Pebble in the Sky (23 page)

“Father—Men are coming up the walk.”

Dr. Shekt went gray. “Quickly, Dr. Arvardan, through the garage.” He was pushing violently. “Take Pola, and don’t worry about me. I’ll hold them back.”

But a man in a green robe waited for them as they turned. He wore a thin smile and carried, with a casual ease, a neuronic whip. There was a thunder of fists at the main door, a crash, and the sound of pounding feet.

“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan in a feeble defiance of the armed green-robe. He had stepped before Pola.

“I?” said Green-robe harshly. “I am merely the humble Secretary of His Excellency, the High Minister.” He advanced. “I almost waited too long. But not quite. Hmm, a girl, too. Injudicious—”

Arvardan said evenly, “I am a Galactic citizen, and I dispute your right to detain me—or, for that matter, to enter this house—without legal authority.”

“I”—and the Secretary tapped his chest gently with his free hand—“am all the right and authority on this planet. Within a
short time I will be all the right and authority in the Galaxy. We have all of you, you know—even Schwartz.”

“Schwartz!” cried Dr. Shekt and Pola, nearly together.

“You are surprised? Come, I will bring you to him.”

The last thing Arvardan was conscious of was that smile, expanding—and the flash of the whip. He toppled through a crimson sear of pain into unconsciousness.

For the moment Schwartz was resting
uneasily on a hard bench in one of the small sub-basement rooms of the Chica “Hall of Correction.”

The Hall, as it was commonly termed, was the great token of the local power of the High Minister and those surrounding him. It lifted its gloominess in a rocky, angular height that overshadowed the Imperial barracks beyond it, just as its shadow clutched at the Terrestrial malefactor far more than did the un-exerted authority of the Empire.

Within its walls many an Earthman in past centuries had waited for the judgment that came to one who falsified or evaded the quotas of production, who lived past his time, or connived at another’s such crime, or who was guilty of attempting subversion of the local government. Occasionally,
when the petty prejudices of Terrestrial justice made particularly little sense to the sophisticated and usually blasé Imperial government of the time, a conviction might be set aside by the Procurator, but this meant insurrection, or, at the very least, wild riots.

Ordinarily, where the Council demanded death, the Procurator yielded. After all, it was only Earthmen who suffered—

Of all this, Joseph Schwartz, very naturally, knew nothing. To him, immediate optical awareness consisted of a small room, its walls transfused with but a dim light, its furniture consisting of two hard benches and a table, plus a small recess in the wall that served as washroom and sanitary convenience combined. There was no window for a glimpse of sky, and the drift of air into the room through the ventilating shaft was feeble.

He rubbed the hair that circled his bald spot and sat up ruefully. His attempt to escape to nowhere (for where on Earth was he safe?) had been short, not sweet, and had ended here.

At least there was the Mind Touch to play with.

But was that bad or good?

At the farm it had been a queer, disturbing gift, the nature of which he did not know, the possibilities of which he did not think of. Now it was a flexible gift to be investigated.

With nothing to do for twenty-four hours but brood on imprisonment, he could have been courting madness. As it was, he could Touch the jailers as they passed, reach out for guardsmen in the adjacent corridors, extend the furthest fibrils of his mind even to the Captain of the Hall in his distant office.

He turned the minds over delicately and probed them. They fell apart like so many walnuts—dry husks out of which emotions and notions fell in a sibilant rain.

He learned much in the process of Earth and Empire—more than he had, or could have, in all two months on the farm.

Of course one of the items that he learned, over and over again, beyond any chance of mistaking, was just this:

He was condemned to death!

There was no escape, no doubt, no reservation.

It might be today; it might be tomorrow. But he would die!

Somehow it sank in and he accepted it almost gratefully.

The door opened, and he was
on his feet, in tense fear. One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason. This was it!

No—it wasn’t. The entering Mind Touch held nothing of death in it. It was a guard with a metal rod held ready in his hand. Schwartz knew what it was.

“Come with me,” he said sharply.

Schwartz followed him, speculating on this odd power of his. Long before his guard could use his weapon, long before he could possibly know he should, he could be struck down without a sound, without a giveaway moment. His Mind was in Schwartz’s mental hands. A slight squeeze and it would be over.

But why? There would be others. How many could he handle at once? How many pairs of hands were in his mind?

He followed, docilely.

It was a large, large room that he was brought into. Two men and a girl occupied it, stretched out corpsewise on high, high benches. Yet not corpses—since three active minds were much in evidence.

Paralyzed! Familiar? . . . Were they familiar?

He was stopping to look, but the guard’s hard hand was on his shoulder. “Get on.”

There was a fourth slab, empty. There was no death in the guard’s mind, so Schwartz climbed on. He knew what was coming.

The guard’s steely rod touched each of his limbs. They tingled and left him, so that he was nothing but a head, floating on nothingness.

He turned it.

“Pola,” he cried. “You’re Pola, aren’t you? The girl who—”

She was nodding. He hadn’t recognized her Touch as such. He had never been aware of it that time two months ago. At that time his mental progression had reached only the stage of sensitivity to “atmosphere.” In the brilliance of hindsight, he remembered that well.

But from the contents he could still learn much. The one past the girl was Dr. Shekt; the one furthest of all was Dr. Bel Arvardan. He could filch their names, sense their despair, taste the last dregs of horror and fright in the young girl’s mind.

For a moment he pitied them, and then he remembered who they were and what they were. And he hardened his heart.

Let them die!

The other three had been there
for the better part of an hour. The room in which they were left was evidently one used for assemblies of several hundred. The prisoners were lost and lonely in its size. Nor was there anything to say. Arvardan’s throat burned dryly and he turned his head from side to side with a futile restlessness. It was the only part of his body that he could move.

Shekt’s eyes were closed and his lips were colorless and pinched.

Arvardan whispered fiercely, “Shekt. Shekt, I say!”

“What? . . . What?” A feeble whisper at best.

“What are you doing? Going to sleep? Think, man, think!”

“Why? What is there to think of?”

“Who is this Joseph Schwartz?”

Pola’s voice sounded, thin and weary. “Don’t you remember, Bel? That time in the department store, when I first met you—so long ago?”

Arvardan wrenched wildly and found he could lift his head two aching inches. A bit of Pola’s face was just visible.

“Pola! Pola!” If he could have moved toward her—as for two months he might have and hadn’t. She was looking at him, smiling so wanly that it might be a statue’s smile, and he said, “We’ll win out yet. You’ll see.”

But she was shaking her head—and his neck gave way, its tendons in panging agony.

“Shekt,” he said again. “Listen to me. How did you meet this Schwartz? Why was he a patient of yours?”

“The Synapsifier. He came as a volunteer.”

“And was treated?”

“Yes.”

Arvardan revolved that in his mind. “What made him come to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But then—Maybe he
is
an Imperial agent.”

(Schwartz followed his thought well and smiled to himself. He said nothing, and he meant to keep on saying nothing.)

Shekt stirred his head. “An Imperial agent? You mean because the High Priest’s Secretary says he is. Oh, nonsense. And what difference does it make? He’s as helpless as we. . . . Listen, Arvardan, maybe, if we tell some sort of concerted story, they might wait. Eventually we might—”

The archaeologist laughed hollowly, and his throat burned at the friction. “We might live, you mean. With the Galaxy dead and civilization in ruins? Live? I might as well die!”

“I’m thinking of Pola,” muttered Shekt.

“I am too,” said the other. “Ask her. . . . Pola, shall we surrender? Shall we try to live?”

Pola’s voice was firm. “I have chosen my side. I don’t want to die, but if my side dies, I’ll go with it.”

Arvardan felt somehow triumphant. When he brought her to Sirius, they might call her an Earthgirl, but she was their equal, and he would, with a great and good pleasure, smash teeth into the throat of any—

And he remembered that he wasn’t likely to bring her to
Sirius—to bring anyone to Sirius. There wasn’t likely to be a Sirius.

Then, as though to escape from the thought, to escape anywhere, he shouted, “You! Whatchername! Schwartz!”

Schwartz raised his head for a moment and allowed a glance to ooze out toward the other. He still said nothing.

“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan. “How did you get mixed up in this? What’s your part in it?”

And at the question, all the injustice of everything descended on Schwartz. All the harmlessness of his past, all the infinite horror of the present burst in upon him, so that he said in a fury, “I? How did I get mixed up in it? Listen. I was once a nobody. An honest man, a hard-working tailor. I hurt nobody, I bothered nobody, I took care of my family. And then, for no reason, for
no reason
—I came here.”

“To Chica?” asked Arvardan, who did not quite follow.

“No, not to Chica!” shouted Schwartz in wild derision. “I came to this whole mad world. . . . Oh, what do I care if you believe me or not?
My
world is in the past. My world had land and food and two billion people, and it was the
only
world.”

Arvardan fell silent before the verbal assault. He turned to Shekt. “Can you understand him?”

“Do you realize,” said Shekt in feeble wonder, “that he has a vermiform appendix, which is three and a half inches long? Do you remember, Pola? And wisdom teeth. And hair on his face.”

“Yes, yes,” shouted Schwartz defiantly. “And I wish I had a tail I could show you.
I’m from the past. I traveled through time
. Only I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. Now leave me alone.” He added suddenly, “They will soon be here for us. This wait is just to break us.”

Arvardan said suddenly, “Do you know that? Who told you?”

Schwartz did not answer.

“Was it the Secretary? Stocky man with a pug nose?”

Schwartz had no way of telling the physical appearance of those he Touched only by mind, but—secretary? There had been just a glimpse of a Touch, a powerful one of a man of power, and it seemed he had been a secretary.

“Balkis?” he asked in curiosity.

“What?” said Arvardan, but Shekt interrupted, “That’s the name of the Secretary.”

“Oh—What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything,” said Schwartz. “I
know
. It’s death for all of us, and there’s no way out.”

Arvardan lowered his voice. “He’s mad, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wonder. . . . His skull sutures, now. They were primitive, very primitive.”

Arvardan was amazed. “You mean—Oh, come, it’s impossible.”

“I’ve always supposed so.” For the moment Shekt’s voice was a feeble imitation of normality, as though the presence of a scientific problem had switched his mind to that detached and objective groove in which personal matters disappeared. “They’ve calculated the energy required to displace matter along the time axis and a value greater than infinity was arrived at, so the project has always been looked upon as impossible. But others
have
talked of the possibility of ‘time faults,’ analogous to geological faults, you know. Space ships
have
disappeared, for one thing, almost in full view. There’s the famous case of Hor Devallow in ancient times, who stepped into his house one day and never came out, and wasn’t inside, either. . . . And then there’s the planet, which you’ll find in the Galactography books of the last century, which was visited by three expeditions that brought back full descriptions—and then was never seen again.

“Then there are certain developments in nuclear chemistry that seem to deny the law of conservation of mass-energy. They’ve tried to explain that by postulating the escape of some
mass along the time axis. Uranium nuclei, for instance, when mixed with copper and barium in minute but definite proportions, under the influence of light gamma irradiation, set up a resonating system—”