Worlds Apart (22 page)

3

First things first, Rog and Bentley had decided, and the first thing was to get well clear of Lemon quickly. Doing so without leaving traces was secondary; they made vehicles that would move, not vehicles that would move without making clear tracks.

There were a lot of nice problems involved. They had twenty-three heavy engines -- one was defective, and Bentley doubted whether it could be repaired in time to affect the issue -- applying practically infinite power, and hardly any means of using it. There were twenty-seven atom-powered units for different purposes. Only six of them might conceivably supply motive power for wagons, without modification. And there certainly wasn't time to make anything that would fly.

So in the end fifty men threw together a giant land raft running on twenty rollers which had been tree trunks. Ten atom engines as ballast gave the clumsy trolley purchase, even on soft ground. Behind it could be drawn another, unpowered raft with twelve more engines -- the remaining one was the one which was in use, supplying hexum for the motors. It was driven on ahead, on a wagon all to itself.

The trek wouldn't have been possible if Mundis hadn't been so flat. Alice had suggested that the grass be burnt ahead of the cavalcade, but Bentley showed how the grass gave purchase to the lumbering rollers. It was tough, ad tougher still when squeezed dry. The rollers up front left a flat, close-knit surface for what followed; and if it was also slippery for smooth rollers dripping with water and chlorophyll, the weight of the clumsy vehicles made up for that.

If the Clades should come up over the horizon, there wasn't the faintest chance of concealment. But that didn't matter, since if the Clades was going to be around at all in the next few days the track left by the convoy was bound to be seen. The chances were much better than they looked. Mundis was all land surface, and there was only one Clades. The convoy might go on for years, with the ship searching for it all the time and never finding a trace of it.

Bentley and Dick and Rog traveled together for the most part, planning.

"Our best chance lies in having a ground base," Bentley said one day as they were being bounced about at the back of the land raft. "The advantage of a ship is its mobility. The disadvantage is its lack of mass. No ship can possibly mount such weapons as can be built on the ground. What are we going to do, concentrate on such weapons immediately we stop?"

"I don't how," said Rog. "What are we going to have to do -- defend or attack?"

Bentley know he didn't want technicalities, but the essence of the possibilities open to them.

"Defense against such weapons is a long business demanding high technical skill and careful research. I think we shall have to concentrate entirely on attack, in the time we are likely to have. Simplify it, if you like, and say defense against atomic power is impossible. That's near enough the truth."

"What are we likely to be able to achieve against the Clades?"

"Anything up to complete destruction, if we have the advantage of surprise. And, of course, time to prepare."

Rog noted how on the purely theoretical question of the destruction of the Clades, Bentley was quite cold and scientific. But he knew that before that became a real possibility, Bentley would become all too human again. He had to allow for that

"Then we must have the advantage of surprise. We must plan for posts surrounding our city -- what are we going to call it, by the way? -- posts miles apart but always manned and connected with the city by -- "

"Telephone or radio," Bentley supplied for him. "As for what we are going to call the city, I think Mary's suggestion is best. She says we're going to build it for freedom, so why not call it that?"

"Freedom," Rog mused. "We'll vote on that when we can. Does what you've been saying mean that we'll have to shoot first and ask questions afterwards?"

"I don't like it. But if we're to have any chance, I don't see any alternative. There never was a real defense against the atom bomb except the various atom rays. That is, strike first. It's like two people tied together by the ankles, armed with knives. The only way to stop the other fellow stabbing you is to stab him first, and you have to be quick about that. That's the horror and hatefulhess ef atomic warfare."

Discussions like that went on every day, for there was little that could be done while they were actually on the move. Bentley had his fits of depression when he realized that he wasn't going to have something he had taken it for granted he would have, but they didn't last, chiefly because Dick couldn't be depressed by a thing like that. He would be so puzzled by Bentley's despair, puzzled and rather shocked, that Bentley would drag himself out of his depression, if only to explain it.

Rog and Alice spent a lot of time talking to everybody, taking note of things it had never been worth while observing before. Soon jobs would have to be allotted to everybody. Too many cooks would spoil the broth -- therefore, not all the cooks were going to be employed in making it.

When Abner Carllss heard the suggestion that the city which they were going to build should be called Freedom he insisted that nothing else was possible.

"Don't you realize what an opportunity it is?" he asked Rog. "Can't you see it? Towns in the past grew like rubbish dumps. People came along and saw there was muck there already and threw some more down beside the first lot. Only after there were a lot of hideous shacks in a ragged line did anyone think about streets and public buildings. Nobody ever planned for any town getting bigger. I've heard all about it and looked it up. And if that wasn't enough, we've seen it happen twice here. New Paris -- another muckheap. Lemon -- "

"Lemon was a good little city," said Alice warmly.

"By the grace of God, since it was strangled before it had a chance to grow up. A few more years and Lemon would have been like all the cities of Earth they tell us about. Streets wide enough for two fat women to pass, no provision for growth, no room to breathe -- but now we've a chance to build a real city."

He spat disgustediy. "I can tell you what will happen. We'll build another Lemon, and for a thousand people it will be quite nice." He made the last two words into the ultimate insult. "But soon Freedom will have five thousand people, and it won't be Freedom any more. It'll be Prison -- narrow, lightless, tumbledown, filthy, cramped -- "

"After all," Alice interrupted, "we have other things on our minds just now than just building a fine city."

"/Just/ building a fine city?" ejaculated Abner. "What more is there? You're going to build a town anyway, aren't you? What in hell's the use of doing it badly? If I were doing it I'd make it so grand and beautiful that the Clades, instead of dropping bombs on it, would gape at the wonder of it."

Rog and Alice took note of all this, Rog more than Alice, it transpired. But there were other things Alice saw and Rog missed. Like the way Ruby Pertwee kept the children together and out of people's way; how Jimmy Doran handled the little wagon which darted on ahead picking a smooth, clear way for the convoy; the way Brad Hulton went about changing a roller on the big raft when it broke and fouled the next.

It was a time when little could be done, yet in that time the whole labor force was organized. Rog, Mary, Alice, Brad, Dick, or Jim Bentley would talk to someone, and when they left him he would be wondering what it would be like to be a driver, a sentry, a bricklayer, a plumber, whatever it was -- but quite prepared to be one and find out.

June was very quiet when Rog talked about Abner. She had known Abner too well, perhaps. They had kicked on the ground together before either of them could walk; Betty Carliss had taught them, together, to read and write; in any game that needed two people, a team, against other pairs, Abner and June were a team. Rog, for the first time, felt a twinge of jealousy. He had given June all he could -- well, almost all -- and shared everything with her, and she worshiped him, and Alice had envied them. Yet she became silent and withdrawn when Abner was mentioned.

He shared everything with her -- but there was something she wouldn't share with him. Perhaps she couldn't. It was too late, it would always be too late, for June and he to know each other as exhaustively as June and Abher knew each other.

Like this, for example. Rog had known Abner all Abner's life, but he had never heard about this dream of Abner's to build a perfect city. June had not only heard about it -- she had helped Abner to make a model township in clay in the early days of Lemon, and heard him boast that some day he would make a real city.

But Rog hadn't much time to think about June as the cavalcade rolled across the flat green plain that was Mundis. He was learning fast what he could leave to others and what he had to do himself. Alice was right, he had wanted power once. Now it was amazing with what feelings of relief he could split a little piece off his mighty responsibility and give it to someone else. He had almost all the power there was, suddenly, somehow. And instead of wanting more, he found he could get by with quite a lot less.

There were the trucks, the smaller carts, the trolleys, driven by the hexum-powered units or the steam engines, or drawn by horses. There were the hundreds of people walking, clinging to the trucks, riding animals, shifting from one to the other so that the convoy could travel at its fastest, not held up by anyone's fatigue. There were the cattle driven along in small groups, the dogs, now perforce allowed their freedom, helping to herd them.

And on Rog all this depended. If there was any problem, it was brought to Rog. For the moment there was no Council -- he was the Council. The old people forgot he was less than half their age, and asked him what they were to do.

Rog had a job on his hands.

4

"We stop here," said Rog. Nobody argued; someone had to guess how far, at the least, they should go. On Mundis most localities were alike. From this spot the usual half-dozen forests were visible, the usual dark green bracken, the usual spurs of rock.

"There's just one question," he went on, as the land rafts ground to a stop. "Do we dig in or build openly from the start?"

He was even more wiry than he had been at the start of the trek. For the first time, Mundans had had to work hard and go hungry. They couldn't take all their crops with them; they hadn't time to mill them. They couldn't bake on the way. It was too dangerous, in a tinder-bed like Mundis, and with no protection for so many people out in the open. A smaller party could have lived on the land, but this party was huge and in a hurry. Many of the young Mundans knew hunger for the first time in their lives.

About Rog were Brad, Dick, Bentley, and Alice. There was no time for Council meetings any more. For the most part people were glad to have Rog give the orders. They were lost, frightend, puzzled. They were reassured by the fact that someone seemed confident and knew what was going to happen next and could remember things that had to be done. Later they would ask who Rog Foley thought he was.

"We build openly," said Bentley. "It would take us a month just to bury ourselves. So if we don't get a month, that wouldn't do us any good. And if we do -- well, we can do something better with it than just hide."

Rog nodded. "We have to keep gambling on having time," he agreed. He ran up the line, shouting. Men and women started unloading the trucks and carting the stuff towards the rocks. Others rode the horses over, herding the cattle with them. After half the unloading was done, more men on horses rode up. They were the scavengers, the men who had followed the convoy making sure that no avoidable clue was left in their trail.

Dick and Bentley got to work at once on one of the engines. Principally their purpose was to supply hexum, a metal which could discharge its power as slowly as uranium or as an atom blast, depending on what was done with it and what had been done with it in the making. Hexum was the battery, the converter, the conduit between the atom engines, the potential, and the machines which were going to do the job. It could be, in effect, long or short, wide or narrow; it could carry power to be used at once, or store it for months. It could take a trickle or a torrent.

And, of course, unless it was properly handled it could, in an instant of time, make the Mundans completely disinterested in the Clades or anything else.

Right away Rog sent out the three geologists, all founder colonists, to see what they could find. And before the sun was down he knew he had a fair supply of iron and a probability of a good supply of copper. The doctors had had very little to do -- that was common, on Mundis -- so had them, with the chemists, mixing gunpowder charges. There was a certain amount of more powerful explosive, but Rog didn't want powerful explosive. Gunpowder would serve for the blasting he wanted to do.

Two water engineers were sinking a temporary well -- on the trek the Mundans had had to rely on the rains for their drinking water. There was water, plenty of it, under their feet; but it was too far under, below too many feet of earth and rock.

In those first few hours Bentley, during pauses in his own work, realized how Rog had taken complete command and that things which might last for hundreds of years were being decided on, sited, and started on his word alone.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked.

"Someone has to be sure."

"What /are/ you doing?"

"What you people should have done whenever you stepped from the Mundis. Twenty-two years late isn't too late. Jim, people can't stay where they are. They have to he advancing or going backwards. And we've been trying to stay where we were. Lemon wasn't developing, only getting bigger. The Constitution that ruled things was an anachronism. That's why I took my party to New Paris. Now we're together again, with another chance."

"Have we? You may turn in five minutes and see the Clades."

In the past few days Rug had stopped politely calling Bentley Mr. Bentley -- Jim was shorter and saved time, and besides, they were working together more closely than they had ever done before.