Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Sixteen

No shots were fired until the second day.

In view of the fact that the group on the He had either destroyed or merely quit using the communications set, Administrator Raddall’s orders were transmitted to them by two United Air Force machines which flew the length of the eastern margin dropping leaflets. The instructions were that they were to assemble in an orderly formation and walk along the southern edge of the lie, keep clear of the power station, and make their way to the elevator head where they would be shipped down to the island. A time limit of twenty-four hours had been set for the move to begin; and when it was ignored two more U.A.F. machines—strike/reconnaissance craft this time—howled along the margin on another leaflet raid.

On their second pass, the amethyst needle of a rad-rifle flicked up from the village and separated the starboard wingtip of the lead aircraft from the rest of its airframe. The plane, with no height in which to maneuver, followed its fatal asymmetry into a banking dive, which intersected the level of the soil beds about a mile west of the margin. Its wing and empennage were wiped off as the heavy fuselage tore through the He’s structure and fell, tumbling end over end, into the receptive waters of the Atlantic. The pilot died somewhere between Heaven and Earth.

In the second aircraft was an impulsive young man who, only an hour earlier, had been playing cards with his dead companion. He stood his aircraft on its tail; pulled it back across the hard blue sky in an immense, sun-glinting loop; and, during the vertical dive, unleashed a swarm of external stores at the spot where he imagined the village to be. As it happened, his guess was fairly accurate; and the only thing which saved the villagers from annihilation was the fact that the bombs were fitted with dibber fuses intended to let them penetrate at least ten feet into concrete before they exploded. The salvo splatted right through the lie in a tight formation and layered the sky with black blossoms several hundred feet further down. By that time the second pilot had calmed down sufficiently to listen to the orders being screamed at him, and he rolled away towards his mother carrier.

The long ribbons of winter wheat were still undulating gently as the He’s structure absorbed the impact of the punch delivered by the first aircraft.

Stirling heard the news with a bleak sense of dismay. He guessed the rad-rifle marksman who triggered off the violence had been Dix; but he could not be sure. Johnny had traveled far enough along his own lonely road to be capable of such an action by himself. In any case, events had been channeled into a new and deadly direction, one in which the innocent were bound to suffer with the guilty. The innocent were personified in his mind as a dark whiplash of a girl with black hair which smelled like the night wind.

Stirling did not go into the Record’s office for his showdown with Selig and McLeod. It was, he realized, far too late. He spent the day at his mother’s television set, leaving it only to brew strong coffee between newscasts—each long-focus shot of the He increasing his feeling of suffocation and helplessness. Stirling was vaguely aware that his own life had, at some point, been diverted into a strange new direction. Six months on the He had effectively de-conditioned him as regards life in the Compression; yet there was nowhere else to go. Mankind, in one way or another, had used up all the living space allotted to it on its home planet; and the Solar System as a whole was not a residential neighborhood.

In the afternoon came the news that a platoon of anti-grav troopers had tried a sneak raid on the He’s power station. The garrison of villagers in the station had machine-gunned six of them before their feet touched the soil, and the others had crawled most of the way back to the elevator head. Army spokesmen were quick to point out that it was impossible to use normal tactics against the squatters because of the risk of damaging the power plant and bringing the He down into the sea. This news inflamed public opinion to the point where crowds began to gather outside Government Mile in Boston. Another report said that the controversial senator, Mason Third, had flown north, ostensibly on private business, but was expected to organize demonstrations outside the monolithic administrative center.

Flash point was finally reached when a bubblecraft rented by an English newspaper got through the drift-ships and flitted across the He’s eastern wall. It crashed a few seconds later, possibly through inexpert piloting; but as far as the man in the street was concerned, the squatters had begun murdering civilians. Raddall had no choice other than to give the army chiefs free rein to clear the He in any way they could.

When it was announced that strike aircraft had begun patrolling the margin and hosing lead at anything which moved, Stirling went to the phone. He spent an hour trying to reach Raddall; he grimly penetrated secretarial screens until, at the highest level, he was told bluntly that the Administrator would not speak to him.

“For Christ’s sake!” Stirling shouted. “There are women and children up there. Raddall has to work this thing out some other way.”

“Mr. Stirling,” the impersonal voice said. “You, of all people, should know that this situation was forced on the Administrator.”

“I didn’t write that story,” Stirling protested.

“Does it matter? Surely this affair hinges not on the story’s authorship, but on its readership. In any case, Mr. Stirling, press publicity was only a very minor contributory factor in the Administrator’s decision. My sincere advice to you is not to overestimate your responsibility.”

Stirling drew an unsteady breath. “Take your sincere advice and …” The phone clicked and went dead.

He set it down and tried to relax; but, for the first time in his life, he was involved. Things had been very much more comfortable on the sidelines where one stared down at the marble faces of John and Jane Doe and made detached philosophical comments. But he had stepped into a game in which children wept in the heavy silence which follows machine-gun fire and men walked ropes above piled-up thunderheads. And he had breathed the night wind in black hair… .

“Mother,” Stirling said presently, “I have to borrow some money from you. I’m flying to Boston.”

Mason Third was about fifty years old, with twinkly-eyed good looks, graying hair and the upright carriage of a vain man who is below medium height. He stood in the center of his hotel room and read Stirling’s note for the second time.

“What makes you think I can help you, Victor?” He spoke crisply, with an almost English accent, and Stirling momentarily saw him in a World War I officer’s uniform, with direct eyes, neat mustache, Sam Brown belt. The physical presence of Mason Third had not matched Stirling’s preconceived picture in any respect, except that a cutting in his morgue file had connected him with a divorce scandal. This carefully dressed man, who barely came to Stirling’s shoulder, was the archetype of all lady-killers.

“I know you can help me,” Stirling said, sensing that a blunt approach would work best. “But what’s more important from your point of view, is that I can help you even more.”

Third glanced at his watch. “I don’t quite see that.”

“Senator, let’s not beat about the bush. People are dying on He 23, and we both have good reasons for keeping them alive. My reasons are personal; yours are political.Right now Raddall has the voters behind him; but tempers are going to die down eventually and somebody’s going to count the cost in human lives and state-owned property.

“Did you know my brother has a herbicidal bomb up there?”

“No.” Third’s eyes became watchful.

“He has___ And he’ll use it. Raddall is going to be the first Administrator to throw away one-hundred-and-fifty square miles of agricultural land almost on the eve of an election. That’s the negative side. The positive side is that you could become the senator who saved one-hundred-and-fifty square miles of agricultural land almost on the eve of an election… .”

“Never try to become a politician, Victor,” Third interrupted. “Broadswords and flick knives are incompatible weapons.”

“If you can get me back onto the lie,” Stirling said doggedly, “I can get control of that bomb, and I can get those people up there to agree to come down peacefully.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“Yes.”

Two hours later, as the elevator car carried him up into the windy darkness, Stirling looked back at the trembling lights of civilization and pondered the meaning of that last affirmative. In retrospective analysis, it did not mean he was certain he could overcome Johnny, get control of the bomb, and win the villagers on to his side. All it meant was he was prepared to die in the attempt; but—Stirling looked up at the black trapezium of Heaven with something approaching reconciliation—he had just discovered that one brand of certainty was as good as another.