“Johnny!” Stirling spoke huskily. “Don’t go near that panel.”
“If you’re going to burn me, you’d better do it now because I’m … there!”
Johnny leaped forward and laid his hands on the red-glowing handles. Stirling squeezed the trigger of the rifle, but nothing happened. For a second he thought the weapon had failed to function; then he realized the fault had been in his finger. It had refused to move. Johnny looked back over his shoulder, read Stirling’s eyes, and smiled triumphantly.
“As you said, Victor—we’re all going down together.” He again spoke without moving his lips, and Stirling suddenly appreciated that the action had a peculiar relevance to the situation. They were boys again, and terrible things were about to be said between them. Things which, to the savage, boyish mind, could not be said without all the outward manifestations of menace and hatred. The speaking without moving lips; the grotesque imitation of a World War II Gestapo officer; the ritual ripping open of the fly, which placed the other boy at a shameful disadvantage; the threatening with fists or weapons; Johnny wearing his father’s boots, the symbols of virility, of male aggression, of invading strength.
“I’ll say I was the real reason you came back, big brother.”
This has all happened before, Stirling thought, and he backed away in fear. Are you going to do it? His father’s voice was real, accusing. Or are you going to let me down again? You must realize . . .
“I don’t want to hear it,” Stirling shouted, still backing away.
“But you must,” Johnny said reasonably. “I can see you’ve blocked it all out again, Victor, and that’s not good. It’s important for you to know why you ran away from the fam-apt at the first opportunity, why you had to come here after me, why you had to take away everything I had, and why—even now—you couldn’t burn me to save your life.”
“I’m warning you, Johnny.”
“But there’s nothing for you to feel guilty about, Victor. You were only a kid when your father disappeared. You couldn’t have been expected to defend your mother’s bed; so there’s no need for you to feel anything at all when you look at me. The only connection between us is that my father took your mother to bed and … “
Stirling threw the rifle aside and dived for Johnny’s throat with clawing fingers; he caught the metal disc of the prosthetic and ripped it away from the flesh. Try to say it now! Johnny made a thick choking sound, and crimson bubbles appeared on the side of his throat. He thrust Stirling away with one hand, and with the other pulled all the circuit breakers. Stirling and his brother locked eyes for one frozen minute.
Then Heaven fell away beneath them.
The fall began slowly; the huge structure continued to support itself for a few seconds, until its output-smoothing reservoirs discharged the last of their stored energy into the power grid. Stirling turned and ran blindly from the power station; he found himself bounding across the surface in gigantic dream-leaps, making a nightmare escape where no escape was possible. His steps grew longer and longer as gravity appeared to vanish, and instinct told him he would part company with the soil beds forever unless he stopped moving. He arced headfirst into the uncaring wheat and held on, as if trying to steal some of its blithe immortality.
Full weightlessness arrived an instant later, and with it the now familiar sounds of Armageddon: groans so deep and vast that each separate vibration was a thunderclap in its own right; near-human shrieks; ear-splitting reports as structural members went beyond their limits of elasticity, and snapped clean, or were torn apart at their laser-welded seams. Some of the negative-gravity booster units patterned across the grid used their dregs of power more efficiently than others, thereby imposing even greater strains on the substructure; and the He broke up into immense flat sections. Stirling, looking up in fascinated horror, saw the ruler-straight horizons writhe and shiver themselves into misty fragments. The sky darkened above him as the segment to which he was clinging dipped one edge and slid in below others. Blurred backdrops of triangulated girders moved by in slow motion—rocking, spinning, receding—while the up-rushing wind roared and chanted in his ears.
Stirling screamed once, heard nothing, and found himself, incredibly, looking at the power station across a cloud-streaming gap. Although it was on a separate fragment, it appeared to remain fixed for a moment through a chance matching of velocities and directions. Johnny, his bare torso streaked with blood, appeared in the doorway. He gripped the doorframe with one hand and held something dark aloft with the other, waving it triumphantly in the air like a battle trophy. Then the power station canted ponderously and went into a slow rotation which carried it out of sight.
Stirling closed his eyes. Johnny had been holding his father’s ancient flying boots.
Eons later he felt the return of gravity starting gradually, and increasing to a fierce pressure which drove him down into the matted roots. Stirling opened his eyes to a scene of aerial majesty. The flat segment, to which he was clinging, had side-slipped until it was almost clear of the melee; and it was now slicing upwards. Beyond its lower edge, mile-long fragments of the He descended towards the ocean in a lazy, spinning, countermarching, colliding swarm. Many of them trailed swirling black streamers of earth and yellow motes, which were agricultural robots plummeting vertically through the swarm, while military drift-ships hovered outside it against a brilliant background of sunlit ocean, monolithic clouds, and the seriate towers along the coast.
As Stirling watched, his own segment completed its upward sweep and curved into the chaos again like a fighter plane returning to a dogfight. The falling-leaf motion carried it deep into the swarm and miraculously back out again—once, twice, three times—before it reached the ocean. When the grazing impact came, Stirling cut an untidy furrow through the wheat strip for over a hundred yards—squandering a fortune in kinetic energy in the process—and then he was treading the icy waters of the North Atlantic in clear sunlight.
The shadow of Heaven had been lifted.
Chapter Twenty
Sometimes, during the long night, Stirling would awaken with the knowledge that Melissa was not asleep. He would touch her forehead and find it as cold as dewed marble. On those occasions he always got up to brew coffee; and they would sit together in the darkness, drink the bitter liquid and talk about inconsequentials. In the morning, by tacit agreement, they never referred to what has passed during the hours of darkness. There would have been no point.
When you’re up, you’re up, the words of an old nursery rhyme drummed in Stirling’s mind. And when you’re down, you’re down.
The letter had been in Stirling’s pocket for three days. He took it out, for perhaps the hundredth time, and read it while Melissa fixed breakfast in the cooking alcove of their apartment. It was an official invitation for Mr. and Mrs. Victor Stirling to visit Administrator Mason Third in his private suite in Government Mile, Boston. The appointed time was three o’clock that afternoon.
Melissa, carrying plates, came into the room. “Victor!” Stirling put the letter away guiltily. He folded the bed up into the wall, pulled a table leaf out into the same space from another wall, and shook it to release the spring-loaded stools.
“Sorry, honey. I was dreaming again,” Stirling said. “But why does he want to see me? What’s behind it?”
“Perhaps he wants to say thanks.”
“Third would have made Administrator without my help. Anyway, it’s been so long, he must be cooking something up.”