A For Anything

21

Going down from the courtyard into the mass of corridors, he saw the Frankies moving again purposefully through the apathetic crowds, and realized that all through the night and morning he had riot once recognized the familiar face. It was as if the Frankies had been submerged in the mob mind, just as he had been himself; and only now, when individual faces were being worn again, could they be told from anyone else.

At the corner where the smaller corridor entered North Passage, two Frankies were setting down heavy bundles of rifles. Each had a .375 Winchester slung over his shoulder, the same make and caliber as the rifles they were now unwrapping, a clatter on the floor. As Dick paused to watch, they began stopping passersby, shoving a rifle at each, saying something, pushing him away. Moving nearer, Dick found himself clutched, given a rifle, pushed off; the Frankie saying hoarsely meanwhile, in a mechanical monotone, "Get to a roof or a window. Make it quick." There were distant shouts in other corridors; some of those with rifles were drifting off, others following more slowly. The Frankies handed out the last of their weapons, pushed a laggard or two again and repeated the order, then went away. Slowly, trying to shake some alertness into himself, Dick went back the way he had come.

The Frankies were organizing a defense: then Eagles must be under attack, and from the air. Eagles had always been considered impregnable from the air, but he realized now, with senses sharpening a little, that with the citadel in ruins, the defenses at the bottom of the mountain shattered and unmanned, it was a different thing.

The giant on the mountain had been crippled and mutilated; now the harpies would come.

Climbing again into the open courtyard, he saw them: slender, tilt-winged shapes, bobbing and swooping in the violent up-currents. Each one was trailing a fierce tail of fire; he could make out the tiny bubble, and the pilot's head. They were two-man aircraft of a type he had never seen, modified copters with a makeshift rocket assembly at the tail. The rockets gave them enough power to maneuver, in the winds at the mountaintop; even so, they were swinging wildly in the treacherous updrafts, and Dick saw one pinwheel against the side of the mountain, exploding into a bright flare that drifted downward, a spark, diminishing. Each one must have a Gismo in it, he realized dazedly, to make it possible for a plane of that size to use sustained rocket power: in ordinary times, no one would have dared to try such a thing, not even the Boss; it must have been done on the spur of the moment ...

He was dimly aware of a popping of gunfire somewhere to his left. Turning to look, he saw a cluster of dark figures with rifles on an exposed platform, just before a sudden blossom of masonry expanded around them. One of the swift, bobbing planes passed erratically over and rose in the updraft; he saw its rocket flaming distantly as it turned to dive again. Others were crisscrossing over the broken field of Eagles' roofs, a landscape as skeletal as the Moon's, with topless towers gaping like the shattered mouths of cannon. Here and there, other white puffs spouted briefly where the planes passed. Dick saw no bombs falling, and realized that the tiny flyers must be firing explosive shells. More roofs winked into ruin as he watched. Under the candid sky, the gray corruption seemed to stir itself, like something half-alive, writhing in pain.

There was a clatter of feet and three men came straining up the staircase below bun, breathing in hoarse gasps, with a mounted machine gun between them. Ignoring Dick, they set the gun up near the parapet. A plane swooped overhead, quick as a hummingbird; they trained the gun futilely after it, then turned it toward a more distant plane and began firing. Deafened, Dick saw the ejected shells spring out glittering in the pure air. Across the roofs, other guns were flashing. A plane burst in midair, first a fireball, then a greasy drifting smoke; wreckage whined and rattled around them, and Dick crouched instinctively under the parapet.

The useless rifle was still in his hands; he looked at it and swore, in a monotone, without knowing what he was saying. The machine gun was still firing a few yards away; others were coming into action, and he could see the heavier flare of mortars in several places. One fired just as a plane went over it; there was a heavy burst of gray smoke where the gun had been, and fragments went spinning. Then out of nowhere there was a tilt-winged plane diving as Dick looked up. It was growing with impossible speed, and he could see flickers of light at its wingtips; and as he ducked, straining close to the parapet, he saw bullet-puffs march irregularly across the balcony beside the machine gunners. Then there was one bright flash at the nose of the plane, and simultaneously parapet and gunners lifted to a heavy blow.

Rubble pattered down around him. When he could see again, half the balcony was gone; there was no sign of the gun or gunners. His head smarted; he put his hand to it and drew it away, smeared with blood and masonry dust. He could not tell whether he was badly hurt or not.

He staggered to his feet, still gripping the rifle. One last explosion fountained up, over where the Promenade should have been; then the broken huddle of buildings lay silent and dark. There was no more gunfire, and the swift planes were circling or hovering.

Numbly, he saw that the stairway he had come up was gone. He was marooned on the balcony.

Out beyond the lower slopes of Eagles, one of the planes was beginning a series of curious maneuvers: dipping close to the roofs, pulling up in an abrupt climb, hovering, then beginning again. Straining his eyes, he saw a flicker of motion between roofs and plane at the bottom of its dip. It was a hairline, a cord or cable with a dot of something at the end of it, whipping violently in the wind. Then something happened, it was cast off or reeled in, he couldn't tell which. As the plane dipped once more, there was another flicker -- he saw the line shoot out, and this time stand taut in the air between the roofs and the plane.

The plane hovered, pitching violently in the up-currents, but holding its place. Other planes were beginning to go through the same maneuvers; one or two of them struck and hid almost immediately.

Then he saw dark shapes sliding down the cords -- men in heavy flying suits, helmeted, with gear slung around them.

Like kites, the planes hung everywhere over the gray waste; and men were swarming over the ruined roofs.

Dick saw a man with a rifle appear suddenly on the rim of a tower; he could not hear the shot, but one of the invaders threw up his hands and fell. The others nearby took cover, and faintly Dick heard the chatter of automatic rifles. The man on the tower spun outward, his weapon floating away, and fell twisting out of sight.

Planes which had successfully dropped their men were cutting the cords and moving off; new ones, an apparently endless supply, were taking their places.

The planes were working nearer. In the full daylight, the invaders' leather jackets gleamed, their goggles shot glints of white. Some were going down into Eagles, disappearing; others, with climbing gear, were working their way systematically over the roofs.

The balcony under Dick's feet shuddered to an abrupt subterranean roar. Black smoke swirled up, carrying a confused echo of screams and shouts. A few hundred yards distant, another black plume shot out of an open roof.

Dark scrambling figures began to appear on the balconies again -- slaves, waving their arms to show they were weaponless. The invaders closed in around them. More spurts of black smoke came up; more slaves appeared. If the invaders had already discovered that all the freemen in Eagles had been slaughtered ...

A few hundred feet away, on an exposed balcony smaller than his, Dick saw two figures come into view, a male and a female. The buck was a familiar stocky shape, with immense, heavy shoulders and a grizzled head. As he turned to look up at the sky, Dick recognized the Old Man. It was only then that he looked again at the girl, and saw that it was Elaine.

Dick stood up slowly. She was in slave's rags, her hair disordered and her face blackened, but he could not mistake those green eyes, or the characteristic gesture with which she put one wrist to wipe her forehead. She had not seen him yet.

The Old Man turned sharply, recognized him, and seemed to gather himself. He took Elaine by the arm as if to point her out. Staring intently across the gap, he called, "Dick -- !"

The appeal was unmistakable. Mercy for mercy; a favor for a favor. If Dick could save his own neck and Elaine's, then he ought to be able to save the Old Man's, too.

Now he saw recognition in the girl's face, and she held her arms out, calling, "Dick! Oh, Dick!"

Too soon, an invader plane was dipping towards them. The grapnel shot out, caught the peak of a nearby roof, and held. A second plane got down its line a few hundred yards away. Dick saw the goggled faces staring down at them, and he saw the uniformed figures emerge from under the planes' bellies, beginning to slide down the taut lines.

His mind was working feverishly fast. Everything came together, the slave turnover, Elaine, the Old Man, all his life at Eagles, Buckhill ... and without any conscious intention, his arm came up with the rifle. The stock fitted itself into his shoulder. Over the bead sight he saw the Old Man's startled face.

He squeezed the trigger, and saw the blocky figure all.

Elaine stood in an attitude of frozen horror for a moment, then turned and ran for the stairway. In a moment, she was gone.

The Old Man, with a spreading bloodstain on the front of his smock, rolled half over on his side, then dropped back and lay still.

The invaders, disengaging themselves from their droplines, were staring across at him. "Who's that?" called one of them.

"Dick Jones of Buckhill."

They were climbing across to him, cautiously, holding their guns ready. "That's right, I know him," said one. He was a lean youngster, with Puget Sound colors in his shoulder patch; the other one, older, was wearing the Boss of Salt Lake's insignia. "Good thing you shot that slob when you did," he said, climbing over the parapet. He showed Dick his sub-machine gun, grinning tightly with excitement. "I had my finger on the trigger."

A furious gush of white suddenly sprang up in the middle of the field of roofs, tall as a geyser, carrying whirling clouds of fragments with it. The balcony staggered with the shock. "My God, did you see that?" cried the young officer as if unaware of what he was saying.

"Something big must have blown."

"My God, my God," the younger one went on saying, his eyes bright and feverish. Suddenly he swung up his rifle and began firing at some figures that had appeared on a nearby open roof. A few dropped, the rest went out of sight. "There's never been anything like it," said the young man, staring around him with a fascinated and happy expression.

Dick glanced across at the body of the Old Man, lying motionless and somehow smaller than it had been before. He saw the empty stairwell down which Elaine had vanished, and looked out across the smoking field of roofs, almost unrecognizable now: the places where he had followed Keel by moonlight, fought Ruell, made love to Vivian ...

"I don't know if you've heard what happened at Buckhill," the older officer was saying at his ear. He hardly heard the words. "Bad luck -- your family all massacred. Slobs hiding in the woods, but they'll get 'em sooner or later."

"I'll do that myself," said Dick, without turning. He wanted to fix this last sight of Eagles in his memory, just as it was. There was his youth, deep down there, buried in ash and locked under the fallen rooftops. All right, let it lie.

He looked to the east, toward Buckhill. There was no feeling left in him now: but he knew he was a Man at last, and had his work ahead of him.