"I can't see," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see. I'm dying."
"Hang on," Danton said. "Only fifty Oligarchs, understand, Van? Forty seven now. Maybe less if those seven I shot down in the pit didn't all recover. Maybe we can get some more of them, Van!"
"I'm dying," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see."
Danton tooled the car. As he approached doors in the long tubular halls, the doors opened automatically, closed again behind. There were turns, drops, risings, more doors, other halls.
He stopped the car. Lost, alone, somewhere. Only fifty of them—no, forty-seven now at most. They wouldn't have too large a structure here. Somewhere there would have to be a central power source. If he could find such a power unit, strike at the heart—
He shook Van Ness. He felt for the heart. It was still beating. Van Ness moaned, "I'm dying. If I could see—"
"Do you know what I'm saying, Van? Can you hear me?"
"Yes ... sure I can hear you."
"Listen to me. We're in the Oligarch's fortress. I don't know how big it is. But it seems to be one unified structure. There has to be a central power source here. You were an engineering expert. Where would it be? Van, listen. There are only a handful of Oligarchs here now. We stand a slim chance...."
"But I can't see—"
"I can see."
"Yes—a central power source. I remember the words to an old song, Captain. You know, soldiering used to be a great sport. There was one about a chocolate soldier with a uniform so pretty...."
"Van Ness!"
"Yes."
"Where would they build that central power room? Up? Down?"
"Down."
He started the car moving. Oddly curving and angling corridors bending with geometrical precision. He saw an elevator door and he pressed the button; the door opened and he drove the car into it. Down, fast, sickeningly fast.
"Bottom ... clear down," Van Ness mumbled. "Start from there. I can't see—"
Danton kept the elevator dropping and then it stopped. He hadn't stopped it.
He stepped to the side as the door slid open. He hit the entering Oligarch, hit him with a short hard blow in the solar plexus and when the man gasped and bent forward, Danton brought his knee up. Bone and cartilage crunched. The man slewed to one side, and Danton hit him again and the man smashed into the wall and slid down toward the floor.
"I can't see," Van Ness said. "But what I hear has a sweet sound."
Danton dragged the Oligarch up, held him against the wall. The man sagged and lifted his hands to protect his face. His lips were torn, his nose bleeding. He stared dazedly at Danton, his eyes filled with terror, shock.
"Wha—" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped into the scream.
"I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units."
The man shook his head, no.
Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them back again.
"Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts from your banks won't put back together again."
The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind.
The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment, though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been. "Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!"
"Yes...."
Danton told what he saw. He was Van Ness' eyes. The generators, huge oscilloscopes, vacuumtube voltimeters, electronic power-supply panels, rolls and skeins of hook-up wire, shielding of every color, size and shape, panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers, long solid surfaces of gleaming bakelite, color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances....
Van Ness told Danton what to do. Van Ness took a long time to say a few words, and after that he didn't seem to be able to say anything else. He didn't move either. Danton released the force of the flash-gun, left the gun in the position Van Ness had indicated, its beam burning deep into the heart of the complicated soul of the Oligarch fortress.
He would have taken Van Ness with him, but Van Ness wasn't interested anymore. He was dead. Danton left him. He would remember Van Ness alive as long as he was capable of remembering anything. Van Ness as clay he had already forgotten.
He ran toward the elevator. As it whirred upward, he felt the reverberation, the trembling, the beginnings of a low deadly murmuring. The elevator continued to rise smoothly, carrying Danton and the car, but Danton felt a giddy swaying like that of an earthquake.
A social system strictly of the top-down variety. But in the final analysis, the top wasn't the mind of Rhone or of Weisser. It was something above both of them, above the Oligarchs. Machines. And above the machines, generators and switches and volts and tubes.
The electronic interdependence was going insane within the fortress, like the intricate cellular structure of a mind within a skull.
In a hall somewhere in a catacomb of metal, Danton sat in the car, wondering which way to go, wondering if it would make any difference now, feeling the fortress above, below, all around him, breaking apart.
What about the Oligarch spaceships? Perhaps they were someplace else, away from here, and they would survive the destruction of the fortress. And maybe one or two or three Oligarchs would also survive. Even one ship, one Oligarch, returning to Earth, would be one too many.
He was looking at the far door as it slid open and a car sped through, skimming along the polished metal floor frantically, desperately. The occupant of the car, a woman, took no notice of Danton. Her face was damp and pale with fear as her car sped past. Her machines were forsaking her. Her efficiency, her gadgets and the tremendous power that had existed for so long at her fingertips, were disintegrating, and she appeared to be disintegrating with them.
She would be intent only on escape, of course, not realizing that without her machines, she was doomed. But she might find a temporary escape from the death around her, the metal walls of the gigantic coffin.
Van Ness was gone. And Keith—convinced that soldiering was an end in itself, rather than a means to an end—had found the inevitable end for a soldier.
Danton wondered about that. He knew one thing—that the test was yet to come for him. He was not sure yet that Keith had not been right....
He followed the woman through a door into a chamber. It was a nice room, Danton thought. A great deal of pleasure had drifted through this room, and in it, time had probably never meant anything. Perfumed incense. Music, drifting, still rising from somewhere, pneumatic couches—but underneath something was cracking open, veins and arteries of power choking, blocked off; but the power had to go somewhere; short-circuit, the madness of a great machine-mind.
The woman had opened a panel, and beyond her, Danton could see the Martian afternoon. He had never seen a Martian afternoon before. It was beautiful, he thought, though he was hardly in a position to study or appreciate it properly. Then he saw what she was doing—the woman was escaping out the panel. There must be some way she was planning to get safely to the ground outside. It seemed to be a long way down.
But she wasn't worried about that.
She jumped. She looked back at Danton, her face pale and twisted, then she jumped. Danton ran, looked out. He looked out just in time to see her body hit. It was too far down for anyone to go that way. Her body bounced a little.
Insane, Danton thought. They had each become such component parts of the bigger machine that very likely they were all going crazy now, right along with the machine. And the machine wasn't going to last much longer either, insane or otherwise. It was beginning to quiver, to shake and shudder, and its metal skin was beginning to groan and twist. Its metal joints were grinding together, its skein nerves wrenching and singing.
Danton looked around hurriedly. He saw the wires again, everything suspended by wires, shiny and strong. He gave a heavy table slab—legless, of course, a suspended disc of metal—he gave it a tremendous shove and it began to swing to and fro; it made a heavy pendulum, swinging wider and wider, and it began to crash into other suspended things, into chairs and into weird sculpture, crashing through structural images and distorted faces of metal. It made a sound like off-key bells bonging and clanging.
Wires finally snapped with a whine and Danton felt the hot sharpness as a strand cut across his arm, sinking in like the slash of a knife. He pushed the table slab to the wall, against the window. He managed to get several strands of the wire tied together by complicated knot designs. He yanked down an ornamental drape that seemed to have a swirling life of its own, made sheaths for his hands from finely-woven metallic-cloth, and looped the wire three times around the metal sheathing.
He slid down toward the ground. It was further down than it had seemed from above. The wind was high and cold and strong. He began to sway dangerously and the wind threatened to tear him from the wire.
He glanced upward. The structure of the Oligarchs was huge, a shining silver metal thing of coldness rising up out of bare rocks. It was built on the side of a cliff, very high, and very far below was a valley. Perhaps it was the valley in which he had landed ... no, that must have been far away from here. He saw no lake. But, of course, the valley itself stretched windingly away further than he could see.
He ran out of wire. He managed to lift his weight with one arm enough to unwrap the wire coils from the other. That gave him another three feet. He dropped. Pain came from a wrenched ankle and the shock of the weight on his bones. But he hit running and he kept on running.
For somehow, though he had killed her, she was alive.
Just before dropping he had seen her, running away from the Oligarch tower. Running along a steel walkway. A fine-mesh railing separated the walkway from a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet. It was Rhone. She was running fast, too. Very fast.
He ran hard. He didn't feel the pain in his ankle. He couldn't afford to feel anything now except urgency. The cold thin air burned.
She stopped and he stopped too, flattening against the hard rust-colored rock. She was pushing a lever or something; whatever it was it got results. A silver nose projected outward from the cliff, slanting slightly upward; it blossomed out as though someone were blowing a silver bubble from stone. Out and out. It stopped.
It was a spaceship, all right. Danton figured that the power shut-off had prevented her from reaching the ship from a subterranean route. Evidently rigged for such an emergency, the wall of the cliff could also summon the ship out into the open, prepare it for blasting off from a cradle cut down into the cliff like a giant cannon barrel.
When the outer door in the side of the ship opened, Rhone ran for it. Danton was right behind her. She heard him just as she went through and into the air-lock. She turned, her mouth opened, and then he struck her with his shoulder, carried her on through the inner air-lock door and into the tubular corridor leading forward into the control room.
He dragged her forward with him as the doors closed behind him. The controls were the same in principle as those of the ship he had brought from Earth. Once set, they were automatic. He strapped Rhone in the shock-seat at the side. He strapped himself into the chair before the control panel....
Seers, Secretary of Social Security, was a fat man with a serious round slate-gray face. He looked at Danton thoughtfully, waited. Outside the office of Sociology Section in New World Square, the sky was a soft and promising blue.
Finally Seers said, "Well, Danton, what happened then?"
Danton shrugged. "First I dropped enough atomic fire to finish destroying the Oligarch fortress completely, and to get any ships that might have been left inside the mountain. There's nothing there now but a big black crater. I don't think there will ever be any need to worry about the Oligarchs anymore. I landed the ship in the Pacific in as isolated a spot as I could find—midway between New Zealand and Cape Horn. Then I contacted you by short wave. And here I am and here you are. And I guess that's all there is."
"Why did you bring Rhone back?"
"I had no choice," Danton said. "I guess when I killed her and put her in the refrigeration bank, that saved her life. Some surgeon did a quick job on her." Danton leaned toward Seers. "If all of it, or any of it, really happened."
"What makes you think it didn't?"
"For one thing, I'm back here alive, an impossible mission accomplished. For another—I—well, this time Iwantto be reconditioned."
"Your experience has changed your outlook, Danton?"
"Considerably. I—want to be changed. I want to be someone else, anything else. I've seen things too horrible to remember anyway. I'd rather forget everything. It could all have been delusion, hallucination rigged up in your psyche labs. As Keith said—you boys are good at that sort of thing. If that's how it was—it was good therapy. There's a doubt in my mind, you see. Itmighthave happened, and just the bare possibility that it did happen is enough to make me gladly volunteer for reconditioning."
Seers nodded. "I'm very glad you're approaching it this way. It will make the processing easier to perform, and the new personality easier to maintain. We probably will never need your kind again, Danton. Now that the Oligarchs are gone, the last threat to our new system is gone with them. The chance of some other intelligent life-form being in the universe at all is remote, and the further chance that they would take aggressive action against Earth makes the whole thing something we can logically ignore."
"That's fine," Danton said.
"You've seen where the psychology of war would lead, inevitably. If you can justify killing human beings at all, the final result is bound to be, in some form or another, what you saw on Mars."
"If I actually saw it. If I was on Mars at all."
Seers signaled through the intercom. A door opened. Rhone stood there, a tablet in her hand, and a pencil. She sat down and crossed attractive legs. Very attractive legs, Danton thought.
"Miss Tannon, this is Richard Danton. Mr. Danton, my new secretary, Miss Tannon."
She nodded, turned her nose down once more, very business-like, into the tablet.
Danton thought, It's Rhone all right. A reconditioned Rhone. They must be good at their reconditioning to change an Oligarch mind into that of an efficient secretary. Danton said, "What about the others up there on Mars?"
"We'll take care of them, peacefully of course," Seers said. "We have plenty of time. We won't bring them back. We will set up our new system there."
Danton listened to Seers' dictation. "To Chief Psyche-adjustment Administrator. From Seers, Department of Social Security. Subject: Voluntary reconditioning of Richard Danton. To take place at once under the jurisdiction of...."
There was more. Danton didn't hear it ... and later they injected something into his veins and he sat there, feeling Richard Danton dying, for the last time, going away. Richard Danton, fading out, all around him bit by bit, cell by cell, dying, never to awaken again. And remembering what he had experienced on Mars, Danton thought: It's as good a reward as anyone could ask. Goodbye, Richard Danton. It was nice knowing you, but Goodbye....
His name was Burton. John R. Burton.
He was as happy as anyone could expect to be. His wife loved him and he loved his wife. Their children were very well adjusted, as was everyone of course in the New World System.
Burton worked ten hours a week in a coal mine, though the job was merely one demanding the overseeing of machines. The rest of the week was one of leisure devoted to gardening, hobbies, play, music. There was no more hate, no violence, no feelings of insecurity. It wasn't that everyone loved everyone else particularly. It was just that no one was afraid of the future anymore.
And Burton was no longer bothered by bad dreams either, and so he was what one might consider perfectly happy, perfectly adjusted.
The perfect happiness of one who does not remember.