Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. Silence. No sign of them anywhere.
They had escaped. They were gone. They had worked out a plan of escape and put it into operation. Two columns, going in opposite directions, as soon as the lid was lifted. Perfectly timed and executed.
Slowly Billings climbed the stairs to his room. He pushed the door open and stood, breathing deeply, dazed from the shock.
They were gone. Project C was already over. It had gone like the others. The same way. Rebellion and independence. Out of supervision. Beyond control. Project A had influenced Project B – and now, in the same way, the contamination had spread to C.
Billings sat down heavily at his desk. For a long time he sat immobile, silent and thoughtful, gradual comprehension coming to him. It was not his fault. It had happened before – twice before. And it would happen again. Each Project would carry the discontent to the next. It would never end, no matter how many Projects were conceived and put into operation. The rebellion and escape. The evasion of the plan.
After a time, Billings reached out and pulled his big report book to him. Slowly he opened it to the place he had left off. From the report he removed the entire last section. The summary. There was no use scrapping the current Project. One Project was as good as any other. They would all be equal – equal failures.
He had known as soon as he saw them. As soon as he had raised the lid. They had clothes on. Little suits of clothing. Like the others, a long time before.
Nathan Hull left his surface car and crossed the pavement on foot, sniffing the chill morning air. Robot work-trucks were starting to rumble past. A gutter slot sucked night debris greedily. A vanishing headline caught his eye momentarily:
PACIFIC TUBE COMPLETED;
ASIAN LAND MASS LINKED
He passed on away from the corner, hands in his pockets, looking for Farley's house.
Past the usual Worldcraft Store with its conspicuous motto: "Own Your Own World!" Down a short grass-lined walk and onto a sloping tilt-front porch. Up three imitation marble stairs. Then Hull flicked his hand before the code beam and the door melted away.
The house was still. Hull found the ascent tube to the second floor and peered up. No sound. Warm air blew around him, tinged with faint smells – smells of food and people and familiar objects. Had they gone? No. It was only the third day; they'd be around someplace, maybe up on the roof terrace.
He ascended to the second floor and found it also vacant. But distant sounds drifted to his ears. A tinkle of laughter, a man's voice. A woman's – perhaps Julia's. He hoped so – hoped she were still conscious.
He tried a door at random, steeling himself. Sometimes during the third and fourth days the Contest Parties got a little rough. The door melted, but the room was empty. Couches, empty glasses, ashtrays, exhausted stimulant tubes, articles of clothing strewn everywhere -
Abruptly Julia Marlow and Max Farley appeared, arm in arm, followed by several others, pushing forward in a group, excited, and red-cheeked, eyes bright, almost feverish. They entered the room and halted.
"Nat!" Julia broke away from Farley and came breathlessly up to him. "Is it that late already?"
"Third day," Hull said. "Hello, Max."
"Hello, Hull. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something?"
"Nothing. Can't stay. Julia -"
Farley waved a robant over, sweeping two drinks from its chest tray. "Here, Hull. You can stay long enough for one drink."
Bart Longstreet and a slender blonde appeared through a door. "Hull! You here? So soon?"
"Third day. I'm picking Julia up. If she still wants to leave."
"Don't take her away," the slim blonde protested. She wore a
sideglance
robe, invisible out of the corner of the eye, but an opaque fountain when looked at directly. "They're judging right now. In the lounge. Stick around. The fun's just beginning." She winked at him with heavy blue-lidded eyes, glazed and sleep-drugged.
Hull turned to Julia. "If you want to stay…"
Julia put her hand nervously on his arm, standing close to him. Not losing her fixed smile she grated in his ear: "Nat, for God's sake, get me out of here. I can't stand it. Please!"
Hull caught her intense appeal, her eyes bright with desperation. He could feel the mute urgency quivering through her body, tense and strained. "Okay, Julia. We'll take off. Maybe get some breakfast. When did you last eat?"
"Two days. I think. I don't know." Her voice trembled. "They're judging right now. God, Nat, you should have seen -"
"Can't go until the judging's over," Farley rumbled. "I think they're almost through. You didn't enter, Hull? No entry for you?"
"No entry."
"Surely you're an owner -"
"Nope. Sorry." Hull's voice was faintly ironic. "No world of my own, Max. Can't see it."
"You're missing something." Max beamed dopily, rocking back on his heels. "Quite a time – best Contest Party for weeks. And the real fun begins
after
the judging. All this is just preliminary."
"I know." Hull moved Julia rapidly toward the descent tube. "We'll see you. So long, Bart. Give me a call when you're out of here."
"Hold it!" Bart murmured suddenly, cocking his head. "The judging's over. The winner is going to be announced." He pushed toward the lounge, the others excitedly behind. "You coming, Hull? Julia?"
Hull glanced at the girl. "All right." They followed reluctantly. "For a minute, maybe."
A wall of sound struck them. The lounge was a seething chaos of milling men and women.
"I won!" Lora Becker shouted in ecstasy. People pushed and shoved around her, toward the Contest table, grabbing up their entries. Their voices grew in volume, an ominous rumble of discordant sound. Robants calmly moved furniture and fixtures back out of the way, clearing the floor rapidly. An unleashed frenzy of mounting hysteria was beginning to fill the big room.
"I knew it!" Julia's fingers tightened around Hull's arm. "Come on. Let's get out before they start."
"Start?"
"Listen to them!" Julia's eyes flickered with fear. "Come on, Nat! I've had enough. I can't stand any more of this."
"I told you before you came."
"You did, didn't you?" Julia smiled briefly, grabbing her coat from a robant. She fastened the coat rapidly around her breasts and shoulders. "I admit it. You told me. Now let's go, for God's sake." She turned, making her way through the surging mass of people toward the descent tube. "Let's get out of here. We'll have breakfast. You were right. These things aren't for us."
Lora Becker, plump and middle-aged, was making her way up onto the stand beside the judges, her entry clasped in her arms. Hull paused a moment, watching the immense woman struggle up, her chemically corrected features gray and sagging in the unwinking overhead lights. The third day – a lot of old-timers were beginning to show the effects, even through their artificial masks.
Lora reached the stand. "Look!" she shouted, holding up her entry. The Worldcraft bubble glittered, catching the light. In spite of himself Hull had to admire the thing. If the actual world inside was as good as the exterior…
Lora turned on the bubble. It glowed, winking into brilliance. The roomful of people became silent, gazing up at the winning entry, the world that had taken the prize over all other comers.
Lora Becker's entry was masterful. Even Hull had to admit it. She increased the magnification, bringing the microscopic central planet into focus. A murmur of admiration swept the room.
Again Lora increased the magnification. The central planet grew, showing a pale green ocean lapping faintly at a low shoreline. A city came into view, towers and broad streets, fine ribbons of gold and steel. Above, twin suns beamed down, warming the city. Myriads of inhabitants swarmed about their activities.
"Wonderful," Bart Longstreet said softly, coming over beside Hull. "But the old hag has been at it sixty years. No wonder she won. She's entered every Contest I can remember."
"It's nice," Julia admitted in a clipped voice.
"You don't care for it?" Longstreet asked.
"I don't care for any of this!"
"She wants to go," Hull explained, moving toward the descent tube. "We'll see you later, Bart."
Bart Longstreet nodded. "I know what you mean. In many ways I agree. You mind if I -"
"Watch!" Lora Becker shouted, her face flushed. She increased the magnification to maximum focus, showing details of the minute city. "See them?
See?"
The inhabitants of the city came into sharp view. They hurried about their business, endless thousands of them. In cars and on foot. Across spidery spans between buildings, breathtakingly beautiful.
Lora held the Worldcraft bubble up high, breathing rapidly. She gazed around the room, her eyes bright and inflamed, glittering unhealthily. The murmurings rose, sweeping up in excitement. Numerous Worldcraft bubbles came up, chest-high, gripped in eager, impassioned hands.
Lora's mouth opened. Saliva dribbled down the creases of her sagging face. Her lips twitched. She raised her bubble up over her head, her doughy chest swelling convulsively. Suddenly her face jerked, features twisting wildly. Her thick body swayed grotesquely – and from her hands the Worldcraft bubble flew, crashing to the stand in front of her.
The bubble smashed, bursting into a thousand pieces. Metal and glass, plastic parts, gears, struts, tubes, the vital machinery of the bubble, splattered in all directions.
Pandemonium broke loose. All around the room other owners were smashing their worlds, breaking them and crushing them, stamping on them, grinding the delicate control mechanisms underfoot. Men and women in a frenzy of abandon, released by Lora Becker's signal, quivering in an orgy of Dionysian lust. Crushing and breaking their carefully constructed worlds, one after another.
"God," Julia gasped, struggling to get away, Longstreet and Hull beside her.
Faces gleamed with sweat, eyes feverish and bright. Mouths gaped foolishly, muttering meaningless sounds. Clothes were torn, ripped off. A girl went down, sliding underfoot, her shrieks lost in the general din. Another followed, dragged down into the milling mass. Men and women struggled in a blur of abandon, cries and gasps. And on all sides the hideous sounds of smashing metal and glass, the unending noise of worlds being destroyed one after another.
Julia dragged Hull from the lounge, her face white. She shuddered, closing her eyes. "I knew it was coming. Three days, building up to this. Smashed – they're smashing them all. All the worlds."
Bart Longstreet made his way out after Hull and Julia. "Lunatics." He lit a cigarette shakily. "What the hell gets into them? This has happened before. They start breaking, smashing their worlds up. It doesn't make sense."
Hull reached the descent tube. "Come along with us, Bart. We'll have breakfast – and I'll give you my theory, for what it's worth."
"Just a second." Bart Longstreet scooped up his Worldcraft bubble from the arms of a robant. "My Contest entry. Don't want to lose it."
He hurried after Julia and Hull.
"More coffee?" Hull asked, looking around.
"None for me," Julia murmured. She settled back in her chair, sighing. "I'm perfectly happy."
"I'll take some." Bart pushed his cup toward the coffee dispenser. It filled the cup and returned it. "You've got a nice little place here, Hull."
"Haven't you seen it before?"
"I don't get up this way. I haven't been in Canada in years."
"Let's hear your theory," Julia murmured.
"Go ahead," Bart said. "We're waiting."
Hull was silent for a moment. He gazed moodily across the table, past the dishes, at the thing sitting on the window ledge. Bart's Contest entry, his Worldcraft bubble.
" 'Own Your Own World'," Hull quoted ironically. "Quite a slogan."
"Packman thought it up himself," Bart said. "When he was young. Almost a century ago."
"That long?"
"Packman takes treatments. A man in his position can afford them."
"Of course." Hull got slowly to his feet. He crossed the room and returned with the bubble. "Mind?" he asked Bart.
"Go ahead."
Hull adjusted the controls mounted on the bubble's surface. The interior scene flickered into focus. A miniature planet, revolving slowly. A tiny blue-white sun. He increased the magnification, bringing the planet up in size.
"Not bad," Hull admitted presently.
"Primitive. Late Jurassic. I don't have the knack. I can't seem to get them into the mammal stage. This is my sixteenth try. I never can get any farther than this."
The scene was a dense jungle, steaming with fetid rot. Great shapes stirred fitfully among the decaying ferns and marshes. Coiled, gleaming, reptilian bodies, smoking shapes rising up from the thick mud -
"Turn it off," Julia murmured. "I've seen enough of them. We viewed hundreds for the Contest."
"I didn't have a chance." Bart retrieved his bubble, snapping it off. "You have to do better than the Jurassic, to win. Competition is keen. Half the people there had their bubbles into the Eocene – and at least ten into the Pliocene. Lora's entry wasn't much ahead. I counted several city-building civilizations. But hers was almost as advanced as we are."
"Sixty years," Julia said.
"She's been trying a long time. She's worked hard. One of those to whom it's not a game but a real passion. A way of life."
"And then she smashes it," Hull said thoughtfully. "Smashes the bubble to bits. A world she's been working on for years. Guiding it through period after period. Higher and higher. Smashes it into a million pieces."
"Why?" Julia asked. "Why, Nat? Why do they do it? They get so far, building it up – and then they tear it all down again."
Hull leaned back in his chair. "It began," he stated, "when we failed to find life on any of the other planets. When our exploring parties came back empty-handed. Eight dead orbs – lifeless. Good for nothing. Not even lichen. Rock and sand. Endless deserts. One after the other, all the way out to Pluto."
"It was a hard realization," Bart said. "Of course, that was before our time."
"Not much before. Packman remembers it. A century ago. We waited a long time for rocket travel, flight to other planets. And then to find nothing…"
"Like Columbus finding the world really was flat," Julia said. "With an edge and a void."
"Worse. Columbus was looking for a short route to China. They
could
have continued the long way. But when we explored the system and found nothing we were in for trouble. People had counted on new worlds, new lands in the sky. Colonization. Contact with a variety of races. Trade. Minerals and cultural products to exchange. But most of all the thrill of landing on planets with amazing life-forms."
"And instead of that…"
"Nothing but dead rock and waste. Nothing that could support life – our own or any other kind. A vast disappointment set in on all levels of society."
"And then Packman brought out the Worldcraft bubble," Bart murmured. " 'Own Your Own World.' There was no place to go, outside of Terra. No other worlds to visit. You couldn't leave here and go to another world. So instead, you -"
"Instead you stayed home and put together your own world." Hull smiled wryly. "You know, he has a child's version out, now. A sort of preparation kit. So the child can cover the basic problems of world-building before he even has a bubble."
"But look, Nat," Bart said. "The bubbles seemed like a good idea, at first. We couldn't leave Terra so we built our own worlds right here. Sub-atomic worlds, in controlled containers. We start life going on a sub-atomic world, feed it problems to make it evolve, try to raise it higher and higher. In theory there's nothing wrong with the idea. It's certainly a creative pastime. Not a merely passive viewing like television. In fact, world-building is the ultimate art form. It takes the place of all entertainments, all the passive sports as well as music and painting -"