The Old Man of the Stars (12 page)

The organization was gradually built up. Patience was essential.

At first, as I travelled and preached the doctrine of eventual resistance to the Newmen, I was met with scepticism and suspicion. Then, as time went on, I received more and more support.

“The Newmen won't be patient for ever. The Newmen will forget their promises sooner or later. The Newmen will want our lands—and our children.” That was the message I preached. Repetition drove it into the minds of the Community dwellers.

Before very long it was they who were impatient for action. They clamoured for an armed uprising. They wanted to set up sabotage groups at once, which would infiltrate into the cities and destroy the power plants.

I insisted on patience. Nothing would be achieved without long-term planning. We were puny—the Newmen were not altogether unjustified in regarding us as insignificant. When we finally struck, we had to know precisely what we were doing. There would be no second attempt if the first one failed.

I restrained the rebellious elements. A grand strategy would take years to develop. We must be sure of every man and every detail before we moved. Our contacts must be perfect, our lines of communication infallible. Surprise was everything.

The length of time involved was, I admitted, a danger in itself. In all that time, in all the quite separate groups that were held together only loosely by my travels and my growing organization, surely there would be one traitor? Word would leak out somehow.

But the years went on; the plans matured slowly; and still the Newmen did not pounce. Nobody defected from our ranks. The mere fact that people had turned their backs on the Newmen in the first place seemed to be sufficient guarantee of their sincerity.

I moved in and out of the cities, and aroused no suspicion. I established my contacts, and none of them broke. The resistance movement took shape.

But there was still Clayton.

Old enough to be the grandfather of most of the members of the Southerden Community, he grew more and more bitter and surly as time went on. He had set himself up as the grand old man of the village, and it irked him to see me assuming control. I knew that he hated me. I knew that if ever an opportunity. presented itself, he would treat me as he wanted to treat all the other Newmen. Given an opportunity, he would have got rid of me.

Which is why I felt quite justified in doing what I did.

I had gone for an evening stroll along the shore, thinking out one or two problems of co-ordination. The rhythm of my steps kept my mind moving steadily in a similar rhythm.

Next week, I thought, I must go up north. The Newcastle group needed an encouraging word; Immured in their artificial city, they were growing restless. They wanted to overturn the children who surrounded them giving orders and wrenching life more and more out of its old pattern.

If, after that, I could go on for a few days to....

“Hello,” said old Clayton.

I came out of my reverie with a start. I was annoyed. I did not like being disturbed in the middle of making plans.

I said, coolly: “Good evening.”

He looked down at me and shook his head wonderingly.

Then he glanced up at the sky.

“Yes,” he said. “Come to think of it, it is a good evening. Fine light on the water down there by the shore, isn't there?”

I hadn't noticed. I turned to look. Presumably he was right. But what did light on the water matter?

We were only a few yards from the edge of the riverbank, shored up here where it emerged into the sea. Beyond, lights blazed on a hillside farm, and there was a faint, gentle hum that drifted across to us.

Abruptly, Clayton said: “You'd like to be one of 'em, wouldn't you?”

“I don't know what you mean,” I said—not because I didn't know, but because this was how conversation was carried on in the Communities; it caused a bad impression if I seized on a point too quickly and flashed out a comprehensive answer. Here, one did not tackle a subject directly—one nudged gently towards it.

“You'd like to be over there,” he snarled, waving his hand derisively across the river. “You're one of 'em. Don't tell me different.”

“You are well aware,” I said, “that all my energies are devoted to planning for the day when the regime of the Newmen can be ended. I'm one of you. I disapprove of the rule of children as much as you do. It upsets the natural order of things. The balance of the human race has been seriously disturbed, and I am as determined as you are that one day it must be set right.”

“So that you can be boss?”

“The question doesn't arise.”

The dying sun struck a queer, fierce red spark from his eyes. He said: “Oh, yes, it does. Jealousy—that's all that drives you.”

“You're mad.”

“I'm not mad,” he said. “I can see straight. I can see that you couldn't go back to the cities because you'd be nothing there. A nonentity. Kids of your age'd be ahead of you, and when the next lot came along you'd be one of the slaves, like every other grown man and woman in those places. So you want to rule this place instead—”

“I want to re-establish the old order,” I insisted.

“And put yourself in charge? The glorious liberator, eh? The one-eyed man, king in the country of the blind....”

We stood on the edge of the bank now. I had not remembered walking there. I was conscious only of my hatred for this man—a hatred to match his own for me. Because he was old, he thought he had the right to be offensive to me. The old had many lessons to learn.

I said: “You don't understand. You never will understand.”

“I understand why this Community was formed,” he said. “And I understand what will happen to it if you have your way. A war—destruction. All for your own glory. All because you're lost, son. Lost. Neither one of us nor one of them.”

I thrust my face into his in the gathering dusk, and shouted: “I'm one of you. The only one with any foresight. The only one who can save you.”

“Lost,” he repeated. “And because you're lost, we've got to pay for it. It's a heavy price.”

It was then that my patience gave out. In that instant I saw that he might still ruin everything. With his malicious tongue and his refusal to face the harsh truths of our time he might turn people against me. I could afford to run no risks. For the sake of the future—the future of the Community—action had to be taken.

So I killed him.

* * * *

He saw it coming, and laughed. I remember his laugh even now. I remember it in the same way as I remember experiences from my mother's and father's memories—it is etched on my mind, unforgettably, the way they are.

His eyes widened as I struck him. His harsh laugh rang in my ears for a long moment, and then fell away as he plunged from the bank. There was a splash as he struck the surface of the water.

I swayed, and then turned and went away. By the time I got back to Southerden, I had evolved a story that made the best possible use of the incident. There was no point in wasting it—it could be employed to stiffen the spirit of resistance in the Communities.

I quickened my pace as I reached the end of the village street, and looked around wildly. The first person I saw was Tom Bentley, a middle-aged man who shared one of the fishing smacks with my father.

“Hello, there, Peregrine,” he said doubtfully, as I called to him.

Always they respected me, now; but always they were uneasy in my presence.

I said, breathlessly: “Something's happened along by the river. I'm sure one of our people is in trouble there.”

“Who?”

“I couldn't tell. I was too far away.”

“Go on.” He glanced in the direction of the river. The shore was shrouded in mist, and the line of the hills above the bay was only faintly blacker than the sky behind. “What did you see?”

“Someone was standing on the bank, on our side. And he seemed to be...well, pulled in. It was as though someone in a boat had come quietly up below him. Someone...or something.”

In a matter of minutes a small group was formed. Armed with knives and jagged pieces of wood, some of the burliest men in Southerden made their way towards the river. There was not a sound.

Apprehensively, the leader peered over the edge. I came up beside him.

“I'm sure it was here,” I said. “One minute he was there; the next, he was gone.”

“You think someone came over and got him?”

“Someone,” I repeated, “or something.”

I could sense their uneasiness. The robots on the other side were hated. The uncanny, inhuman movements of those efficient creatures made the hackles rise. The thought of some deadly, remorseless, soulless thing being sent across the river for some reason, and for some reason dragging one of our own people in....

It was a nightmare. Senseless, irrational—yet compelling, like a nightmare.

“Maybe,” said Tom Bentley, “it wasn't one of our folk who got pulled in. Maybe the figure you saw was one of their own people on this side.”

Either way, the thought was a disturbing one. The Community wanted nothing to do with human beings from the other side, or with their inhuman creations.

We went back to Southerden. And by morning it was realized that old Clayton was missing.

He was never found. His body must have been swept out to sea by the swirling tide in the narrow estuary. That was how I imagined it; but I did not mention this to anyone. They muttered among themselves about the Newmen, who had come over and captured one of us.

“But why?” asked my father in an argument. “What point would there be in that?”

“We don't know what the Newmen are up to,” said Tom Bentley darkly.

“They wouldn't want to kidnap one of us,” my father persisted. “They know all about us. They know we're only men and women—we've got nothing to offer them.”

“Except, perhaps, details of our plans to take back the country one day,” said Tom Bentley.

The men in the small group turned to look at me.

Henning said slowly. “If your plans have involved poor old Clayton in trouble—”

“Clayton was never taken into our confidence,” I returned.

And Tom Bentley at once said: “I wasn't meaning to fix any blame when I said that. It was just an idea. And if it's true, it shows that Peregrine's been right all along. If they're that sort of folk, we're right to oppose them. We're right to hit at them when we get the chance, all along the line.”

They tried to discuss some way of establishing the facts of what had occurred. But it was a hopeless proposition. Where did you begin on a thing like that? The Community had, of its own free will, cut itself off from the Newmen. To appeal to the laws and judicial system of the Newmen would be to invite scorn.

“But we've got to do it,” said Henning. “The laws of this country are still the laws of this country. We can send in a formal request for an enquiry. The government in London won't let Newmen in this part of the country behave just as they like. Kidnapping—murder, maybe....”

I said: “There have been deaths in other parts of the country at one time and another, and who has ever got any satisfaction from the Newmen?”

They listened to me. They had none of them made any real contact with Communities in other parts of the country, so they had only my word for these things. I told them how communications from the Communities to the Newmen were ignored, how protests were laughed at, and how impossible it was to establish even formal relations with Newmen who lived, perhaps, only a mile away over a hill or beyond an adjacent river.

“That's the way we wanted it,” interposed Tom Bentley. “So I reckon we've got no grudge now. No more than we've always had, anyway,” he added grimly. “Being dispossessed—grown men having to leave the cities to escape children—we've always faced up to that, and this doesn't make any difference. It only makes us more sure.”

They followed his lead. They had to agree that there was nothing to be done. Nothing yet. The day would come, as I had promised.

* * * *

Sometimes I lay awake and thought about what Clayton had said on that last day of his life.

It came back to me, nagging at my memory. It came back like his laugh, with a thousand echoes. Simpler people would have been able in time to blur over the words and forget them; but my mind could not relax its grip on anything like that.

“Jealousy...,” he had said. “You want to rule this place instead....”

“The one-eyed man, king in the country of the blind.”

Was it true?

I came in the end to a cool recognition of my own pathological condition. This ability to analyse one's own faults was another attribute of the Newmen. I saw that the emotionalism I had inherited from my parents was driving me to behave illogically; but this realization did not in any way affect my determination. I had to accept the fact that I had certain obsessions. I knew that it was impossible to alter them. The ability to see them clearly did not mean that I could overcome them. I knew better than that. I knew better than the crude psychologists and religious moralists of earlier centuries.

Perhaps it was true that I was jealous of the Newmen who controlled the advanced civilization of the cities. I sensed what delights they experienced in the exercise of their mental faculties. My own were clamped to the ground by circumstances. In the Community I could not use my abilities to their best advantage.

But if I could not be a ruler in the cities, I would be a ruler here. I would lead a campaign.

I would be all the things Clayton had accused me of being.

And Clayton was not the only one to accuse me.

The time for action was drawing near. We had been patient, and soon this patience would be rewarded. I had chosen the time of the Conference of All Nations—when that opened in London, we would strike.

It was then that my father called me a madman.