below! This is horrible – horrible!’
‘“When a Woman kills a Chicken,
Dynasties and Empires sicken,”’
Takahira quoted. ‘It is too late to be gentle now.’
‘Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!’ Dragomiroff began hysterically.
Pirolo must have put his arm round him.
‘Hush,’ he said, ‘I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.’
‘I’ll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,’said Arnott. ‘She don’t deserve it, but we’ll allow her a minute or two to take mamma to the cellar.’
In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard Macdonough’s Song from the city beneath us grow fainter, as we rose to position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as though the floor of Heaven had been riddled, and all the inconceivable blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.
‘You nee
dn’t count,’ said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing. ‘There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full power, please, for another fifteen seconds.’
The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.
‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?’ Dragomiroff cried, and fell across our knees.
‘Glass of water, please,’ said Takahira, to a helmeted shape that leaped forward. ‘He is a little faint.’
The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We could hear Dragomiroff s teeth on the glass edge.
Pirolo was comforting him.
‘All right, all ra-ight,’ he repeated.’ Come and lie down. Come below and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right. They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo’s leetle lights. You know me? I do not hurt people.’
‘Pardon!’ Dragomiroff moaned. ‘I have never seen Death. I have never seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is that already done?’
‘Oh, hush!’ said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.
‘Do we repeat, sir?’ Arnott asked De Forest.
‘Give ’em a minute’s break,’ De Forest replied. ‘They may need it.’
We waited a minute and then Macdonough’s Song, broken but defiant, rose from undefeated Chicago.
‘They seem fond of that tune,’ said De Forest. ‘I should let ’em have it, Arnott.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator keys.
No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the ruled foreshores of space.