A Mile Beyond the Moon Part 11

But she was looking at him with bright frightened mouse's eyes and slipped on down the line when he paused for breath, putting out the parchment palm to others but not ceasing towatch him.

Coins tapped the tambour. "G.o.d bless you. G.o.d bless you. G.o.d bless you."

The raving-maniacal ghost of G. Was.h.i.+ngton Hill descended then into a girdled sibyl; she screamed from the screen: "It's. .h.i.t Pa-rade!"

"I like them production numbers."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh."

"I like them production numbers. Lotsa pretty girls, pretty clothes, something to take your mind off your troubles."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don't just sing, mind you, she plays the saxophone.

Talent."

"I like them production numbers. They show you just what the song is all about. Like last week they did s.a.d.i.s.t Calypso with this mad scientist cutting up the girls, and then Pigalle comes in and whips him to death at the last verse, you see just what the song's all about, something to take your mind off your troubles."

"I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don't just sing, mind you, she plays the saxophone and cracks a blacksnake whip, like last week hi s.a.d.i.s.t Calypso-"

"Yeah. Something to take your mind off your troubles."

Irritably he felt in his pocket for the Seal and moved, stumbling a little, to one of the tables against the knotty pine wall. His head slipped forward on the polished wood and he sank into the sea of myth.

Galardo came to him in his dream and spoke under a storm-green sky: "Take your mind off your troubles, Edward. It was stolen like the first penny, like the quiz answers, like the pity for your bereave-ment." His hand, a tambourine, was out.

"Never shall I yield," he declaimed to the miserable wretch. "By the honneur of a Gascon, I stole it fair and square; 'tis mine, knave! En garde!"

Galardo quailed and ran, melting into the sky, the altar, the tam-bourine.

A ham-hand manhandled him. "Light-up time," said Sam. "I let you sleep because you got it here, but I got to close up now."

"Sam," he says uncertainly.

"One for the road, mister. On the house, t/p-sy-daisy!" meaty hooks under his armpits heaving him to the bar.

The lights are out behind the bar, the jolly neons, glittering off how many gems of amber rye and the tan crystals of beer? A meager bulb above the register is the oasis in the desert of inky night.

"Sam," groggily, "you don't understand. I mean I never explained it-"

"Drink up, mister," a pale free drink, soda bubbles lightly tinged with tawny rye. A small sip to gain time.

"Sam, there are some people after me-"

"You'll feel better in the morning, mister. Drink up, I got to close up, hurry up."

"These people, Sam [it's cold in here and scary as a noise in the attic; the bottles stand accusingly, the chrome globes that top them eye you] these people, they've got a thing, The Century of-"

"Sure, mister, I let you sleep because you got it here, but we close up now, drink up your drink."

"Sam, let me go home with you, will you? It isn't anything like that, don't misunderstand, I just can't be alone. These people-look, I've got money-"

He spreads out what he dug from Ms pocket.

"Sure, mister, you got lots of money, two dollars and thirty-eight cents. Now you take your money and get out of the store because I got to lock up and clean out the register-"

"Listen, bartender, I'm not drunk, maybe I don't have much money on me but I'm an important man! Important! They couldn't run Big Maggie at Brookhaven without me, I may not have a degree but what I get from these people if you'll only let me stay here-"

The bartender takes the pale one on the house you only sipped and dumps it in the sink;his hands are iron on you and you float while he chants: "Decent man. Decent place. Hold their liquor. Got it here. Try be nice. Drunken b.u.m. Don't-come-back."

The crash of your coccyx on the concrete and the slam of the door are one.

Run!

Down the black street stumbling over cans, cats, orts, to the pool of light in the night, safe corner where a standard sprouts and sprays radiance.

The tall black figure that steps between is Galardo.

The short one has a tambourine.

"Take it!" He thrust out the Seal on his shaking palm. "If you won't tell me anything, you won't. Take it and go away!"

Galardo inspects it and sadly says: "Thiss appearss to be a blank wash-er."

"Mistake," he s...o...b..rs. "Minute." He claws in his pockets, rip-ping. "Here! Here!"

The la.s.sie squeaks: "The wheel of a toy truck. It will not do at all, sir." Her glittereyes.

"Then this! This is it! This must be it!"

Their heads shake slowly. Unable to look his fingers feel the rim and rolled threading of the jar cap.

They nod together, sad and glitter-eyed, and The Century of Flame begins.

The Only Thing We Learn The professor, though he did not know the actor's phrase for it, was counting the house-peering through a spyhole in the door through which he would in a moment appear before the cla.s.s. He was pleased with what he saw. Tier after tier of young people, ready with notebooks and styli, chattering tentatively, glancing at the door against which his nose was flattened, waiting for the pleasant inter-lude known as "Archaeo-Literature 203" to begin.

The professor stepped back, smoothed his tunic, crooked four books on his left elbow, and made his entrance. Four swift strides brought him to the lectern and, for the thousandth-odd time, he impa.s.sively swept the lecture hall with his gaze. Then he gave a wry little smile. Inside, for the thousandth-odd time, he was nagged by the irritable little thought that the lectern really ought to be a foot or so higher.

The irritation did not show. He was out to win the audience, and he did. A dead silence, the supreme tribute, gratified him. Imper-ceptibly, the lights of the lecture hall began to dim and the light on the lectern to brighten.

He spoke.

"Young gentlemen of the Empire, I ought to warn you that this and the succeeding lectures will be most subversive."

There was a little rustle of incomprehension from the audience- but by then the lectern light was strong enough to show the twinkling smile about his eyes that belied his stern mouth, and agreeable chuckles sounded in the gathering darkness of the tiered seats. Glow lights grew bright gradually at the students' tables, and they adjusted their notebooks in the narrow ribbons of illumination. He waited for the small commotion to subside. - "Subversive-" He gave them a link to cling to. "Subversive be-cause I shall make every effort to tell both sides of our ancient begin-nings with every resource of archaeology and with every clue my dili-gence has discovered in our epic literature.

"There were two sides, you know-difficult though it may be to be-lieve that if we judge by the Old Epic alone-such epics as the n.o.ble and tempestuous Chant oj Remd, theremaining fragments of Kratt's Voyage, or the gory and rather out-of-date Battle For the Ten Suns." He paused while styli scribbled across the notebook pages.

"The Middle Epic is marked, however, by what I might call the rediscovered ethos."

From his voice, every student knew that that phrase, surer than death and taxes, would appear on an examination paper. The styli scribbled. "By this I mean an awakening of fellow-feeling with the Home Suns People, which had once been filial loyalty to them when our ancestors were few and pioneers, but which turned into contempt when their numbers grew.

"The Middle Epic writers did not despise the Home Suns People, as did the bards of the Old Epic. Perhaps this was because they did not have to-since then: long war against the Home Suns was drawing to a victorious close.

"Of the New Epic I shall have little to say. It was a literary fad, a pose, and a silly one.

Written within historic times, the some two score pseudo-epics now moulder hi their cylinders, where they belong. Our ripening civilization could not with integrity work in the epic form, and the artistic failures produced so indicate. Our genius turned to the lyric and to the unabashedly romantic novel.

"So much, for the moment, of literature. What contribution, you must wonder, have archaeological studies to make in an investigation of the wars from which our ancestry emerged?

"Archaeology offers-one-a check in historical matters in the epics-confirming or denying. Two-it provides evidence glossed over hi the epics-for artistic or patriotic reasons. Three-it provides evi-dence which has been lost, owing to the fragmentary nature of some of the early epics."

All this he fired at them crisply, enjoying himself. Let them not think him a dreamy litterateur, or, worse, a flat precisionist, but let them be always a little off-balance before him, never knowing what came next, and often wondering, in cla.s.s and out. The styli paused after heading Three.

"We shall examine first, by our archaeo-literary technique, the sec-ond book of the Chant of Remd. As the selected youth of the Empire, you know much about it, of course-much that is false, some that is true, and a great deal that is irrelevant. You know that Book One hurls us into the middle of things, aboard s.h.i.+p with Algan and his great captain, Remd, on their way from the triumph over a Home Suns stronghold, the planet Telse. We watch Remd on his diver-sionary action that splits the Ten Suns Fleet into two halves. But be-fore we see the destruction of those halves by the Horde of Algan, we are told in Book Two of the battle for Telse."

He opened one of his books on the lectern, swept the amphitheater again, and read sonorously.

"Then battle broke And high the blinding blast Sight-searing leaped While folk in fear below Cowered in caverns From the wrath of Remd- "Or, in less sumptuous language, one fission bomb-or a stick of time-on-target bombs-was dropped. An unprepared and disor-ganized populace did not take the standard measure of dispersing, but huddled foolishly to await Algan's gunfighters and the death they brought.

"One of the things you believe because you have seen them hi notes to elementary-school editions of Remd is that Telse was the fourth planet of the star, Sol.

Archaeology denies it by establis.h.i.+ng that the fourth planet-actually called Ma.r.s.e, by the way-was in those days weather-roofed at least, and possibly atmosphere-roofed as well.

As potential warriors, you know that one does not waste fissionable material on a roof, and there is no mention of chemical explosives being used to crack the roof. Ma.r.s.e, therefore,was not the locale of Remd, Book Two.

"Which planet was? The answer to that has been established by X-radar, differential decay a.n.a.lyses, video-coring, and every other re-source "of those scientists still quaintly called 'diggers.' We know and can prove that Telse was the third planet of Sol. So much for the opening of the attack. Let us jump to Canto Three, the Storming of the Dynastic Palace.

"Imperial purple wore they Fresh from the feast Grossly gorged They sought to slay- "And so on. Now, as I warned you, Remd is of the Old Epic, and makes no pretense at fairness. The unorganized huddling of Telse's population was read as cowardice instead of poor A.R.P. The same is true of the Third Canto. Video-cores show on the site of the palace a hecatomb of dead in once-purple livery, but also shows impartially that they were not particularly gorged and that digestion of their last meals had been well advanced. They didn't give such a bad account-ing of themselves, either. I hesitate to guess, but perhaps they ac-counted for one of our ancestors apiece and were simply outnum-bered. The study is not complete.

"That much we know." The professor saw they were tiring of the terse scientist and s.h.i.+fted gears. "If but the veil of time were rent that shrouds the years between us and the Home Suns People, how much more would we learn? Would we despise the Home Suns People as our frontiersman ancestors did, or would we cry: 'This is our spiritual home-this world of rank and order, this world of formal verse and exquisitely patterned arts'?"

If the veil of time were rent-?

We can try to rend it...

Wing Commander Arris heard the clear jangle of the radar net alarm as he was dreaming about a fish. Struggling out of his too-deep, too-soft bed, he stepped into a purple singlet, buckled on his Sam Browne belt with its bolstered .45 automatic, and tried to read the radar screen. Whatever had set it off was either too small or too dis-tant to register on the five-inch C.R.T.

He rang for his aide, and checked his appearance in a wall mirror while waiting. His s.p.a.ce tan was beginning to fade, he saw, and made a mental note to get it renewed at the parlor. He stepped into the cor-ridor as Evan, his aide, trotted up-younger, browner, thinner, but the same officer type that made the Service what it was, Arris thought with satisfaction.

Evan gave him a bone-cracking salute, which he returned. They set off for the elevator that whisked them down to a large, chilly,' dark underground room where faces were greenly lit by radar screens and the lights of plotting tables. Somebody yelled "Attention!" and the tecks snapped. He gave them "At ease" and took the brisk salute of the senior teck, who reported to him hi flat, machine-gun delivery: "Object-becoming-visible-on-primary-screen-sir."

He studied the sixty-inch disk for several seconds before he spot-ted the intercepted particle. It was coming hi fast from zenith, grow-ing while he watched.

"a.s.suming it's now traveling at maximum, how long will it be be-fore it's within striking range?" he asked the teck.

"Seven hours, sir."

"The interceptors at Idlewild alerted?"

"Yessir."

Arris turned on a phone that connected with Interception. The boy at Interception knew the face that appeared on its screen, and was al-ready capped with a crash helmet.

"Go ahead and take him, Efrid," said the wing commander.

"Yessir!" and a punctilious salute, the boy's pleasure plain at being known by name and a great deal more at being on the way to a fight that might be first-cla.s.s.Arris cut him off before the boy could detect a smile that was forming on his face. He turned from the pale lunar glow of the sixty-incher to enjoy it. Those kids-when every meteor was an invading dreadnaught, when every ragged scouting s.h.i.+p from the rebels was an armada!

He watched Efrid's squadron soar off on the screen and then he re-treated to a darker corner. This was his post until the meteor or scout or whatever it was got taken care of. Evan joined him, and they silently studied the smooth, disciplined functioning of the plot room, Arris with satisfaction and Evan doubtless with the same. The aide broke silence, asking: "Do you suppose it's a Frontier s.h.i.+p, sir?" He caught the wing commander's look and hastily corrected himself: "I mean rebel s.h.i.+p, sir, of cQurse."

"Then you should have said so. Is that what the junior officers generally call those scoundrels?"

Evan conscientiously cast his mind back over the Tast few junior messes and reported unhappily: "I'm afraid we do, sir. We seem to have got into the habit."

"I shall write a memorandum about it. How do you account for that very peculiar habit?"

"Well, sir, they do have something like a fleet, and they did take over the Regulus Cl.u.s.ter, didn't they?"

What had got into this incredible fellow, Arris wondered in amaze-ment. Why, the thing was self-evident! They had a few s.h.i.+ps-ac-counts differed as to how many-and they had, doubtless by raw sedi-tion, taken over some systems temporarily.

He turned from his aide, who sensibly became interested in a screen and left with a murmured excuse to study it very closely.

The brigands had certainly knocked together some ramshackle league or other, but-The wing commander wondered briefly if it could last, shut the horrid thought from his head, and set himself to composing mentally a stiff memorandum that would be posted in the junior officer's mess and put an end to this absurd talk.

His eyes wandered to the sixty-incher, where he saw the inter-ceptor squadron climbing nicely toward the particle-which, he no-ticed, had become three particles. A low crooning distracted him. Was one of the tecks singing at work? It couldn't be!

It wasn't. An unsteady shape wandered up in the darkness, murmuring a song and exhaling alcohol. He recognized the Chief Ar-chivist, Glen.

"This is Service country, mister," he told Glen.

"Hullo, Arris," the round little civilian said, peering at him. "I come down here regularly-regularly against regulations-to wear off my regular irregularities with the wine bottle. That's all right, isn't it?"

He was drunk and argumentative. Arris felt hemmed in. Glen couldn't be talked into leaving without loss of dignity to the wing commander, and he couldn't be chucked out because he was writing a biography of the chamberlain and could, for the time being, have any head in the palace for the asking. Arris sat down unhappily, and Glen plumped down beside him.

The little man asked him.

"Is that a fleet from the Frontier League?" He pointed to the big screen. Arris didn't look at his face, but felt that Glen was grinning maliciously.

"I know of no organization called the Frontier League," Arris said. "If you are referring to the brigands who have recently been op-erating in Galactic East, you could at least call them by their proper names." Really, he thought-civilians!

"So sorry. But the brigands should have the Regulus Cl.u.s.ter by now, shouldn't they?" he asked, insinuatingly.

This was serious-a grave breach of security. Arris turned to the little man.

"Mister, I have no authority to command you," he said mea-suredly. "Furthermore, I understand you are enjoying a temporary eminence in the non-Service world which would make it very difficult for me to-ah-tangle with you. I shall therefore refer only to your al-truism. How did you find out about the Regulus Cl.u.s.ter?""Eloquent!" murmured the little man, smiling happily. "I got it from Rome."

Arris searched his memory. "You mean Squadron Commander Romo broke security? I can't believe it!" - "No, commander. I mean Rome-a place-a time-a civilization. I got it also from Babylon, a.s.syria, the Mogul Raj-every one of them. You don't understand me, of course."

"I understand that you're trifling with Service security and that you're a fat little, malevolent, worthless drone and scribbler!"