“That,” said Chambers, “is just exactly what we want.”
He hung up the phone, fumbling awkwardly, then turned his head toward Monk.
“You heard?” he asked.
“Enough,” said Monk. “If it’s something I should forget—”
“It’s nothing you should forget,” Chambers told him. “You’re in this with me. Clear up to the hilt.”
“I’ve guessed some of it,” said Monk. “A lot of it, in fact. Found some of it from hints in the manuscripts. Some from what I’ve heard you say. I’ve been sitting here, trying to straighten it out, trying to make all the factors fall together. The Asteroid jewels, of course, are the encysted life form from the fifth planet and someone on Sanctuary is using them to do to us just what they planned to do to the Martian race—may have done to the Martian race.”
“The man out on Sanctuary,” said Chambers, “is Jan Nichols, but I doubt if he is using the asterites. More probably they are using him. Some years ago he headed an expedition into the Belt and disappeared. When he came to light again he was the head of Sanctuary. Somehow, while he was out there, he must have come under control of the asterites. Maybe someone played a violin, struck just the right note when he had an Asteroid jewel on his person. Or it might have happened some other way. There’s no way of knowing. The worst of it is that now he probably is convinced he is engaged in a great crusade. That’s the most dangerous thing about the asterites or the fifth-planet people or whatever you want to call them. Their propaganda is effective because once one is exposed to them he becomes one of them, in philosophy if not in fact and, after all, it’s the philosophy, the way of thinking that counts.”
Chambers shuddered, as if a cold wind might be sweeping through the room. “It’s a beautiful philosophy, Monk. At least, on the surface. God knows what it is underneath. I gained a glimpse of it, several times, through Hannibal. It was that strong, strong enough even to force its way through the veil of hatred that he held for them, powerful enough to reach through the vengeance in his mind. The vengeance that’s driving him out there now.”
“Vengeance?” asked Monk.
“He’s killing them,” said Chambers. “As you and I might kill vermin. He’s berserk, killing mad. I’ve tried to call him back. Tried to get him to hide so we can rescue him without the certainty of losing every man we sent out. For some reason, perhaps because he knows them better, hates them more, Hannibal can stand against them. But a man couldn’t, a man wouldn’t have a chance. Sanctuary is stirred up like a nest of maddened bees.”
Chambers’ face sagged. “But I can’t call him back. I can’t even reach him any more. I still see the things he sees. He still keeps contact with me, probably because he wants me to observe, through his mind, as long as possible. Hoping, perhaps, that the human race will take up where he left off—if he leaves off.”
“Hannibal is carrying out his destiny,” Monk said gravely. “I can patch it together now. Things I didn’t understand before. Things I found in the manuscripts. Hannibal slept through time for this very day.”
Chambers snapped his head erect, questioningly.
“That’s right,” said Monk. “The Martians, in their last days, perfected a fairly safe method of suspended animation. Perhaps they used principles they stole from the fifth planet, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. They placed a number of their people in suspended animation. How many, I don’t know. The number’s there, but I can’t read it. It might be a hundred or a thousand. Anyway, it was a lot of them. And they scattered them all over the Solar System. They took some to the Asteroids, some to Earth, some to the Jovian moons, some even out to Pluto. They left them everywhere. They left them in those different places and then the rest of the race went home to die. I wondered why they did it. The symbol was there to tell me, but I couldn’t read the symbol.”
Chambers nodded. “You have to fill in too many things, the translation leaves too many blanks.”
“I had a hunch,” Monk said, “it might have been an attempt to preserve the race. A wild throw, you know. A desperate people will try almost anything. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Hang on long enough and something’s bound to happen.
“But I was wrong. I can see that now. They did it for revenge. It ties in with the other things we know about the Martians. Perhaps the asterites had destroyed them. They had tried to destroy the asterites, were sure that they had failed. So they left behind a mop-up squad. The rest of them died, but the mop-up squad slept on against a distant day, playing the million-to-one chance. In Hannibal’s case, the long shot paid out. He’s doing some mopping-up out in Sanctuary now. It’s the last brave gesture of a race that’s dead these million years.”
“But there are others,” said Chambers. “There are—”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Monk warned. “Remember the odds. Hannibal carried out his destiny. Even that was more than could have been logically expected. The others—”
“I’m not doing any hoping,” Chambers declared. “Not on my own account, anyhow. There’s a job to do. We have to do it the best we can. We must guard against the human race going down before the philosophy of these other people. We must keep the human race—human.
“The asterites’ creed, on the surface, is beautiful, admittedly. What it is beneath the surface, of course, we cannot know. But admitting that it is all that it appears and nothing more, it is not a human creed. It’s not the old hell-for-leather creed that has taken man up the ladder, that will continue to take him up the ladder if he hangs onto it. It would wipe out all the harsher emotions and we need those harsher emotions to keep climbing. We can’t lie in the sun, we can’t stand still, we can’t, not yet, even take the time to stand off and admire the things that we have done.
“Peace, the deeper concept of peace, is not for the human race, never was meant for the human race. Conflict is our meat. The desire to beat the other fellow to it, the hankering for glorification, the tendency to heave out one’s chest and say, ‘I’m the guy that done it,’ the satisfaction of tackling a hard job and doing it, even looking for a hard job just for the hell of doing it.”
A springtime breeze blew softly through the window. A bird sang and a hushed clock ticked.
There were faces in the blackness that loomed before the speeding spaceship. Faces that swirled in the blackness and shouted. All sorts of faces. Old men and babies. Well-dressed man-about-town and tramp in tattered rags. Women, too. Women with flying hair and tear-streaked cheeks. All shouting, hooked hands raised in anger.
Faces that protested. Faces that pleaded. Faces that damned and called down curses.
Harrison Kemp passed a hand slowly across his eyes and when he took it away the faces were gone. Only space leered back at him.
But he couldn’t shake from his mind the things those mouths had said, the words the tongues had shaped.
“What have you done? You have taken Sanctuary from us!”
Sanctuary! Something the race had leaned upon, had counted on, the assurance of a cure, a refuge from the mental mania that ranged up and down the worlds.
Something that was almost God. Something that was the people’s friend—a steadying hand in the darkness. It was something that was there, always would be there, a shining light in a troubled world, a comforter, something that would never change, something one could tie to.
And now?
Kemp shuddered at the thought.
One word and he could bring all that structure tumbling down about their ears. With one blow he could take away their faith and their assurance. With one breath he could blow Sanctuary into a flimsy house of cards.