Title: The burning world
Author: Budrys, Algis
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The burning world" ***


                           The Burning World

                            By ALGIS BUDRYS

                       Illustrated by SCHOENHERR

              _Can the battle for freedom ever be won--as
               long as some men still want to fight it?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                          Infinity July 1957.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                               CHAPTER I


They walked past rows of abandoned offices in the last government
office building in the world--two men who looked vastly different, but
who had crucial similarities.

Josef Kimmensen had full lips trained to set in a tight, thin line, and
live, intelligent eyes. He was tall and looked thin, though he was not.
He was almost sixty years old, and his youth and childhood had been
such that now his body was both old for its years and still a compact,
tightly-wound mechanism of bone and muscle fiber.

Or had been, until an hour ago. Then it had failed him; and his one
thought now was to keep Jem Bendix from finding out how close he was to
death.

Jem Bendix was a young man, about twenty-eight, with a broad, friendly
grin and a spring to his step. His voice, when he spoke, was low and
controlled. He was the man Josef Kimmensen had chosen to replace him as
president of the Freemen's League.

The building itself was left over from the old regime. It was perhaps
unfortunate--Kimmensen had often debated the question with himself--to
risk the associations that clung to this building. But a building is
only a building, and the dust of years chokes the past to death. It was
better to work here than to build a new set of offices. It might seem a
waste to leave a still-new building, and that might tend to make people
linger after their jobs had finished themselves. This pile of cracking
bricks and peeled marble facings would be falling in a heap soon, and
the small staff that still worked here couldn't help but be conscious
of it. It was probably a very useful influence.

They walked through the domed rotunda, with its columns, echoing
alcoves, and the jag-topped pedestals where the old regime's statues
had been sledge-hammered away. The rotunda was gloomy, its skylight
buried under rain-borne dust and drifted leaves from the trees on the
mountainside. There was water puddled on the rotten marble floor under
a place where the skylight's leading was gone.

Kimmensen left the day's letters with the mail clerk, and he and Bendix
walked out to the plaza, where his plane was parked. Around the plaza,
the undergrowth was creeping closer every year, and vine runners were
obscuring the hard precision of the concrete's edge. On all sides, the
mountains towered up toward the pale sun, their steep flanks cloaked in
snow and thick stands of bluish evergreen. There was a light breeze in
the crystalline air, and a tang of fir sap.

Kimmensen breathed in deeply. He loved these mountains. He had been
born in the warm lowlands, where a man's blood did not stir so easily
nor surge so strongly through his veins. Even the air here was
freedom's air.

As they climbed into his plane, he asked: "Did anything important come
up in your work today, Jem?"

Jem shrugged uncertainly. "I don't know. Nothing that's urgent at the
moment. But it might develop into something. I meant to speak to you
about it after dinner. Did Salmaggi tell you one of our families was
burned out up near the northwest border?"

Kimmensen shook his head and pressed his lips together. "No, he
didn't. I didn't have time to see him today." Perhaps he should have.
But Salmaggi was the inevitable misfit who somehow creeps into every
administrative body. He was a small, fat, tense, shrilly argumentative
man who fed on alarms like a sparrow. Somehow, through election
after election, he had managed to be returned as Land Use Advisor.
Supposedly, his duties were restricted to helping the old agricultural
districts convert to synthetic diets. But that limitation had never
restrained his busybody nature. Consultations with him were full of
sidetracks into politics, alarmisms, and piping declamations about
things like the occasional family found burned out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kimmensen despaired of ever making the old-fashioned politician types
like Salmaggi understand the new society. Kimmensen, too, could feel
sorrow at the thought of homesteads razed, of people dead in the midst
of what they had worked to build. It was hard--terribly hard--to think
of; too easy to imagine each might be his own home. Too easy to come
upon the charred embers and feel that a horrible thing had been done,
without taking time to think that perhaps this family had abused its
freedom. Sentiment was the easy thing. But logic reminded a man that
some people were quarrelsome, that some people insisted on living their
neighbors' lives, that some people were offensive.

There were people with moral codes they clung to and lived by, people
who worshipped in what they held to be the only orthodox way, people
who clung to some idea--some rock on which their lives rested. Well and
good. But if they tried to inflict these reforms on their neighbors,
patience could only go so far, and the tolerance of fanaticism last
just so long.

Kimmensen sighed as he fumbled with his seat belt buckle, closed the
power contacts, and engaged the vanes. "We're haunted by the past,
Jem," he said tiredly. "Salmaggi can't keep himself from thinking like
a supervisor. He can't learn that quarrels between families are the
families' business." He nodded to himself. "It's a hard thing to learn,
sometimes. But if Salmaggi doesn't, one of these days he may not come
back from his hoppings around the area."

"I wouldn't be worrying, Joe," Jem said with a nod of agreement.
"But Salmaggi tells me there's a fellow who wants to get a group of
men together and take an army into the northwest. This fellow--Anse
Messerschmidt's his name--is saying these things are raids by the
Northwesters."

"Is he getting much support?" Kimmensen asked quickly.

"I don't know. It doesn't seem likely. After all, the Northwesters're
people just like us."

Kimmensen frowned, and for one bad moment he was frightened. He
remembered, in his youth--it was only twenty-eight years ago--Bausch
strutting before his cheering crowds, bellowing hysterically about
the enemies surrounding them--the lurking armies of the people to the
south, to the east, the northwest; every compass point held enemies
for Bausch. Against those enemies, there must be mighty armies raised.
Against those enemies, there must be Leadership--firm Leadership:
Bausch.

"Armies!" he burst out. "The day Freemen organize to invade another
area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to
the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their
homes and families. They become a separate class--an armed, organized
class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on
that day, freedom dies for everybody.

"You understand me, don't you, Jem? You understand how dangerous talk
like this Messerschmidt's can be?" Kimmensen knew Bendix did. But it
was doubly important to be doubly assured, just now.

Bendix nodded, his quick, easy smile growing on his face. "I feel the
same way, Joe." And Kimmensen, looking at him, saw that Jem meant
it. He had watched Jem grow up--had worked with him for the past ten
years. They thought alike; their logic followed the same, inevitable
paths. Kimmensen couldn't remember one instance of their disagreeing on
anything.

The plane was high in the air. Below them, green forests filled the
valleys, and the snow on the mountaintops was red with the light of
sunset. On the east sides of the slopes, twilight cast its shadows.
Kimmensen looked down at the plots of open ground, some still in crops,
others light green with grass against the dark green of the trees. Off
in the far west, the sun was half in the distant ocean, and the last
slanting rays of direct light reflected from the snug roofs of houses
nestled under trees.

Here is the world, Kimmensen thought. Here is the world we saw in the
times before we fought out our freedom. Here is the world Dubrovic
gave us, working in the cold of his cellar, looking like a maniac
gnome, with his beard and his long hair, putting circuits together by
candle-light, coughing blood and starving. Here is the world Anna and I
saw together.

That was a long time ago. I was thirty-two, and Anna a worn thirty,
with silver in her fine black hair, before we were free to build the
house and marry. In the end, we weren't as lucky as we thought, to have
come through the fighting years. The doctors honestly believed they'd
gotten all the toxins out of her body, but in the end, she died.

Still, here it is, or almost. It isn't given to very many men to have
their dreams come true in their lifetimes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kimmensen's house stood on the side of a mountain, with its back to the
north and glass walls to catch the sun. There was a patio, and a lawn.
Kimmensen had been the first to break away from the old agricultural
life in this area. There was no reason why a man couldn't like
synthetic foods just as well as the natural varieties. Like so many
other things, the clinging to particular combinations of the few basic
flavors was a matter of education and nothing else. With Direct Power
to transmute chemicals for him, a man was not tied to cows and a plow.

The plane settled down to its stand beside the house, and they got out
and crossed the patio. The carefully tended dwarf pines and cedars
in their planters were purple silhouettes against the sky. Kimmensen
opened the way into the living room, then slid the glass panel back
into place behind them.

The living room was shadowy and almost dark, despite the glass.
Kimmensen crossed the softly whispering rug. "Apparently Susanne hasn't
come home yet. She told me she was going to a party this afternoon."
He took a deep, unhappy breath. "Sit down, Jem--I'll get you a drink
while we're waiting." He touched the base of a lamp on an end table,
and the room came to life under a soft glow of light. The patio went
pitch-black by comparison.

"Scotch and water, Jem?"

Bendix held up a thumb and forefinger pressed together. "Just a pinch,
Joe. A little goes a long way with me, you know."

Kimmensen nodded and went into the kitchen.

The cookers were glowing in the dark, pilot lights glinting. He touched
the wall switch. The light panels came on, and he took glasses out of
the cupboard. Splashing water from the ice-water tap, he shook his
head with resigned impatience.

Susanne should have been home. Putting the dinner in the cookers and
setting the timers was not enough, no matter how good the meal might
be--and Susanne was an excellent meal planner. She ought to have been
home, waiting to greet them. He wouldn't have minded so much, but she'd
known Jem was going to be here. If she had to go to the Ennerth girl's
party, she could have come home early. She was insulting Jem.

Kimmensen opened the freezer and dropped ice cubes into the glasses.
She never enjoyed herself at parties. She always came home downcast and
quiet. Yet she went, grim-faced, determined.

He shook his head again, and started to leave the kitchen. He stopped
to look inside the cookers, each with its Direct Power unit humming
softly, each doing its automatic work perfectly. Once the prepared
dishes had been tucked inside and the controls set, they could be left
to supervise themselves. One operation followed perfectly upon another,
with feedback monitors varying temperatures as a dish began to brown,
with thermocouples and humidity detectors always on guard, built into
an exactly balanced system and everything done just right.

He touched the temperature controls, resetting them just a trifle to
make sure, and went back out into the living room. He took the bottle
of carefully compounded Scotch out of the sideboard, filled two shot
glasses, and went over to Bendix.

"Here you are, Jem." He sat down jerkily, dropping rather than sinking
into the chair.

Dying angered him. He felt no slowdown in his mind--his brain, he was
sure, could still chew a fact the way it always had. He felt no drying
out in his brain cells, no mental sinews turning into brittle cords.

He'd been lucky, yes. Not many men had come whole out of the fighting
years. Now his luck had run out, and that was the end of it. There were
plenty of good men long in the ground. Now he'd join them, not having
done badly. Nothing to be ashamed of, and a number of grounds for quiet
pride, if truth be told. Still, it made him angry.

"Susanne ought to be home any moment," he growled.

Jem smiled. "Take it easy, Joe. You know how these kids are. She
probably has to wait 'til somebody else's ready to leave so she can get
a lift home."

Kimmensen grunted. "She could have found a way to get home in time. I
offered to let her take the plane if she wanted to. But, no, she said
she'd get a ride over."

The puzzled anger he always felt toward Susanne was making his head
wag. She'd annoyed him for years about the plane, ever since she
was eighteen. Then, when he offered her its occasional use after
she'd reached twenty-five, she had made a point of not taking it. He
couldn't make head or tail of the girl. She was quick, intelligent,
educated--she was potentially everything he'd tried to teach her to be.
But she was willful--stubborn. She refused to listen to his advice. The
growing coldness between them left them constantly at swords' points.
He wondered sometimes if there hadn't been something hidden in Anna's
blood--some faint strain that had come to the surface in Susanne and
warped her character.

No matter--she was still his daughter. He'd do his duty toward her.

       *       *       *       *       *

"This is really very good, Joe," Jem remarked, sipping his drink.
"Excellent."

"Thank you," Kimmensen replied absently. He was glaringly conscious
of the break in what should have been a smooth evening's social flow.
"Please accept my apologies for Susanne's thoughtlessness."

Jem smiled. "There's nothing to apologize for, Joe. When the time
comes for her to settle down, she'll do it."

"Tell me, Jem--" Kimmensen started awkwardly. But he had to ask. "Do
you like Susanne? I think you do, but tell me anyhow."

Jem nodded quietly. "Very much. She's moody and she's headstrong. But
that'll change. When it does, I'll ask her."

Kimmensen nodded to himself. Once again, his judgment of Bendix was
confirmed. Most young people were full of action. Everything had to
be done now. They hadn't lived long enough to understand how many
tomorrows there were in even the shortest life.

But Jem was different. He was always willing to wait and let things
unfold themselves. He was cautious and solemn beyond his years. He'd
make Susanne the best possible husband, and an excellent president for
the League.

"It's just as well we've got a little time," Jem was saying. "I was
wondering how much you knew about Anse Messerschmidt."

Kimmensen frowned. "Messerschmidt? Nothing. And everything. His kind're
all cut out of the same pattern."

Jem frowned with him. "I've seen him once or twice. He's about my age,
and we've bumped into each other at friends' houses. He's one of those
swaggering fellows, always ready to start an argument."

"He'll start one too many, one day."

"I hope so."

Kimmensen grunted, and they relapsed into silence. Nevertheless, he
felt a peculiar uneasiness. When he heard the other plane settling down
outside his house, he gripped his glass tighter. He locked his eyes on
the figure of Susanne walking quickly up to the living room wall, and
the lean shadow behind her. Then the panel opened, and Susanne and her
escort stepped out of the night and into the living room. Kimmensen
took a sudden breath. He knew Susanne, and he knew that whatever she
did was somehow always the worst possible thing. A deep, pain-ridden
shadow crossed his face.

Susanne turned her face to look up at the man standing as quietly as
one of Death's outriders beside her.

"Hello, Father," she said calmly. "Hello, Jem. I'd like you both to
meet Anse Messerschmidt."



                              CHAPTER II


It had happened at almost exactly four o'clock that afternoon.

As he did at least once each day, Kimmensen had been checking his
Direct Power side-arm. The weapon lay on the desk blotter in front of
him. The calloused heel of his right palm held it pressed against the
blotter while his forefinger pushed the buttplate aside. He moved the
safety slide, pulling the focus grid out of the way, and depressed the
squeeze triggers with his index and little fingers, holding the weapon
securely in his folded-over palm. Inside the butt, the coil began
taking power from the mysterious _somewhere_ it was aligned on. Old
Dubrovic, with his sheaves of notations and encoded symbology, could
have told him. But Dubrovic had been killed in one spiteful last gasp
of the old regime, for giving the world as much as he had.

The pea-sized tubes flashed into life. Kimmensen released the triggers,
slid the buttplate back, and pushed the safety slide down. The side-arm
was working--as capable of leveling a mountain as of burning a
thread-thin hole in a man.

He put the side-arm back in its holster. Such was the incarnation of
freedom. The side-arm did not need to be machined out of metal, or
handgripped in oil-finished walnut. These were luxuries. It needed only
a few pieces of wire, twisted just so--it was an easy thing to learn--,
a few tubes out of an old radio. And from the moment you had one,
you were a free man. You were an army to defend your rights. And when
everybody had one--when Direct Power accumulators lighted your house,
drove your plane, let you create building materials, food, clothing
out of any cheap, plentiful substance; when you needed no Ministry
of Supply, no Board of Welfare Supervision, no Bureau of Employment
Allocation, no Ministry of the Interior, no National Police--when all
these things were as they were, then the world was free.

He smiled to himself. Not very many people thought of it in those
technical terms, but it made no difference. They knew how it felt. He
remembered talking to an old man, a year after the League was founded.

"Mr. Kimmensen, don't talk no Silas McKinley to me. I ain't never read
a book in my life. I remember young fellers comin' around to court my
daughter. Every once in a while, they'd get to talkin' politics with
me--I gotta admit, my daughter wasn't so much. They'd try and explain
about Fascism and Bureaucracy and stuff like that, and they used to
get pretty worked up, throwin' those big words around. All I knew was,
the government fellers used to come around and take half of my stuff
for taxes. One of 'em finally come around and took my daughter. And I
couldn't do nothin' about it. I used to have to work sixteen hours a
day just to eat.

"O.K., so now you come around and try and use your kind of big words
on me. All I know is, I got me a house, I got me some land, and I got
me a wife and some new daughters. And I got me a gun, and ain't nobody
gonna take any of 'em away from me." The old man grinned and patted the
weapon at his waist. "So, if it's all the same to you, I'll just say
anything you say is O.K. by me long's it adds up to me bein' my own
boss."

That had been a generation ago. But Kimmensen still remembered it as
the best possible proof of the freedom he believed in. He had paid
great prices for it in the past. Now that the old regime was as dead as
most of the men who remembered it, he would still have been instantly
ready to pay them again.

But no one demanded those sacrifices. Twenty-eight years had passed,
as uneventful and unbrokenly routine as the first thirty years of his
life had been desperate and dangerous. Even the last few traces of
administration he represented would soon have withered away, and then
his world would be complete. He reached for the next paper in his IN
basket.

He felt the thready flutter in his chest and stiffened with surprise.
He gripped the edge of his desk, shocked at the way this thing was
suddenly upon him.

A bubble effervesced wildly in the cavity under his ribs, like a liquid
turned hot in a flash.

He stared blindly. Here it was, in his fifty-ninth year. The knock on
the door. He'd never guessed how it would finally come. It hadn't had
to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been
a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at
his vitals. But he'd known it was coming, as every man knows and tries
to forget it is coming.

The searing turbulence mounted into his throat. He opened his mouth,
strangling. Sudden cords knotted around his chest and, even strangling,
he groaned. _Angina pectoris_--pain in the chest--the second-worst pain
a man can feel.

The bubble burst and his jaws snapped shut, his teeth mashing together
in his lower lip. He swayed in his chair and thought:

_That's it. Now I'm an old man._

       *       *       *       *       *

After a time, he carefully mopped his lips and chin with a handkerchief
and pushed the bloodied piece of cloth into the bottom of his
wastebasket, under the crumpled disposal of his day's work. He kept
his lips compressed until he was sure the cuts had clotted, and decided
that, with care, he could speak and perhaps even eat without their
being noticed.

Suddenly, there were many things for him to decide quickly. He glanced
at the clock on his desk. In an hour, Jem Bendix would be dropping by
from his office down the hall. It'd be time to go home, and tonight Jem
was invited to come to dinner.

Kimmensen shook his head. He wished he'd invited Jem for some other
day. Then he shrugged, thinking: I'm acting as though the world's
changed. It hasn't; I have. Some arrangements will have to change, but
they will change for the quicker.

He nodded to himself. He'd wanted Susanne and Jem to meet more often.
Just as well he'd made the invitation for tonight. Now, more than ever,
that might be the solution to one problem. Susanne was twenty-five now;
she couldn't help but be losing some of her callow ideas. Give her a
husband's firm hand and steadying influence, a baby or two to occupy
her time, and she'd be all right. She'd never be what he'd hoped for in
a daughter, but it was too late for any more efforts toward changing
that. At least she'd be all right.

He looked at his clock again. Fifty-five minutes. Time slipped away
each moment your back was turned.

He hooked his mouth, forgetting the cuts, and winced. He held his
palm pressed against his lips and smiled wryly in his mind. Five
minutes here, five there, and suddenly twenty-eight years were gone.
Twenty-eight years here in this office. He'd never thought it'd
take so long to work himself out of a job, and here he wasn't quite
finished even yet. When he'd accepted the League presidency, he'd
thought he only needed a few years--two or three--before the medical
and educational facilities were established well enough to function
automatically. Well, they had been. Any League member could go to a
hospital or a school and find another League member who'd decided to
become a doctor or a teacher.

That much _had_ been easy. In some areas, people had learned to
expect cooperation from other people, and had stopped expecting some
all-powerful Authority to step in and give orders. But then, medicine
and education had not quite gotten under the thumb of the State in this
part of the world.

The remainder had been hard. He'd expected, in a sort of naive haze,
that everyone could instantly make the transition from the old regime
to the new freedom. If he'd had any doubts at all, he'd dismissed them
with the thought that this was, after all, mountainous country, and
mountaineers were always quick to assert their personal independence.
Well, they were. Except for a lingering taint from what was left of the
old generation, the youngsters would be taking to freedom as naturally
as they drew breath. But it had taken a whole generation. The oldsters
still thought of a Leader when they thought of their president. They
were accustomed to having an Authority think for them, and they
confused the League with a government.

Kimmensen shuffled through the papers on his desk. There they were;
requests for food from areas unused to a world where no one issued
Agricultural Allocations, letters from people styling themselves Mayors
of towns.... The old fictions died hard. Crazy old Dubrovic had given
men everywhere the weapon of freedom, but only time and patience would
give them full understanding of what freedom was.

Well, after all, this area had been drowned for centuries in the blood
of rebellious men. It was the ones who gave in easily who'd had the
leisure to breed children. He imagined things were different in the
Western Hemisphere, where history had not had its tyrannous centuries
to grind away the spirited men. But even here, more and more families
were becoming self-contained units, learning to synthesize food and
turn farms into parks, abandoning the market-place towns that should
have died with the first MGB man found burned in an alley.

It was coming--the day when all men would be as free of their past as
of their fellow men. It seemed, now, that he would never completely see
it. That was too bad. He'd hoped for at least some quiet years at home.
But that choice had been made twenty-eight years ago.

Sometimes a man had to be a prisoner of his own conscience. He could
have stayed home and let someone else do it, but freedom was too
precious to consign to someone he didn't fully trust.

Now he'd have to call a League election as soon as possible. Actually,
the snowball was well on its way downhill, and all that remained for
the next president was the tying up of some loose ends. The business
in the outlying districts--the insistence on mistaking inter-family
disputes for raids from the northwest--would blow over. A society of
armed Freeman families had to go through such a period. Once mutual
respect was established--once the penalty for anti-sociability became
quite clear--then the society would function smoothly.

And as for who would succeed him, there wasn't a better candidate
than Jem Bendix. Jem had always thought the way he did, and Jem was
intelligent. Furthermore, everyone liked Jem--there'd be no trouble
about the election.

So that was settled. He looked at his clock again and saw that he had
a half hour more. He pushed his work out of the way, reached into a
drawer, and took out a few sheets of paper. He frowned with impatience
at himself as his hands fumbled. For a moment, he brooded down at the
seamed stumps where the old regime's police wires had cut through his
thumbs. Then, holding his pen clamped firmly between his middle and
index knuckles, he began writing:

"I, Joseph Ferassi Kimmensen, being of sound mind and mature years, do
make the following Will...."



                              CHAPTER III


Messerschmidt was tall and bony as a wolfhound. His long face was
pale, and his ears were large and prominent. Of his features, the ears
were the first to attract a casual glance. Then attention shifted to
his mouth, hooked in a permanent sardonic grimace under his blade of
a nose. Then his eyes caught, and held. They were dark and set close
together, under shaggy black eyebrows. There was something in them that
made Kimmensen's hackles rise.

He tried to analyze it as Messerschmidt bowed slightly from the hips,
his hands down at the sides of his dark clothes.

"Mr. President, I'm honored."

"Messerschmidt." Kimmensen acknowledged, out of courtesy. The man
turned slightly and bowed to Bendix. "Mr. Secretary."

And now Kimmensen caught it. Toward him, Messerschmidt had been a bit
restrained. But his bow to Jem was a shade too deep, and his voice as
he delivered Jem's title was too smooth.

It was mockery. Deep, ineradicable, and unveiled, it lurked in the
backs of Messerschmidt's eyes. Mockery--and the most colossal ego
Kimmensen had ever encountered.

_Good God!_ Kimmensen thought, _I believed we'd killed all your kind!_

"Father, I invited--" Susanne had begun, her face animated for once.
Now she looked from Jem to Kimmensen and her face fell and set into a
mask. "Never mind," she said flatly. She looked at Kimmensen again, and
turned to Messerschmidt. "I'm sorry, Anse. You'll excuse me. I have to
see to the dinner."

"Of course, Susanne," Messerschmidt said. "I hope to see you again."

Susanne nodded--a quick, sharp jerk of her head--and went quickly into
the kitchen. Messerschmidt, Jem, and Kimmensen faced each other.

"An awkward situation," Messerschmidt said quietly.

"You made it," Kimmensen answered.

Messerschmidt shrugged. "I'll take the blame. I think we'd best say
good night."

"Good night."

"Good night, Mr. President ... Mr. Secretary."

Messerschmidt bowed to each of them and stepped out of the living room,
carefully closing the panel behind him. He walked through the pool of
light from the living room and disappeared into the darkness on the
other side of the patio. In a minute, Kimmensen heard his plane beat
its way into the air, and then he sat down again, clutching his glass.
He saw that Bendix was white-lipped and shaking.

"So now I've met him," Kimmensen said, conscious of the strain in his
voice.

"That man can't be allowed to stay alive!" Bendix burst out. "If all
the things I hate were ever personified, they're in him."

"Yes," Kimmensen said, nodding slowly. "You're right--he's dangerous."
But Kimmensen was less ready to let his emotions carry him away. The
days of political killings were over--finished forever. "But I think we
can trust the society to pull his teeth."

Kimmensen hunched forward in thought. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, at
work. Our personal feelings are unimportant, compared to the steps we
have to take as League officers."

That closed the matter for tonight, as he'd hoped it would. He still
hoped that somehow tonight's purpose could be salvaged.

       *       *       *       *       *

In that, he was disappointed. It was an awkward, forced meal, with the
three of them silent and pretending nothing had happened, denying the
existence of another human being. They were three people attempting
to live in a sharply restricted private universe, their conversation
limited to comments on the food. At the end of the evening, all their
nerves were screaming. Susanne's face was pinched and drawn together,
her temples white. When Kimmensen blotted his lips, he found fresh
blood on the napkin.

Jem stood up awkwardly. "Well ... thank you very much for inviting me,
Joe." He looked toward Susanne and hesitated. "It was a delicious meal,
Sue. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Well ... I'd better be getting home...."

Kimmensen nodded, terribly disappointed. He'd planned to let Susanne
fly Jem home.

"Take the plane, Jem," he said finally. "You can pick me up in the
morning."

"All right. Thank you.... Good night, Sue."

"Good night."

"Joe."

"Good night, Jem." He wanted to somehow restore Bendix's spirits.
"We'll have a long talk about that other business in the morning," he
reminded him.

"Yes, sir." It did seem to raise his chin a little.

       *       *       *       *       *

After Jem had left, Kimmensen turned slowly toward Susanne. She sat
quietly, her eyes on her empty coffee cup.

_Waiting_, Kimmensen thought.

She knew, of course, that she'd hurt him badly again. She expected his
anger. Well, how could he help but be angry? Hadn't any of the things
he'd told her ever made any impression on her?

"Susanne."

She raised her head and he saw the stubborn, angry set to her mouth.
"Father, please don't lecture me again." Every word was low, tight, and
controlled.

Kimmensen clenched his hands. He'd never been able to understand this
kind of defiance. Where did she get that terribly misplaced hardness
in her fiber? What made her so unwilling to listen when someone older
and wiser tried to teach her?

If I didn't love her, he thought, this wouldn't matter to me. But in
spite of everything, I do love her. So I go on, every day, trying to
make her see.

"I can't understand you," he said. "What makes you act this way? Where
did it come from? You're nothing like your mother,"--though, just
perhaps, even if the thought twisted his heart, she was--"and you're
nothing like me."

"I am," she said in a low voice, looking down again. "I'm exactly like
you."

When she spoke nonsense like that, it annoyed him more than anything
else could have. And where anger could be kept in check, annoyance
could not.

"Listen to me," he said.

"Don't lecture me again."

"Susanne! You will keep quiet and listen. Do you realize what you're
doing, flirting with a man like Messerschmidt? Do you realize--has
anything I've told you ever made an impression on you?--do you realize
that except for an accident in time, that man could be one of the
butchers who killed your mother?"

"Father, I've heard you say these things before. We've all heard you
say them."

Now he'd begun, it was no longer any use not to go on. "Do you realize
they oppressed and murdered and shipped to labor camps all the people
I loved, all the people who were worthwhile in the world, until we
rose up and wiped them out?" His hands folded down whitely on the arms
of his chair. "Where are your grandparents buried? Do you know? Do I?
Where is my brother? Where are my sisters?"

"I don't know. I never knew them."

"Listen--I was born in a world too terrible for you to believe. I
was born to cower. I was born to die in a filthy cell under a police
station. Do you know what a police station is, eh? Have I described one
often enough? Your mother was born to work from dawn to night, hauling
stones to repair the roads the army tanks had ruined. And if she made a
mistake--if she raised her head, if she talked about the wrong things,
if she thought the wrong thoughts--then she was born to go to a labor
camp and strip tree bark for the army's medicines while she stood up to
her waist in freezing water.

"I was born in a world where half a billion human beings lived for a
generation in worship--in _worship_--of a _man_. I was born in a world
where that one twisted man could tell a lie and send gigantic armies
charging into death, screaming that lie. I was born to huddle, to be a
cipher in a crowd, to be spied on, to be regulated, to be hammered to
meet the standard so the standard lie would fit me. I was born to be
nothing."

Slowly, Kimmensen's fingers uncurled. "But now I have freedom. Stepan
Dubrovic managed to find freedom for all of us. I remember how the word
spread--how it whispered all over the world, almost in one night, it
seemed. Take a wire--twist it, so. Take a vacuum tube--the army has
radios, there are stores the civil servants use, there are old radios,
hidden--make the weapon ... and you are free. And we rose up, each man
like an angel with a sword of fire.

"But if we thought Paradise would come overnight, we were wrong. The
armies did not dissolve of themselves. The Systems did not break down.

"You take a child from the age of five; you teach it to love the
State, to revere the Leader; you inform it that it is the wave of the
future, much cleverer than the decadent past but not quite intelligent
enough to rule itself. You teach it that there must be specialists
in government--Experts in Economy, Directors of Internal Resources,
Ministers of Labor Utilization. What can you do with a child like
that, by the time it is sixteen? By the time it is marching down the
road with a pack on its back, with the Leader's song on its lips? With
the song written so its phrases correspond to the ideal breathing
cycle for the average superman marching into the Future at one hundred
centimeters to the pace?"

"Stop it, Father."

"You burn him down. How else can you change him? You burn him down
where he marches, you burn his Leaders, you burn the System, you root
out--_everything_!"

Kimmensen sighed. "And then you begin to be free." He looked urgently
at Susanne. "Now do you understand what Messerschmidt is? If you can't
trust my advice, can you at least understand that much? Has what I've
always told you finally made some impression?"

Susanne pushed her chair back. "No. I understood it the first time and
I saw how important it was. I still understood it the tenth time. But
now I've heard it a thousand times. I don't care what the world was
like--I don't care what you went through. I never saw it. You. You sit
in your office and write the same letters day after day, and you play
with your weapon, and you preach your social theory as though it was
a religion and you were its high priest--special, dedicated, above
us all, above the flesh. You tell me how to live my life. You try to
arrange it to fit your ideas. You even try to cram Jem Bendix down my
throat.

"But I won't have you treating me that way. When Anse talks to me, it's
about him and me, not about people I never met. I have things I want.
I want Anse. I'm telling you and you can tell Bendix. And if you don't
stop trying to order me around, I'll move out. That's all."

Clutching his chair, not quite able to believe what he'd heard, knowing
that in a moment pain and anger would crush him down, Kimmensen
listened to her quick footsteps going away into her room.



                              CHAPTER IV


He was waiting out on the patio, in the bright cold of the morning,
when Jem Bendix brought the plane down and picked him up. Bendix was
pale this morning, and puffy-eyed, as though he'd been a long time
getting to sleep and still had not shaken himself completely awake.

"Good morning, Joe," he said heavily as Kimmensen climbed in beside
him.

"Good morning, Jem." Kimmensen, too, had stayed awake a long time. This
morning, he had washed and dressed and drunk his coffee with Susanne's
bedroom door closed and silent, and then he had come out on the patio
to wait for Jem, not listening for sounds in the house. "I'm--I'm very
sorry for the way things turned out last night." He left it at that.
There was no point in telling Jem about Susanne's hysterical outburst.

Jem shook his head as he lifted the plane into the air. "No, Joe. It
wasn't your fault. You couldn't help that."

"She's my daughter. I'm responsible for her."

Jem shrugged. "She's headstrong. Messerschmidt paid her some attention,
and he became a symbol of rebellion to her. She sees him as someone who
isn't bound by your way of life. He's a glamorous figure. But she'll
get over it. I spent a long time last night thinking about it. You were
right, Joe. At the moment, he's something new and exciting. But he'll
wear off. The society'll see through him, and so will Susanne. All we
have to do is wait."

Kimmensen brooded over the valleys far below, pale under the early
morning mist. "I'm not sure, Jem," he answered slowly. He had spent
hours last night in his chair, hunched over, not so much thinking as
steeping his mind in all the things that had happened so suddenly.
Finally, he had gotten up and gone into his bedroom, where he lay on
his bed until a plan of action slowly formed in his mind and he could,
at last, go to sleep.

"It's not the matter of Messerschmidt and Susanne," he explained
quickly. "I hope you understand that I'm speaking now as someone
responsible to all the families in this area, rather than as the head
of any particular one. What concerns me now is that Messerschmidt is
bound to have some sort of following among the immature. He's come at
a bad time. He's in a good position to exploit this business in the
Northwest."

And I'm going to die. Kimmensen had to pause before he went on.

"Yes, in time his bubble will burst. But it's a question of how long
that might take. Meanwhile, he is a focus of unrest. If nothing happens
to check him now, some people might decide he was right."

Bendix chewed his lower lip. "I see what you mean, Joe. It'll get worse
before it gets better. He'll attract more followers. And the ones he
has now will believe in him more than ever."

"Yes," Kimmensen said slowly, "that could easily happen."

They flew in silence for a few moments, the plane jouncing in the bumpy
air, and then as Bendix slowed the vanes and they began to settle down
into the valley where the office building was, Jem asked, "Do you have
anything in mind?"

Kimmensen nodded. "Yes. It's got to be shown that he doesn't have the
population behind him. His followers will be shocked to discover how
few of them there are. And the people wavering toward him will realize
how little he represents. I'm going to call for an immediate election."

"Do you think that's the answer? Will he run against you?"

"If he refuses to run in an election, that's proof enough he knows he
couldn't possibly win. If he runs, he'll lose. It's the best possible
move. And, Jem ... there's another reason." Kimmensen had thought it
all out. And it seemed to him that he could resolve all his convergent
problems with this one move. He would stop Messerschmidt, he would pass
his work on to Jem, and--perhaps this was a trifle more on his mind
than he'd been willing to admit--once Messerschmidt had been deflated,
Susanne would be bound to see her tragic error, and the three of them
could settle down, and he could finish his life quietly.

"Jem, I'm getting old."

Bendix's face turned paler. He licked his lips. "Joe--"

"No, Jem, we've got to face it. Don't try to be polite about it. No
matter how much you protest, the fact is I'm almost worn out, and I
know it. I'm going to resign."

Bendix's hands jerked on the control wheel.

Kimmensen pretended not to see it. For all his maturity, Jem was
still a young man. It was only natural that the thought of stepping
up so soon would be a great thrill to him. "I'll nominate you as my
successor, and I'll campaign for you. By winning the election, you'll
have stopped Messerschmidt, and then everything can go on the way
we've always planned." Yes, he thought as the plane bumped down on the
weathered plaza. That'll solve everything.

       *       *       *       *       *

As Kimmensen stepped into his office, he saw Salmaggi sitting beside
the desk, waiting for him. The man's broad back was toward him, and
Kimmensen could not quite restrain the flicker of distaste that
always came at the thought of talking to him. Of all mornings, this
was a particularly bad one on which to listen to the man pour out his
hysterias.

"Good morning, Tullio," he said as he crossed to his desk.

Salmaggi turned quickly in his chair. "Good morning, Josef." He jumped
to his feet and pumped Kimmensen's hand. "How are you?" His bright eyes
darted quickly over Kimmensen's face.

"Well, thank you. And you?"

Salmaggi dropped back into his chair. "Worried, Josef. I've been trying
to see you about something very important."

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry I've been so busy."

"Yes. So I thought if you weren't too busy this morning, you might be
able to spare ten minutes."

Kimmensen glanced at him sharply. But Salmaggi's moon of a face was
completely clear of sarcasm or any other insinuation. There were only
the worried wrinkles over the bridge of his nose and at the corners of
his eyes. Kimmensen could not help thinking that Salmaggi looked like a
baby confronted by the insuperable problem of deciding whether or not
it wanted to go to the bathroom. "I've got a number of important things
to attend to this morning, Tullio."

"Ten minutes, Josef."

Kimmensen sighed. "All right." He settled himself patiently in his
chair.

"I was up in the northwest part of the area again on this last trip."

"Um-hmm." Kimmensen, sacrificing the ten minutes, busied himself with
thinking about Jem's reaction to his decision. Bendix had seemed
totally overwhelmed, not saying another word as they walked from the
plane into the office building.

"There's been another family burned out."

"So I understand, Tullio." Kimmensen smiled faintly to himself,
understanding how Jem must feel today. It had been something of the
same with himself when, just before the end of the fighting years, the
realization had slowly come to him that it would be he who would have
to take the responsibility of stabilizing this area.

"That makes seven in all, Josef. Seven in the past eighteen months."

"It takes time, Tullio. The country toward the northwest is quite
rugged. No regime was ever able to send its police up there with any
great success. They're individualistic people. It's only natural they'd
have an unusual number of feuds." Kimmensen glanced at his clock.

It was a great responsibility, he was thinking to himself. I remember
how confused everything was. How surprised we were to discover, after
the old regime was smashed, that many of us had been fighting for
utterly different things.

That had been the most important thing he'd had to learn; that almost
everyone was willing to fight and die to end the old regime, but that
once the revolution was won, there were a score of new regimes that had
waited, buried in the hearts of suppressed men, to flower out and fill
the vacuum. That was when men who had been his friends were suddenly
his enemies, and when men whose lives he had saved now tried to burn
him down. In many ways, that had been the very worst period of the
fighting years.

"Josef, have you gone up there recently?"

Kimmensen shook his head. "I've been very occupied here." His
responsibility was to all the families in the area, not to just those
in one small section. He could never do his work while dashing from one
corner of the area to another.

"Josef, you're not listening!" Kimmensen looked up and was shocked
to see that there were actually glints of frustrated moisture in the
corners of Salmaggi's eyes.

"Of course I'm listening, Tullio," he said gently.

Salmaggi shook his head angrily, like a man trying to reach his
objective in the midst of a thick fog. "Josef, if you don't do
something, Messerschmidt's going to take an army up into the
Northwesters' area. And I'm not sure he isn't right. I don't like
him--but I'm not sure he isn't right."

Kimmensen smiled. "Tullio, if that's what's on your mind, you can rest
easy. I am going to do something. This afternoon, I'm going to make a
general broadcast. I'm going to call an election. I'm resigning, and
Jem Bendix will run against Messerschmidt. That will be the end of him."

Salmaggi looked at him. "Of who?"

"Of Messerschmidt, of course," Kimmensen answered in annoyance. "Now if
you'll excuse me, Tullio, I have to draft my statement."

       *       *       *       *       *

That night, when he came home, he found Susanne waiting for him in the
living room. She looked at him peculiarly as he closed the panel behind
him.

"Hello, Father."

"Hello, Susanne." He had been hoping that the passage of a day would
dull her emotional state, and at least let the two of them speak to
each other like civilized people. But, looking at her, he saw how tense
her face was and how red the nervous blotches were in the pale skin at
the base of her neck.

What happened between us? he thought sadly. Where did it start? I
raised you alone from the time you were six months old. I stayed up
with you at night when your teeth came. I changed your diapers and put
powder on your little bottom, and when you were sick I woke up every
hour all night for weeks to give you your medicine. I held you and gave
you your bottles, and you were warm and soft, and when I tickled you
under the chin you laughed up at me. Why can't you smile with me now?
Why do you do what you do to me?

"I heard your broadcast, of course," she said tightly.

"I thought you would."

"Just remember something, Father."

"What, Susanne?"

"There are a lot of us old enough to vote, this time."



                               CHAPTER V


Kimmensen shifted in his chair, blinking in the sunshine of the plaza.
Messerschmidt sat a few feet away, looking up over the heads of the
live audience at the mountains. The crowd was waiting patiently and
quietly. It was the quiet that unsettled him a little bit. He hadn't
said anything to Jem, but he'd half expected some kind of demonstration
against Messerschmidt.

Still, this was only a fraction of the League membership. There
were cameras flying at each corner of the platform, and the bulk of
the electorate were watching from their homes. There was no telling
what their reaction was, but Kimmensen, on thinking it over, decided
that the older, more settled proportion of the League--the people in
the comfort of their homes, enjoying the products of their own free
labor--would be as outraged at this man as he was.

He turned his head back over his shoulder and looked at Jem.

"We'll be starting in a moment. How do you feel?"

Jem's smile was a dry-lipped grimace. "A little nervous. How about you,
Joe?"

Kimmensen smiled back at him. "This is an old story to me, Jem.
Besides, I'm not running." He clasped his hands in his lap and faced
front again, forcing his fingers to keep still.

The surprisingly heavy crowd here in the plaza was all young people.

In a moment, the light flashed on above the microphone, and Kimmensen
stood up and crossed the platform. There was a good amount of applause
from the crowd, and Kimmensen smiled down at them. Then he lifted his
eyes to the camera that had flown into position in front of and above
him.

"Fellow citizens," he began, "as you know, I'm not running in this
election." There was silence from the crowd. He'd half expected some
sort of demonstration of disappointment--at least a perfunctory one.

There was none. Well, he'd about conceded this crowd of youngsters to
Messerschmidt. It was the people at home who mattered.

"I'm here to introduce the candidate I think should be our next League
President--Secretary Jem Bendix."

This time the crowd reacted. As Jem got up and bowed, and the other
cameras focussed on him, there was a stir in the plaza, and one young
voice broke in: "Why introduce him? Everybody knows him."

"Sure," somebody else replied. "He's a nice guy."

Messerschmidt sat quietly in his chair, his eyes still on the
mountains. He made a spare figure in his dark clothes, with his pale
face under the shock of black hair.

Kimmensen started to go on as Jem sat down. But then, timed precisely
for the second when he was firmly back in his chair, the voice that had
shouted the first time added: "But who wants him for President?"

A chorus of laughter exploded out of the crowd. Kimmensen felt his
stomach turn icy. That had been pre-arranged. Messerschmidt had the
crowd packed. He'd have to make the greatest possible effort to offset
this. He began speaking again, ignoring the outburst.

"We're here today to decide whom we want for our next president. But
in a greater sense, we are here to decide whether we shall keep our
freedom or whether we shall fall back into a tyranny as odious as any,
as evil as any that crushed us to the ground for so long."

As he spoke, the crowd quieted. He made an impressive appearance on a
platform, he knew. This _was_ an old story to him, and now he made use
of all the experience gathered through the years.

"We are here to decide our future. This is not just an ordinary
election. We are here to decide whether we are going to remain as we
are, of whether we are going to sink back into the bloody past."

As always, he felt the warmth of expressing himself--of re-affirming
the principles by which he lived. "We are here to choose between a life
of peace and harmony, a life in which no man is oppressed in any way by
any other, a life of fellowship, a life of peaceful trade, a life of
shared talents and ideals--or a life of rigid organization, of slavery
to a high-sounding phrase and a remorseless system of government that
fits its subjects to itself rather than pattern itself to meet their
greatest good."

He spoke to them of freedom--of what life had been like before they
were born, of how bitter the struggle had been, and of how Freemen
ought to live.

They followed every word attentively, and when he finished he sat down
to applause.

He sat back in his chair. Jem, behind him, whispered:

"Joe, that was wonderful! I've never heard it better said. Joe, I ...
I've got to admit that before I heard you today, I was scared--plain
scared. I didn't think I was ready. It--it seemed like such a big job,
all alone.... But now I know you're with me, forever...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Messerschmidt got up. It seemed to Kimmensen as though the entire crowd
inhaled simultaneously.

"Fellow citizens." Messerschmidt delivered the opening flatly, standing
easily erect, and then stood waiting. The attention of the crowd
fastened on him, and the cameras dipped closer.

"First," Messerschmidt said, "I'd like to pay my respects to President
Kimmensen. I can truthfully say I've never heard him deliver that
speech more fluently." A ripple of laughter ran around the crowd.
"Then, I'd like to simply ask a few questions." Messerschmidt had gone
on without waiting for the laughter to die out. It stopped as though
cut by a knife. "I would have liked to hear Candidate Bendix make his
own speech, but I'm afraid he did." Messerschmidt turned slightly
toward Bendix's chair. In Kimmensen's judgment, he was not using the
best tone of voice for a rabble-rouser.

"Yes, Jem Bendix is a nice guy. No one has a bad word for him. Why
should they? What's he ever done on any impulse of his own--what's he
ever said except 'me, too'?"

Kimmensen's jaws clamped together in incredulous rage. He'd expected
Messerschmidt to hit low. But this was worse than low. This was a
deliberate, muddy-handed perversion of the campaign speech's purpose.

"I wonder," Messerschmidt went on, "whether Jem Kimmensen--excuse me;
Jem _Bendix_--would be here on this platform today if Josef Kimmensen
hadn't realized it was time to put a shield between himself and the
citizens he calls his fellows. Let's look at the record."

Kimmensen's hands crushed his thighs, and he stared grimly at
Messerschmidt's back.

"Let's look at the record. You and I are citizens of the Freemen's
League. Which is a voluntary organization. Now--who founded the League?
Josef Kimmensen. Who's been the only League President we've ever had?
Who _is_ the League, by the grace of considerable spellbinding powers
and an electorate which--by the very act of belonging to the League--is
kept so split up that it's rare when a man gets a chance to talk things
out with his neighbor?

"I know--we've all got communicators and we've all got planes. But you
don't get down to earth over a communicator, and you don't realize the
other fellow's got the same gripes you do while you're both flapping
around up in the air. When you don't meet your neighbor face to face,
and get friendly with him, and see that he's got your problems,
you never realize that maybe things aren't the way Josef Kimmensen
says they are. You never get together and decide that all of Josef
Kimmensen's fine words don't amount to anything.

"But the League's a voluntary organization. We're all in it, and, God
help me, I'm running for President of it. Why do we stick with it? Why
did we all join up?

"Well, most of us are in it because our fathers were in it. And it
was a good thing, then. It still can be. Lord knows, in those days
they needed something to hold things steady, and I guess the habit of
belonging grew into us. But why don't we pull out of this voluntary
organization now, if we're unhappy about it for some reason? I'll tell
you why--because if we do, our kids don't go to school and when they're
sick they can't get into the hospital. And do you think Joe Kimmensen
didn't think of that?"

The crowd broke into the most sullen roar Kimmensen had heard in
twenty-eight years. He blanched, and then rage crashed through him.
Messerschmidt was deliberately whipping them up. These youngsters out
here didn't have children to worry about. But Messerschmidt was using
the contagion of their hysteria to infect the watchers at home.

He saw that suddenly and plainly, and he cursed himself for ever having
put this opportunity in Messerschmidt's hands. But who would have
believed that Freemen would be fools enough--_stupid_ enough--to listen
to this man?

Of course, perhaps those at home weren't listening.

"And what about the Northwesters' raids? Josef Kimmensen says there
aren't any raids. He says we're settling our unimportant little feuds."
This time, Messerschmidt waited for the baying laughter to fade.
"Well, maybe he believes it. Maybe. But suppose you were a man who held
this area in the palm of your hand? Suppose you had the people split up
into little families, where they couldn't organize to get at you. And
now, suppose somebody said, 'We need an army.' What would you do about
that? What would you think about having an organized body of fighting
men ready to step on you if you got too big for people to stand? Would
you say, if you were that man--would you say, 'O.K., we'll have an
army,' or would you say, 'It's all a hoax. There aren't any raids. Stay
home. Stay split up?' Would you say that, while we were all getting
killed?"

The savage roar exploded from the crowd, and in the middle of it
Messerschmidt walked quietly back to his chair and sat down.

Jem's fist was hammering down on the back of Kimmensen's chair.

"We should never have let him get on this platform! A man like that
can't be treated like a civilized human being! He has to be destroyed,
like an animal!"

Heartsick and enraged, Kimmensen stared across the platform at the
blade-nosed man.

"Not like an animal," he whispered to himself. "Not like an animal.
Like a disease."

       *       *       *       *       *

Still shaken, still sick, Kimmensen sat in his office and stared down
at his hands. Twenty-eight years of selfless dedication had brought him
to this day.

He looked up at the knock on his open door, and felt himself turn rigid.

"May I come in?" Messerschmidt asked quietly, unmoving, waiting for
Kimmensen's permission.

Kimmensen tightened his hands. "What do you want?"

"I'd like to apologize for my performance this afternoon." The voice
was still quiet, and still steady. The mouth, with its deep line etched
at one corner, was grave and a little bit sad.

"Come in," Kimmensen said, wondering what new tactic Messerschmidt
would use.

"Thank you." He crossed the office. "May I sit down?"

Kimmensen nodded toward the chair, and Messerschmidt took it. "Mr.
President, the way I slanted my speech this afternoon was unjust in
many respects. I did it that way knowingly, and I know it must have
upset you a great deal." His mouth hooked into its quirk, but his eyes
remained grave.

"Then why did you do it?" Kimmensen snapped. He watched Messerschmidt's
face carefully, waiting for the trap he knew the man must be spinning.

"I did it because I want to be President. I only hope I did it well
enough to win. I didn't have time to lay the groundwork work for a
careful campaign. I would have used the same facts against you in any
case, but I would have preferred not to cloak them in hysterical terms.
But there wasn't time. There isn't time--I've got to destroy this
society you've created as soon as I can. After tonight's election, I
will."

"You _egomaniac_!" Kimmensen whispered incredulously. "You're so
convinced of your superiority that you'll even come here--to _me_--and
boast about your twisted plans. You've got the gall to come here and
tell me what you're going to do--given the chance."

"I came here to apologize, Mr. Kimmensen. And then I answered your
question."

Kimmensen heard his voice rising and didn't care. "We'll see who wins
the election! We'll see whether a man can ride roughshod over other men
because he believes he has a mission to perform!"

"Mr. President," Messerschmidt said in his steady voice, "I have no
idea of whether I am supplied with a mission to lead. I doubt it. I
don't particularly feel it. But when I speak my opinions, people agree
with me. It isn't a question of my wanting to or not wanting to.
People follow me."

"No Freeman in his right mind will follow you!"

"But they will. What it comes down to is that I speak for more of them
than you. There's no Utopia with room for men like you and me, and yet
we're here. We're constantly being born. So there's a choice--kill us,
burn us down, or smash your Utopia. And you can't kill more than one
generation of us."

Messerschmidt's eyes were brooding. His mouth twisted deeper into
sadness. "I don't like doing this to you, Mr. President, because I
understand you. I think you're wrong, but I understand you. So I came
here to apologize.

"I'm a leader. People follow me. If they follow me, I have to lead
them. It's a closed circle. What else can I do? Kill myself and leave
them leaderless? Someday, when I'm in your position and another man's
in mine, events may very well move in that direction. But until the
man who'll displace me is born and matures, I have to be what I am,
just as you do. I have to do something about the Northwesters. I have
to get these people back together again so they're a whole, instead of
an aggregate of isolated pockets. I have to give them places to live
together. Not all of us, Mr. President, were born to live in eagle
rooks on mountaintops. So I've got to hurt you, because that's what the
people need."

Kimmensen shook in reaction to the man's consummate arrogance. He
remembered Bausch, when they finally burst into his office, and the way
the great fat hulk of the man had protested: "Why are you doing this? I
was working for _your_ good--for the good of this nation--why are you
doing _this_?"

"That's enough of you and your kind's hypocrisy, Messerschmidt!" he
choked out. "I've got nothing further I want to hear from you. You're
everything I despise and everything I fought to destroy. I've killed
men like you. After the election tonight, you'll see just how few
followers you have. I trust you'll understand it as a clear warning to
get out of this area before we kill one more."

Messerschmidt stood up quietly. "I doubt if you'll find the election
coming out in quite that way," he said, his voice still as calm as it
had been throughout. "It might have been different if you hadn't so
long persisted in fighting for the last generation's revolution."

       *       *       *       *       *

Kimmensen sat stiffly in Jem Bendix's office.

"Where's he now?" Bendix demanded, seething.

"I don't know. He'll have left the building."

Bendix looked at Kimmensen worriedly. "Joe--_can_ he win the election?"

Kimmensen looked at Jem for a long time. All his rage was trickling
away like sand pouring through the bottom of a rotted sack. "I think
so." There was only a sick, chilling fear left in him.

Bendix slapped his desk with his hand. "But he _can't_! He just
_can't_! He's bulldozed the electorate, he hasn't promised one single
thing except an army, he doesn't have a constructive platform at
all--no, by God, he can't take that away from me, too!--Joe, what're we
going to _do_?"

He turned his pale and frightened face toward Kimmensen. "Joe--tonight,
when the returns come in--let's be here in this building. Let's be
right there in the room with the tabulating recorder. We've got to make
sure it's an honest count."



                              CHAPTER VI


There was only one bare overhead bulb in the tabulator room. Bendix
had brought in two plain chairs from the offices upstairs, and now
Kimmensen sat side by side with him, looking at the gray bulk of the
machine. The room was far down under the building. The walls and floor
were cement, and white rime bloomed dankly in the impressions left by
form panels that had been set there long ago.

The tabulating recorder was keyed into every League communicator, and
every key was cross-indexed into the census files. It would accept one
vote from each mature member of every League family. It flashed running
totals on the general broadcast wavelength.

"It seems odd," Bendix said in a husky voice. "An election without
Salmaggi running."

Kimmensen nodded. The flat walls distorted voices until they sounded
like the whispers of grave-robbers in a tomb.

"Did you ask him why he wasn't?" he asked because silence was worse.

"He said he didn't know whose ticket to run on."

Kimmensen absorbed it as one more fact and let it go.

"The first votes ought to be coming in." Bendix was looking at his
watch. "It's time."

Kimmensen nodded.

"It's ironic," Bendix said. "We have a society that trusts itself
enough to leave this machine unguarded, and now the machine's recording
an election that's a meaningless farce. Give the electorate one more
day and it'd have time to think about Messerschmidt's hate-mongering.
As it is, half the people'll be voting for him with their emotions
instead of their intelligence."

"It'll be a close election," Kimmensen said. He was past pretending.

"It won't _be_ an election!" Bendix burst out, slamming his hand on his
knee. "One vote for Bendix. Two votes for Mob Stupidity." He looked
down at the floor. "It couldn't be worse if Messerschmidt were down
here himself, tampering with the tabulator circuits."

Kimmensen asked in a dry voice: "Is it that easy?"

"Throwing the machine off? Yes, once you have access to it. Each
candidate has an assigned storage circuit where his votes accumulate.
A counter electrode switches back and forth from circuit to circuit as
the votes come in. With a piece of insulation to keep it from making
contact, and a jumper wire to throw the charge over into the opposing
memory cells, a vote for one candidate can be registered for the other.
A screwdriver'll give you access to the assembly involved. I ...
studied up on it--to make sure Messerschmidt didn't try it."

"I see," Kimmensen said.

They sat in silence for a time. Then the machine began to click.
"Votes, coming in," Bendix said. He reached in his blouse pocket. "I
brought a communications receiver to listen on."

They sat without speaking again for almost a half hour, listening.
Then Kimmensen looked at Bendix. "Those'll be his immediate followers,
voting early," he said. "It'll even out, probably, when most of the
families finish supper." His voice sounded unreal to himself.

Bendix paced back and forth, perspiration shining wetly on his face in
the light from the overhead bulb. "It's not fair," he said huskily.
"It's not a true election. It doesn't represent anything." He looked at
Kimmensen desperately. "It's not _fair_, Joe!"

Kimmensen sighed. "All right, Jem. I assume you brought the necessary
equipment--the screwdriver, the insulation, and so forth?"

       *       *       *       *       *

After another half hour, Bendix looked across the room at Kimmensen.
The removed panel lay on the floor at his feet, its screws rocking back
and forth inside its curvature. "Joe, it's still not enough."

Kimmensen nodded, listening to the totals on the receiver.

"How many are you switching now?" he asked.

"One out of every three Messerschmidt votes is registering for me."

"Make it one out of two," Kimmensen said harshly.

       *       *       *       *       *

They barely caught up with Messerschmidt's total. It was a close
election. Closer than any Kimmensen had ever been in before. Bendix
replaced the panel. They put out the room light and climbed back up to
the ground level offices, bringing the chairs with them.

"Well, Joe, it's done." Bendix whispered though there was no one
listening.

"Yes, it is."

"A thing like this creeps over you," Jem said in a wondering voice.
"You begin by telling yourself you're only rectifying a mistake people
would never make if they had time to think. You set a figure--one out
of five. One person out of five, you say to yourself, would switch his
own vote, given the chance. Then you wonder if it might not be one out
of four--and then three.... Joe, I swear when I first suggested we go
down there tonight, I hadn't a thought of doing--what we did. Even when
I put the insulation and wire in my pocket, I never thought I'd--"

"Didn't you?" Kimmensen said. He felt disinterested. They'd had to do
it, and they'd done it. Now the thing was to forget about it. "Good
night, Bendix."

He left him and walked slowly through the corridors left over from
another time. He went down the front steps and out into the plaza.

He found Messerschmidt waiting for him. He was standing in the shadow
of the plane's cabin, and the plaza lights barely showed his face.
Kimmensen stopped still.

Messerschmidt's features were a pale ghost of himself in the darkness.
"Didn't you think I'd make spot-checks?" he asked with pity in his
voice. "I had people voting at timed intervals, with witnesses, while I
checked the running total."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Messerschmidt nodded slowly. "Mr. Kimmensen, if I'd thought for a
minute you'd do something like that, I'd have had some of my men in
that building with you." His hands moved in the only unsure gesture
Kimmensen had ever seen him make. "I had a good idea of how the vote
would go. When it started right, and suddenly began petering out, I had
to start checking. Mr. Kimmensen, did you really think you could get
away with it?"

"Get away with what? Are you going to claim fraud--repudiate the
election? Is that it?"

"Wait--wait, now--Mr. Kimmensen, didn't you rig the vote?"

"Are you insane?"

Messerschmidt's voice changed. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kimmensen. Once more, I
have to apologize. I ought to have known better. Bendix must have done
it by himself. I should have known--"

"No. No," Kimmensen sighed, "forget it, Messerschmidt. We did it
together."

Messerschmidt waited a long moment. "I see." His voice was dead. "Well.
You asked me if I was going to repudiate the election."

"Are you?"

"I don't know, yet. I'll have to think. I'll have to do something,
won't I?"

Kimmensen nodded in the darkness. "Somehow, you've won and I've lost."
Suddenly, it was all welling up inside him. "Somehow, you've arranged
to win no matter what decent men do!"

"All right, Mr. Kimmensen. Have it your way."

"Whatever you plan to do now, I'll be home. If you should need me for a
firing squad or some similar purpose."

Messerschmidt made an annoyed sound. "Mr. Kimmensen, you're notorious
for your dramatics, but I think that's going too far." He walked away
into the darkness.

Kimmensen climbed into his plane, sick at the night that covered him,
and furious at Messerschmidt's ruthlessly sharp mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no one at home. He walked methodically through the house,
doggedly opening Susanne's empty closets. Then he sat down in the
living room with the lights off, staring out into the starlit, moonless
night. He nodded sharply to himself.

"Of course," he said in the dark. "She'd be one of his timed voters."
Then he sat for a long time, eyes straight ahead and focussed on
nothing, every fold of his clothing rigidly in place, as though he were
his own statue.



                              CHAPTER VII


Until, hours later, orange flowers burst in the valley below. He came
erect, not understanding them for a moment, and then he ran out to
the patio, leaning over the parapet. On the faint wind, he heard the
distant sound of earth and houses bursting into vapor. In the valleys,
fire swirled in flashes through the dark, and against the glare of
burning trees he saw bobbing silhouettes of planes. Men were far too
small to be seen at this distance, but as firing stabbed down from the
planes other weapons answered from the ground.

Suddenly, he heard the flogging of a plane in the air directly
overhead. He jumped back, reaching for his weapon, before he recognized
Jem Bendix's sportster. It careened down to his landing stage, landing
with a violent jar, and Bendix thrust his head out of the cabin. "Joe!"

"What's happening?"

"Messerschmidt--he's taking over, in spite of the election! I was home
when I saw it start up. He and his followers're cutting down everybody
who won't stand for it. Come on!"

"What are you going to do?"

Bendix's face was red with rage. "I'm going to go down there and kill
him! I should have done it long ago. Are you coming with me?"

_Why not?_ Kimmensen grimaced. _Why wait to die here?_

He clambered into the plane and buckled his seat belt. Bendix flung
them up into the air. His hands on the wheel were white and shaking as
he pointed the plane along the mountain slope and sent them screaming
downward. "They're concentrated around the office building, from the
looks of it," he shouted over the whine of air. "I should have known
he'd do this! Well, I'm League President, by God, and I'm going to
settle for him right now!"

If you don't kill us first, Kimmensen thought, trying to check over
his weapon. Bendix was bent over the wheel, crouched forward as though
he wanted to crash directly into the plaza where Kimmensen could see
running men.

They pulled out of the dive almost too late. The plane smashed down
through the undergrowth behind the office building. Bendix flung his
door open and jumped out while the plane rocked violently.

Kimmensen climbed out more carefully. Even here, in the building's
shadow, the fires around the plaza were bright enough to let him see.
He pushed through the tangled shrubbery, hearing Bendix breaking
forward ahead of him. Bendix cleared the corner of the building. "I see
him, Joe!"

Kimmensen turned the corner, holding his weapon ready.

He could see Messerschmidt standing in a knot of men behind the
wreckage of a crashed plane. They were looking toward the opposite
slope, where gouts of fire were winking up and down the mountainside.
Kimmensen could faintly hear a snatch of what Messerschmidt was
shouting: "Damn it, Toni, we'll pull back when I--" but he lost the
rest. Then he saw Bendix lurch out of the bushes ten feet behind them.

"You! Messerschmidt! Turn around!"

Messerschmidt whirled away from the rest of the men, instinctively,
like a great cat, before he saw who it was. Then he lowered the weapon
in his hand, his mouth jerking in disgust. "Oh--it's you. Put that
thing down, or point it somewhere else. Maybe you can do some good
around here."

"Never mind that! I've had enough of you."

Messerschmidt moved toward him in quick strides. "Listen, I haven't got
time to play games." He cuffed the weapon out of Bendix's hand, rammed
him back with an impatient push against his chest, and turned back to
his men. "Hey, Toni, can you tell if those Northwesters're moving down
here yet?"

Kimmensen's cheeks sucked in. He stepped out into the plaza, noticing
Bendix out of the corners of his eyes, standing frozen where
Messerschmidt had pushed him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kimmensen came up to Messerschmidt and the man turned again. His eyes
widened. "Well, Mr. Kimmensen?"

"What's going on?"

Messerschmidt grunted. He pointed up the mountain. "There they are. I
suppose they knew they had to move fast once I repudiated the election.
They began airdropping men about a half hour ago. They're thick as
flies up there, and they'll be coming down here as soon as they're
through mopping up. That ought to be in a few minutes."

"Northwesters."

"That's right, Mr. Kimmensen.

"Well."

Messerschmidt smiled thinly. "I suppose you've guessed Susie's at my
house?"

"Will she be all right?"

Messerschmidt nodded. "It's fortified. That's our next holding point
when we fall back from here." His face was grave.

"Isn't there any chance of stopping them?"

Messerschmidt shook his head. "None. They're military specialists, Mr.
Kimmensen. We don't have any trained men."

"I see."

Messerschmidt looked at him without any perceptible triumph in his
eyes. "It seems, Mr. Kimmensen, that they have men like us in the
Northwest, too. Unfortunately, theirs seem to have moved faster."

"What're you going to do?"

Messerschmidt looked up the mountain and shrugged. "Nothing. We got
some of them in the air, but the rest are down. We may have weapons as
good as theirs, but they know how to use them in units. It's quite
simple. We'll try to hold and kill as many as we can when they come at
us. We'll keep retreating and holding as long as we can, and when we
reach the sea, if we get that far, we'll drown."

Kimmensen frowned. "Their men are concentrated on that mountain?"

"Yes."

"And you're just going to stand still and let the League be wiped out?"

"Just what, Mr. Kimmensen, would you like me to do?" Messerschmidt
looked at him in fury. "I don't have time to train an army of our own.
They've got us cold."

"Messerschmidt, I see eight men here with weapons."

"As far as anything we can accomplish goes, we might as well use them
to toast sandwiches."

"We can scour that mountainside. Down to bare rock."

Messerschmidt blanched. "You're joking."

"I am _not_!"

"There are people of ours up there."

"There are people of ours all through this area. When the Northwesters
are finished up there, they'll fan out and burn them all down, a little
bit at a time."

Messerschmidt looked at Kimmensen incredulously. "I can't do it.
There's a chance some of our people up there'll be able to slip out."

"By that time, the Northwesters'll be down here and dispersed."

Messerschmidt started to answer, and stopped.

"Messerschmidt, if you're going to do anything, you'd best do it
immediately."

Messerschmidt was shaking his head. "I can't do it. It's murder."

"Something much more important than human life is being murdered on
that mountain at this moment."

"All right, Kimmensen," Messerschmidt exploded, "if you're so hot for
it, _you_ give the order! There're something like a hundred League
families up there. Half of them're still alive, I'd say. If the
election's void, you're still president. You take the responsibility,
if you can."

"I can."

"Just like that."

"Messerschmidt, the defense of freedom is instantaneous and automatic."

"All right, Mr. Kimmensen," Messerschmidt sighed. He turned to his men.
"You heard him. It's his order. Aim at the mountain." He bared his
teeth in a distorted laugh. "In freedom's name--fire!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kimmensen watched it happen. He kept his face motionless, and he
thought that, in a way, it was just as well he hadn't long to live.

But it was done, and, in a way, his old dream was still alive. In a
way, Messerschmidt's hands were tied now, for in the end the Freemen
defeated the trained armies and no one could forget the lesson in this
generation.

He looked down at the ground. And in a way, Messerschmidt had won,
because Kimmensen was dying and Messerschmidt had years.

That seemed to be the way of it. And Messerschmidt would someday die,
and other revolutions would come, as surely as the Earth turned on
its axis and drifted around the sun. But no Messerschmidt--and no
Kimmensen--ever quite shook free of the past, and no revolution could
help but borrow from the one before.

Well, Bausch, Kimmensen thought to himself as the face of the mountain
slowly cooled and lost color, I wonder what we'll have to say to each
other?




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The burning world" ***

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