At the indistinct line which only a native could recognize as marking the southern end of the village, Stirling halted and looked around. Some of the tracks in the area were twisted into the air like sculpted lines of agony; and the bomb holes were giving off a low moaning sound as air bled through them from the higher pressure zone inside the He’s shell field. Stirling was reminded of photographs taken in European cities at the end of World War II. He was cupping his hands around his mouth to call Johnny’s name when he saw Melissa. She was slumped tiredly against the patchwork wall of a large hut. Her face was whiter than he had ever seen it, and her hands were streaked with red. It dawned coldly on him that she had been watching his approach for some time, but had not bothered to signal her presence.
“Melissa!” He ran towards her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m alive,” she said dully. “Why have they stopped? Where are the planes?” Her eyes were unfocused, vacant with shock and exhaustion.
“There won’t be any more planes. All we have to do is get out of here in a hurry.”
“Get out?” Melissa raised one hand to her forehead, and he saw it was covered with blood. “Get out? I can’t leave.” There was a movement in the hut behind her, and his eyes suddenly picked out the horizontal figures of men, or women, lying in the dimness. Somebody began to groan; the sound came as regularly as breathing. He went to the door, looked in, and turned away quickly.
“Don’t go in there again, Melissa,” he said quietly. He took her arm and led her away from the hut. “You aren’t even entitled to accept that sort of responsibility. I’ll see that military medics are brought in as soon as possible.”
She looked up at him, smiled uneasily, and became heavy in his arms. Stirling lifted Melissa and carried her limp body back to the last place where he had seen other villagers.
“Get out of here,” he shouted, as he laid Melissa on the grass. “What are you waiting for?” There was no response, and he began to feel afraid that noon would come and find them all frozen in the same tableau. “I tell you the raids have been stopped until noon. You can all leave.”
“Give it up, Victor,” a reedy voice said from above. “You haven’t got the touch.”
Stirling looked up and saw Johnny standing on the upper surface of a storage tank. He had spoken without moving his lips—the boyhood convention for menace— and the muscles around his mouth were slack and heavy. The bulky tubularity of the rad-rifle was cradled in his arms with its tripod still attached. Slanting across his bared chest was the strap of a pack containing a spherical object; and—Stirling felt a pang of fear—on his feet were the ancient, crinkled, leather flying boots left behind by his father. Suddenly Stirling saw his own father against that fabled background of misty dream-fields: the familiar-alien face taut with anger, his eyes accusing.
“Go away, Victor,” Johnny squeaked. “You don’t belong here.”
I’m older than you, Stirling thought in a gust of inexplicable fury. I was first! I BELONG! He felt himself begin to run, heard his feet hammer on the thinly covered decking, and saw his limbs go hand-over-hand up the clustered feed pipes leading to the top of the tank. Halfway across the tank’s upper surface he saw the look of hard speculation in Johnny’s eyes, and his censor clamped down violently forcing him to slow to a walk. The understanding, which had been close at hand for a few seconds, receded, and left in its wake a sense of loss mingled with a vast relief.
“It’s been agreed that the raids will be suspended until noon, Johnny.” Stirling concentrated on keeping his voice under control. ‘That gives the people here plenty of time to get away.”
Johnny shook his head. “You’ll never understand. There are people who can’t live down there. They don’t want to leave.”
“Some of them do, and the rest would probably go if you told them.”
“That’s what Raddall would like—to split us up. If he can get the weaklings to leave of their own accord, he’ll switch over to gas; and then it’ll be all over.”
“But it’s all over right now. For God’s sake, Johnny, be reasonable. Raddall has no choice other than to bring you down, one way or another. How long do you think any country could tolerate what amounts to a petty dictatorship within its own borders?”
Johnny smiled indulgently. “Within its own borders? You know, Victor, you have accidentally come close to the point of the whole operation. I do believe that if you were given a week or two to sit down and think about it, you would get there by yourself.”
“This is …” Stirling began to speak impatiently, unthinkingly; then an idea was born. “You haven’t the engineering know-how Johnny.” He spoke urgently.
“Not personally,” Johnny said. “But the Council has it —and we’re all one.”
“But …” Stirling’s mind was swamped with the new concept. “Even if you did master the negative-gravity units, and introduce a horizontal component, how fast would the He move? Five knots? Ten? No matter which way you go, they’ll stay with you. It won’t …”
He stopped speaking. Johnny was pointing straight up into the sky. Meaningfully.
Chapter Eighteen
In a way, Stirling was almost grateful.
The idea was crazy, of course; but it was the kind of purposive craziness with which he could sympathize and almost understand—and it explained so much. Johnny’s continual discussions with other Council members, the uneasy awe he seemed to inspire in so many of the villagers, his apparent disregard for consequences—all these became understandable in the light of Johnny’s vision of the future. Stirling had no doubt the original idea had been his brother’s. In it he could hear echoes of Johnny’s own voice, the one he had had as a child, before a glass dagger ripped open his throat. The fair-haired, gap-toothed kid, who had leaned on the same window ledge as Stirling while they waited for a signal from Heaven, had been the author of this plan to turn the He into a fifteen-mile-long spaceship and fly it to … ?
“The Moon,” Johnny said.
“There’s no real need for us to put the lie down anywhere; but the Moon will provide gravity and, somehow, it helps to have a target to act as a fixed frame of reference. The Moon. I always think a good address is so important, don’t you?”
“Most good addresses have air and water laid on.”
“We have all we need—all that’s necessary is to make sure we don’t lose it. This can be done by boosting the lie’s shell field to maximum impermeability. It won’t be perfect, naturally; but it should retain air and moisture for twenty or thirty years … and that’s enough to be getting along with.”
“With those holes in the decking your air wouldn’t last twenty or thirty minutes in space.”
Johnny frowned momentarily. “You’ve got a point there, but that’s the sort of job the maintenance robots can handle. They aren’t doing anything on it yet because the work we’re doing in the power station has interrupted certain supplies. The hole where that aircraft went through is going to hold us back by a couple of days, though… .