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compared to this.
Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi's uniformed thugs,
suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized the control centers. At
the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million people as hostages
for Egtverchi's safe-conduct, with the active collusion of perhaps five
million of them. The violence elsewhere was not as systematic, though some of
the outbursts of wrecking must have been carefully planned to allow for the
placing of the explosives alone, there seemed to be no special pattern to
it--but in no case could it be described as "passive" or "non-violent."
Sick, wretched and damned, Ruiz-Sanchez waited in the Michelises' jungle
apartment, as though part of Lithia had followed him home and enfolded him
there.
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After the first three days, the fury had exhausted itself sufficiently to
permit Michelis and Liu to
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish risk the trip back to their apartment in
a UN armored car. They were wan and ghastly-looking, as
Ruiz-Sanchez supposed he was himself; they had had even less sleep than he
had. He decided at once to say nothing about Agronski; that horror they could
be spared. There was no way, however, that he could avoid explaining what had
happened to the bees.
Liu's sad little shrug was somehow even harder to bear than Agronski.
"Did they find him yet?" Ruiz-Sanchez said huskily.
"We were going to ask you the same thing," Michelis said. The tall New
Englander was able to get a glimpse of himself in a mirror above a planting
box and winced. "Ugh, what a beard! At the
UN everybody's too busy to tell you anything, except in fragments. We thought
you might have heard an announcement."
"No, nothing. The Detroit vigilantes have surrendered, according to QBC."
"Yes, so have those goons in Smolensk; they ought to be putting that on the
air in an hour or so. I
never did think they'd succeed in pulling that operation off. They can't
possibly know the corridors as well as the target area authorities themselves
do. In Smolensk they got them with the fire door system--drained all the
oxygen out of the area they were holding without their realizing what was
going on. Two of them never came to."
Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself automatically. Up on the wall, the Klee muttered
in a low voice; it had not been off since Egtverchi's broadcast.
"I don't know whether I want to listen to that damn thing or not," Michelis
said sourly.
Nevertheless, he turned up the volume. There was still essentially no news.
The rioting was dying back, though it was as bad as ever in some shelters. The
Smolensk announcement was duly made, bare of detail. Egtverchi had not yet
been located, but UN officials expected a break in the case
"shortly."
"'Shortly,' hell," Michelis said. "They've run out of leads entirely. They
thought they had him cold the next morning, when they found a trail to the
hideaway where he'd arranged to tide himself over and direct things. But he
wasn't there--apparently he'd gotten out in a hurry, some time before. And
nobody in his organization knows where he would go next--he was supposed to be
there, and they're thoroughly demoralized to be told that he's not."
"Which means that he's on the run," Ruiz-Sanchez suggested.
"Yes, I suppose that's some consolation," Michelis said. "But where could he
run to, where he
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish wouldn't be recognized? And how would he
run? He couldn't just gallop naked through the streets, or take a public
conveyance. It takes organization to ship something as outré as that
secretly--and Egtverchi's organization is as baffled about it as the UN is."
He turned the 3-V off with a savage gesture.
Liu turned to Ruiz-Sanchez, her expression appalled beneath its weariness.
"Then it's really not over after all?" she said hopelessly.
"Far from it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But maybe the violent phase of it is over.
If Egtverchi stays vanished for a few days more, I'll conclude that he is
dead. He couldn't stay unsighted that long if he were still moving about. Of
course his death won't solve most of the major problems, but at least it would
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remove one sword from over our heads."
Even that, he recognized silently, was wishful thinking. Besides, can you kill
a hallucination?
"Well, I hope the UN has learned something," Michelis said.
"There's one thing you have to say for Egtverchi: he got the public to bring
up all the unrest that's been smoldering down under the concrete for all these
years. And underneath all the apparent conformity, too. We're going to have to
do something about that now--maybe take sledgehammers in our hands and pound
this damned Shelter system down into rubble and start over. It wouldn't cost
any more than rebuilding what's already been destroyed. One thing's certain:
the UN won't be able to smother a revolt of this size in slogans. They'll have
to do something."
The Klee chimed.
"I won't answer it," Michelis said through gritted teeth. "I won't answer it.
I've had enough."
"I think we'd better, Mike," Liu said. "It might be news."
"News!" Michelis said, like a swearword. But he allowed himself to be
persuaded. Underneath all the weariness, Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could detect
something like a return of warmth between the two, as though, during the three
days, some depth had been sounded which they had never touched before. The
slight sigh of something good astonished him. Was he beginning, like all
demonolaters, to take pleasure in the prevalence of evil, or at least in the
expectation of it?
The caller was the UN man. His face was very strange underneath his funny hat,
and his head was cocked as if to catch the first word. Suddenly, blindingly,
Ruiz-Sanchez saw the hat in the light of
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish the attitude, and realized what it was:
an elaborately disguised hearing aid. The UN man was deaf and, like most deaf
people, ashamed of it. The rest of the apparatus was a decoy.
"Dr. Michelis, Dr. Meid, Dr. Ruiz," he said. "I don't know how to begin. Yes,
I do. My deepest apologies for past rudeness. And past damn foolishness. We [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]