His voice stopped. The figure in the screen was not. his father; realizing that, he saw that the tower room was in wreckage, papers spilled from the desk, windows and casements shattered. Then he saw who it was: one of the garden slobs, a big buck named Roy -standing there, dull-eyed, with a bloody butcher knife in his hand.
The mob flowed on, endlessly. Some of its members were still ferociously active; some had been overtaken by fatigue and were shuffling along, blank-faced, somnambulistic; but the human river never stopped. There was now no place where the sated ex-slaves might have paused to sit down and look at what they had won. Every chair and table had been broken, windows smashed, small objects spilled and trampled underfoot; paneling had been ripped away from walls, even the flooring pried up; Eagles had been changed, in fourteen hours, from a magnificent palace-city to a honeycomb of gray, debris-choked cells. A fire was burning unchecked now in the North Colonnades, sending up a thick dark pillar of smoke to be whipped away by the winds into the upper air. Outer walls had been battered down, portions of roofs were gone, and the cold air howled through all the corridors. Some areas were still blazing with light from high-placed fixtures; others, where the wiring had been damaged, were pitch dark or illuminated only by the weak bluish light of morning.
Passing continually from light to darkness, to half-light, the people looked at each other out of stunned wooden faces, jaws slack, eyes filmed. They went on moving because there was nothing else left for them to do; and because they felt that if they should stop, it would somehow be terrible.
The explosions continued at long intervals. The roof of the Rose Court came down, burying hundreds; the Long Corridor was blasted into rubble. There was a puff of smoke against one flank of the Tower; scales of gold glittered briefly, each a hand-worked panel nine feet square, but so small in the distance that they looked like pollen, drifting and gleaming, then gone.
Dick was watching from a balcony overlooking Marson Court, now open to the sky. An explosion had torn off the whole roof, exposing the rubble-strewn court with its balconies, stairways and descending levels, all silent and mysterious, like something just dug up by archaeologists. The cold wind whipped by overhead with a shriek, fingering the balcony as it went; Dick stood gripping the rail, buffeted and numb. He had been wandering without thought or feeling for hours, ever since the call to Buckhill. Now, from this height, he could see the roofs of Eagles spread out around him. Many other rooms were gaping open to the sky, like rotten teeth, and in them he could see other figures standing, staring up as the dawn brightened.
Down below, the roofs fell away in dizzy leaps. The mountain swooped down below them, blue-shadowed, with the broken line of the funicular like a hasty chalkline in the darkness. The shadow pooled deep at the bottom, but Dick could just begin to make out the blocky shapes of the airport buildings, and the wrecked planes on the field.
Another puff of white caught his eye, and as he turned to look, the sound came muffled after it, a swallowed roar in the wind. More scales of gold drifted away from the side of the Tower, and the whole tall structure appeared to lurch. Faintly, on the wind, came a grinding protest. In the dawn, against the silken blue of the sky, the Tower was more beautiful than he had ever seen it. It rose now like a golden tree, limbless and eaten hollow, shining in the naked beauty of its wounds, with its mighty buttresses, like roots, gripping the mountain.
Another white puff bulged out from the side of the Tower. It trembled visibly, like a tree at the axe stroke; then he saw it lean.
The enormous shaft of the Tower leaned, very slowly, and went on leaning, with incredible nightmare slowness, forever and ever, growing larger against the bright sky and yet still leaning, while distant seismic ripping and crackling sounds came on the wind; and still it was leaning nearer, so that he could see the scaly pattern of gold panels in its framework, and the dull light glinting off the pinnacle as it went over, now faster and faster, while panic held him in a tingling, breathless waiting, too shocked to shout, and still faster, resistlessly, like all heaven falling to smash the earth, larger and larger like a moon descending, and then it flashed down, with fountains of gray rubble flying at its torn-up roots, and somehow failed to destroy him; and looking down he saw it dissolve into golden chaos while the lazy fragments of roofs came spiraling up into the air around it: then the mountain shook under him, once, twice and again.
In the long, unreal silence, the orange-gray cloud of dust slowly spread and trailed away in long, diminishing streamers into the air. The open places among Eagles' roofs began to blacken with figures crowding up, standing to stare. There were no more explosions. Underfoot, Eagles seemed to breathe more slowly; the sense of frantic movement was gone. People were coming up wearily, singly, to stand in the open and look around them in wonder.
Over the back of the world the sunrise was spreading its wings of majesty, gold billowing into scarlet, pierced and purpled. Flecks of yellowish cirrus rode infinitely high in the pure dome of air; the pale light was slowly spreading, bringing depth and roundness to the flat earth.
21
Going down from the courtyard into the mass of corridors, he saw the Frankies moving again purposefully through the apathetic crowds, and realized that all through the night and morning he had riot once recognized the familiar face. It was as if the Frankies had been submerged in the mob mind, just as he had been himself; and only now, when individual faces were being worn again, could they be told from anyone else.
At the corner where the smaller corridor entered North Passage, two Frankies were setting down heavy bundles of rifles. Each had a .375 Winchester slung over his shoulder, the same make and caliber as the rifles they were now unwrapping, a clatter on the floor. As Dick paused to watch, they began stopping passersby, shoving a rifle at each, saying something, pushing him away. Moving nearer, Dick found himself clutched, given a rifle, pushed off; the Frankie saying hoarsely meanwhile, in a mechanical monotone, "Get to a roof or a window. Make it quick." There were distant shouts in other corridors; some of those with rifles were drifting off, others following more slowly. The Frankies handed out the last of their weapons, pushed a laggard or two again and repeated the order, then went away. Slowly, trying to shake some alertness into himself, Dick went back the way he had come.
The Frankies were organizing a defense: then Eagles must be under attack, and from the air. Eagles had always been considered impregnable from the air, but he realized now, with senses sharpening a little, that with the citadel in ruins, the defenses at the bottom of the mountain shattered and unmanned, it was a different thing.
The giant on the mountain had been crippled and mutilated; now the harpies would come.
Climbing again into the open courtyard, he saw them: slender, tilt-winged shapes, bobbing and swooping in the violent up-currents. Each one was trailing a fierce tail of fire; he could make out the tiny bubble, and the pilot's head. They were two-man aircraft of a type he had never seen, modified copters with a makeshift rocket assembly at the tail. The rockets gave them enough power to maneuver, in the winds at the mountaintop; even so, they were swinging wildly in the treacherous updrafts, and Dick saw one pinwheel against the side of the mountain, exploding into a bright flare that drifted downward, a spark, diminishing. Each one must have a Gismo in it, he realized dazedly, to make it possible for a plane of that size to use sustained rocket power: in ordinary times, no one would have dared to try such a thing, not even the Boss; it must have been done on the spur of the moment ...