Stirling bulled his way through the tide of people to a backwater in the entrance of a store and scanned the main story. It was written hi a luridly factual style for the most part, and the phrase “this reporter” occurred in passages expressing opinions. Nowhere was it actually stated that Stirling had written the story; yet, as far as the man in the street was concerned, this was an eyewitness account of life on the He. Stirling went through it, picking out echoes of descriptions he had given Selig earlier in the day. When he came to a paragraph telling how the villagers kept warm by burning tons of yellow grain, he screwed the paper up in a ball and began looking for a telephone. In the booth, he dialed the Record’s editorial number and got through to the nightman.
“Is McLeod there?” Stirling demanded.
“Not tonight. Who wants him?”
“When will he be back?”
“Eight-thirty in the morning. Who wants to know?”
Stirling dropped the receiver and walked back the way he had come. The reckoning with McLeod—and Selig, if he could be reached—would have to wait till morning. He forced himself to admit that the nightlong cooling off period was a good idea, because in his present mood he would have been capable of using one man as a club with which to beat the other to death. When he finally lay down in the coffin-like bedroom, he had to wait a long time before sleep came drifting down like black snow.
In the morning, while he was eating breakfast, came the news that Administrator Raddall had ordered complete evacuation of He 23.
Chapter Sixteen
No shots were fired until the second day.
In view of the fact that the group on the He had either destroyed or merely quit using the communications set, Administrator Raddall’s orders were transmitted to them by two United Air Force machines which flew the length of the eastern margin dropping leaflets. The instructions were that they were to assemble in an orderly formation and walk along the southern edge of the lie, keep clear of the power station, and make their way to the elevator head where they would be shipped down to the island. A time limit of twenty-four hours had been set for the move to begin; and when it was ignored two more U.A.F. machines—strike/reconnaissance craft this time—howled along the margin on another leaflet raid.
On their second pass, the amethyst needle of a rad-rifle flicked up from the village and separated the starboard wingtip of the lead aircraft from the rest of its airframe. The plane, with no height in which to maneuver, followed its fatal asymmetry into a banking dive, which intersected the level of the soil beds about a mile west of the margin. Its wing and empennage were wiped off as the heavy fuselage tore through the He’s structure and fell, tumbling end over end, into the receptive waters of the Atlantic. The pilot died somewhere between Heaven and Earth.
In the second aircraft was an impulsive young man who, only an hour earlier, had been playing cards with his dead companion. He stood his aircraft on its tail; pulled it back across the hard blue sky in an immense, sun-glinting loop; and, during the vertical dive, unleashed a swarm of external stores at the spot where he imagined the village to be. As it happened, his guess was fairly accurate; and the only thing which saved the villagers from annihilation was the fact that the bombs were fitted with dibber fuses intended to let them penetrate at least ten feet into concrete before they exploded. The salvo splatted right through the lie in a tight formation and layered the sky with black blossoms several hundred feet further down. By that time the second pilot had calmed down sufficiently to listen to the orders being screamed at him, and he rolled away towards his mother carrier.
The long ribbons of winter wheat were still undulating gently as the He’s structure absorbed the impact of the punch delivered by the first aircraft.
Stirling heard the news with a bleak sense of dismay. He guessed the rad-rifle marksman who triggered off the violence had been Dix; but he could not be sure. Johnny had traveled far enough along his own lonely road to be capable of such an action by himself. In any case, events had been channeled into a new and deadly direction, one in which the innocent were bound to suffer with the guilty. The innocent were personified in his mind as a dark whiplash of a girl with black hair which smelled like the night wind.
Stirling did not go into the Record’s office for his showdown with Selig and McLeod. It was, he realized, far too late. He spent the day at his mother’s television set, leaving it only to brew strong coffee between newscasts—each long-focus shot of the He increasing his feeling of suffocation and helplessness. Stirling was vaguely aware that his own life had, at some point, been diverted into a strange new direction. Six months on the He had effectively de-conditioned him as regards life in the Compression; yet there was nowhere else to go. Mankind, in one way or another, had used up all the living space allotted to it on its home planet; and the Solar System as a whole was not a residential neighborhood.
In the afternoon came the news that a platoon of anti-grav troopers had tried a sneak raid on the He’s power station. The garrison of villagers in the station had machine-gunned six of them before their feet touched the soil, and the others had crawled most of the way back to the elevator head. Army spokesmen were quick to point out that it was impossible to use normal tactics against the squatters because of the risk of damaging the power plant and bringing the He down into the sea. This news inflamed public opinion to the point where crowds began to gather outside Government Mile in Boston. Another report said that the controversial senator, Mason Third, had flown north, ostensibly on private business, but was expected to organize demonstrations outside the monolithic administrative center.
Flash point was finally reached when a bubblecraft rented by an English newspaper got through the drift-ships and flitted across the He’s eastern wall. It crashed a few seconds later, possibly through inexpert piloting; but as far as the man in the street was concerned, the squatters had begun murdering civilians. Raddall had no choice other than to give the army chiefs free rein to clear the He in any way they could.
When it was announced that strike aircraft had begun patrolling the margin and hosing lead at anything which moved, Stirling went to the phone. He spent an hour trying to reach Raddall; he grimly penetrated secretarial screens until, at the highest level, he was told bluntly that the Administrator would not speak to him.
“For Christ’s sake!” Stirling shouted. “There are women and children up there. Raddall has to work this thing out some other way.”
“Mr. Stirling,” the impersonal voice said. “You, of all people, should know that this situation was forced on the Administrator.”
“I didn’t write that story,” Stirling protested.
“Does it matter? Surely this affair hinges not on the story’s authorship, but on its readership. In any case, Mr. Stirling, press publicity was only a very minor contributory factor in the Administrator’s decision. My sincere advice to you is not to overestimate your responsibility.”
Stirling drew an unsteady breath. “Take your sincere advice and …” The phone clicked and went dead.
He set it down and tried to relax; but, for the first time in his life, he was involved. Things had been very much more comfortable on the sidelines where one stared down at the marble faces of John and Jane Doe and made detached philosophical comments. But he had stepped into a game in which children wept in the heavy silence which follows machine-gun fire and men walked ropes above piled-up thunderheads. And he had breathed the night wind in black hair… .