Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Eleven

Jepson Lomax was a pale round-faced man, with liver-colored lips and clammy hands which he rubbed continually with a lime handkerchief. Each time he touched his desk, condensation left a ghostly handprint which slowly shrank to nothing as its moisture evaporated into the air of his office. He threw Stirling’s press card into a wire tray and walked to the window. He moved like a much bigger and older man.

“Fantastic view, isn’t it? All that open space. I’ve been on F.T.A. ocean processing stations most of my working life; so I’m used to distant horizons. That’s one of the reasons I got this job. But it’s not the same at sea. It isn’t the same as looking at wide open land.” Lomax waved at the view beyond his window. “Nothing’s the same as that.”

Stirling nodded slowly. Beyond the double glazing, the broad acres of Heaven vapored introspectively in the morning sun like ruled strips tapering into hazy distance. To Stirling, it all looked strangely unreal. He was still trying to find his mental feet in the new situation, and nothing seemed quite solid or real any longer. Especially this prefabricated office building which had been erected at the elevator head and peopled by comfortable, smoothly shaven F.T.A. executives in white uniforms.

“I might as well be frank with you, Mr. Stirling.” Lomax mopped his palms mechanically. “I’ve had a couple of very unpleasant shocks during the past twenty-four hours. To discover a bunch of … hoboes on this He was bad enough. But the fact that you, a newspaperman, got onto them first makes things all the more difficult for me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, it means we may not be able to let you go.” Lomax smiled an apology, whose obvious insincerity made it a threat. “You see, we don’t want to draw attention to our presence here. … So it would hardly be advisable for me to release a reporter with one of the most sensational stories of the century.

“You do see my point of view, don’t you?”

Stirling stood up angrily. “Listen, I’m grateful to you for saving my life. But I don’t see what right you have to even think about keeping me here against my will. The F.T.A. has no power to …”

“Correction, Mr. Stirling.” Lomax stretched his brown lips in another formal smile. “You forget how long you’ve been… shall we say, out of touch? Last month both coastal administrations approved a rationalization program which brought the lies under the Authority’s direct control.”

“All right, so Hodder finally got the lies in his pocket. Where does that leave me?”

“It leaves you in the middle of a quiet revolution, Mr. Stirling. Weren’t you surprised to find us here!”

“I was coming to that.”

“I’ll bring it to you. Do you know what percentage of the country’s food supply comes from the lies?”

“I don’t know. Five? No, I guess that’s too high. One or two?”

“Point oh-oh-two.”

Stirling looked out at Heaven’s blurred horizons in disbelief. “But that’s only…”

“Not worth taking into consideration, is it? And do you know how much it costs to produce a pound of incomplete protein on the lies, compared with extracting a pound of whole protein from the ocean?” A look of expectancy appeared on Lomax’s round face; and Stirling, realizing he was taking part in a set piece, became irritated.

“All I want to know is, what makes you think you can keep me here?”

Lomax frowned. “The lies are finished, Mr. Stirling. The only useful function left to them is to provide living space. That’s what we need more than a few vegetables right now.”

Stirling suddenly saw the light. “Do you mind if I make a wild guess about what you’re going to say next? I imagine that, as the F.T.A. controls these choice pieces of real estate, it has also selected the tenants. Right?”

Lomax nodded, still looking amused.

“And who would it choose but its own executives? If Hodder’s plans work out, there’s going to be a kind of technocracy on both coasts, with the F.T.A. on top … And the lies will become glorified penthouses for Hodder and his puppets.”

“I knew you would understand why we can’t let you go, Mr. Stirling. Under the new legislation there’s nothing really illegal about what we’re doing here, but it will take the great American public some time to get used to the idea. Our public relations agency has barely got started on the job and—with the congressional elections coining up soon—it could be inconvenient for the Authority if you were to talk to the wrong people.”

“I don’t see what you’re worrying about,” Stirling said bitterly. “Your so-called Press Council would block everything I wrote. I’m one of their best customers.”

“You journalists become too wrapped up in the press.” Lomax began drawing the pale green handkerchief between each of his fingers in turn. “You forget about things like whispering campaigns, Mr. Stirling. Public opinion was a potent electioneering weapon long before newspapers were invented.

“The Authority insists on you remaining here as its guest for the time being. But relax. … It won’t be for very long.” How right you are, Stirling thought. He walked to the window and looked out to the spot where work crews were unloading earth-moving equipment from the elevator cars. How right you are.

Stirling found he had been given complete freedom of movement within the building which—when he thought it over—was much better treatment than he might have expected. Lomax and a couple of F.T.A. security men had questioned him closely after dragging him into the safety of their office block; but Stirling had stuck to his story of coming to the lie as a reporter in search of an unusual scoop. His instinctive dislike for anyone connected with the F.T.A. had led him to keep quiet about Johnny and to be vague about the number of people in the village.

Finally, Lomax accepted him at face value; and Stirling got the impression the F.T.A. thought the four men they had captured with him represented the bulk of the He’s unofficial colony. He was content to leave it that way. When the new landlords unexpectedly encountered an army of two hundred shabby guerrillas, their cloak of secrecy was likely to come apart at the seams.

Once free of Lomax, Stirling explored the single-story building. Drafting machines had been set up in some of the rooms, and men in F.T.A. whites were everywhere. Stirling noticed that, in contrast to most citizens of the Compression, the men were tanned; and he guessed they had worked on the processing stations along the coast. That would make them good material for the He: anybody who had been used to seascapes would adapt more easily. He ambled around, ignoring the curious stares from the office workers, until he found the wing which was being used as a temporary prison. The four captured villagers sat disconsolately behind a superglass partition. Stirling surveyed their faces and satisfied himself Johnny was not there; then he noticed the mens movements were limited by webs of silvery streamers clinging around their limbs.

“What’s that stuff?”

The square-faced security man on guard looked coldly at Stirling, but he answered. “We used blotch guns on those guys. Good thing for you we had ‘em too.”

“I appreciate it. Is that a blotch gun?” He pointed at the bulbous weapon of gray metal clipped to the guard’s belt.

“Yeah. Best yet for security work… . Better range than the old bolas guns we used to have, and that solder wraps ‘em up but good.”

“That’s progress for you.”

Stirling stared through the superglass at the villagers. Yesterday they had tried to kill him; today he bore them no grudge. All the rules had been changed. One of the villagers, his lips moving silently behind the screen, looked up, recognized Stirling, and pointed him out to the others. The four faces looked strangely alike: dark-skinned, bearded, hunted, and trapped. Stirling knew none of them by name, and guessed they had been four nonentities who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He moved on and picked a convenient window from which to watch the reconstruction teams at work. They had begun spreading along two strips, dozing the soil into tumbled brown heaps, pouring plastic floors, and erecting wall panels. Beyond the new buildings loomed the yellow structure of an agricultural robot, strangely canted; and showers of sparks fountained up around it from cutting machines. The robot looked oddly dignified in death, and Stirling felt something like regret.

The first battle of International Land Extension, U.S. 23, took place three days later.

An unofficial survey team of three men had headed out across the He early in the afternoon, partly to see the territory for themselves, partly for the pleasure of the ride. Their negative-gravity sled was set to travel about three feet above the level of the soil beds, but it moved with a faint undulating motion due to the interaction of its own field with the beam fields of the He’s substructure. From his vantage point, Stirling saw the men laugh as they discovered the newly arrived sled’s tendency to behave like a roller coaster. He watched the party disappear into the east and wondered, uneasily, how long it would be before the village was discovered. The sled reappeared an hour later, traveling at top speed, rising and falling like a swallow in its skimming flight. Two of the men were slumped in their seats, and their white coveralls were dappled with crimson. The report which filtered down to Stirling was that they had seen a solitary figure moving in the eastern margin, had tried to round him up, and found themselves right in the middle of the village. Only the sled’s impressive acceleration had got them back out of it—and two of the survey team had serious knife wounds.

An hour after the sled’s return, Lomax appeared in the room which he had allocated to Stirling. His brown lips were twitching with anger.

“I expected no cooperation from those four … animals we caught with you, but I thought you were an impartial observer, Stirling.”

“I don’t get you.” Stirling met his gaze squarely.

“You must have known how many of these people there were on the He, but you didn’t tell me. Why not?”

Stirling shook his head. The question was a difficult one, even for him. He was opposed to Hodder and the idea of the nation’s sole food supplier acquiring all the powers of government, but he had never been the type to sacrifice his own interests to a political ideal. Had he some more personal, deeply buried motive for wanting the whole He business to blow up hi everybody’s faces?

“All right, don’t answer,” Lomax snapped thinly. “But remember, I’m holding you responsible for the lives of those two men. I am also confining you to this room until the Authority decides what action to take against you. Don’t try to leave.”

Stirling gave a mock salute as Lomax went out. He sat down on the edge of his folding bed and wished that half a year in Heaven had not ruined his taste for a cigarette.

Within a matter of hours F.T.A. reinforcements began to arrive at the elevator head. Eight negative-gravity sleds fitted with armored bubbles of superglass drifted off the cars, waltzing slightly, nudging each other’s bumper rings. With each sled was a crew of F.T.A. security men carrying blotch guns and an assortment of more conventional weapons.

Stirling watched the little flotilla course off over the He’s gravity gradients in the pewter light of dawn. The first sortie lasted three hours and, he learned later, was an almost complete failure due to the fact that the security men where unable to find the village. On the second sortie, the unharmed member of the original hapless trio led the way; and they found the village, but no villagers.

At that point, Lomax began to lose interest; he realized that his building program was free to carry on for as long as it took to reach the eastern end of the lie and that by that time, the problem of the villagers would have sorted itself out. The expeditions became sporadic, almost casual affairs which seemed to be governed by how restless or adventurous the security men felt on any particular day. As the prospect of an imminent explosion began to dwindle, Stirling began to realize he really was—once more—a prisoner, and his sentence would last for perhaps two years. He had an unsatisfactory interview with Lomax at which he learned that the two wounded men would live and that the F.T.A. was still determined to keep Stirling confined to his room. Two armed security men escorted him back to his quarters, and the precision with which they remained beyond the range of fists, but inside the effective radius of a blotch gun made Stirling wonder, strickenly, if he was going to be cooped up for the foreseeable future.

A few hours later, one of the patrols accidentally made contact and returned with two prisoners. One of them died on the sled ride back to the elevator head.

The other was Melissa Latham.

“All right, Stirling, outside.” The security guard held open the door of Stirling’s room and waved him out into the corridor with drawn blotch gun.

“What’s happening?” Stirling left his vantage point at the window.

“Mr. Lomax has finished talking to that girl we brought in, and he’s giving her your room until we ship the lot of you downstairs.”

“So where do I go?”

“In with your buddies, of course. If they try to knife you again, just sing out. I’m a light sleeper.”

“You’re such a comfort, Milburn.” Stirling reluctantly gathered up his jacket and walked out ahead of the guard. Melissa! How had she managed to get caught? Why did it have to be her? How many forces were working to prevent him going back?

Part way along the narrow corridor, a door opened in front of him, and Melissa was ushered out of an office by Lomax. He was smiling behind her; and his fingers traced the contours of her shoulders—not quite touching the skin —as he directed her to Stirling’s old room. Melissa’s flat-planed face was pale, masked with dust. It makes no difference, he thought. Her eyes widened for an instant as she saw Stirling, and she tried unsuccessfully to smile. “It makes no difference,” he told himself, but the words came out differently.

“What do you think you’re doing, Lomax? You can’t keep the girl here.”

“I don’t intend to,” Lomax replied pleasantly. “The Authority has arranged new quarters down below for you and all other trespassers we catch. I’m sending you down in the morning.”

Stirling saw a pulse begin to flicker in Melissa’s throat, and he tried to visualize her reactions to being buried in a Compression prison. He had a strong conviction that she would, quite simply, die.

“Keep moving, big man,” Milburn said from behind. Stirling glanced back and saw that the guard had not forgotten the basic theory of firearms: when you have a weapon which acts at a distance, don’t throw away your advantage by going up close. If Stirling tried anything, Milburn would get off at least one shot, and apparently it was not necessary to be very accurate with a blotch gun. I’m sorry, Melissa, he thought. I hope this doesn’t hurt too much.

He put his hand on Melissa’s arm, as if to sympathize with her, then tightened his grasp, and jerked hard. Melissa was lifted right off her feet and hurled towards Milburn. There was a vicious splat as the guard fired instinctively; and Stirling saw an octopus of silvery metal wrap itself around Melissa binding her instantly into a rigid human spindle. Then he was past her, pushing the gun aside with one hand and pile-driving Milburn down onto his knees with the other. Stirling snatched the gun and turned around in time to see Lomax sprint towards his office door. He fired the unfamiliar weapon twice and saw Lomax topple sideways, wrapped up like a Christmas present. Melissa had gone down too; so Stirling lifted her under his left arm and ran for the outer door. Nobody got in his way, and in less than ten seconds he was outside in the cool darkness. The eight large negative-gravity sleds and the two smaller ones were parked in a neat row beside the entrance. Stirling unceremoniously dumped Melissa into a small one, then ran along the line firing the blotch gun into the controls of the other nine. The gun felt no-ceably lighter when he had finished, but nobody was going to come after him that night—unless they came on foot.

He ran back to the sled in which Melissa lay, leaped in, and boosted the tiny craft off towards the east in a prolonged burst of acceleration which threatened to drag him back from the controls. The lighted windows and frantically running figures of the F.T.A, headquarters shrank abruptly, like a scene on a deflated balloon.

Stirling felt a surge of pleasure, then he remembered there was nowhere to run to in the darkness that lay ahead. Nowhere, except the village.