Part 11 (1/2)
”They fear to tip the environmental balance. You see, it can be shown mathematically-or so my experts tell me-that the long-term effects of another ma.s.s launching of missiles will be worse for Ungava than for us, regardless of where the missiles land.” Was there, in the minister's almost immobile face, a glint of some brand of humor? ”Of course for a first-hand answer, you will have to ask the Ungavans themselves.”
His trip began next day with a flight from Vellore to an advanced military base, set amid the chalky cliffs of the southern coast. The next leg of his journey pa.s.sed aboard a fast courier-recon plane, which deposited him upon a barren ocean islet, then took off in a hurry, headed back the way it had come, and vanished in a moment.
Surf pounded tranqualizingly, but then some wild sea creature screamed as if in torment. Waiting on the flat, lichen-spotted rock, Shen-yang studied the horizon and tried to use the time for thought. He still could not believe in the existence of the Ungavan strategic missiles-those utter, bitter fanatics would have used them, sometime in the past forty years. Themselves held on the rack of war, year after year, by a merciless enemy-they would have struck back as hard as possible. No claim had ever been made that they were superhumanly forgiving, and it was un-reasonable that they should be so reluctant to add some pollution to the atmosphere.
He could hear the Ungavan aircraft coming before he spotted it; it was moving somewhat more slowly than the Condamine courier. Shen-yang waved as the smooth metal shape made one leisurely pa.s.s overhead. He felt a little foolish for his wave when the aircraft had landed and he had walked to it and found it was unmanned.
A gla.s.sy canopy had retracted, above an empty, spartan seat and a small s.p.a.ce for luggage. Shen-yang climbed in, and as his weight came down into the seat, the gla.s.s slid closed again above his head. A moment later he was airborne. The plane flew at a good speed, close above the waves. It turned smoothly a couple of times, avoiding a line of squalls.
In time a coastline grew, ahead. He thought his vehicle slowed somewhat as the land drew nearer-to give him a good look?
There, just inland among rocky hills, was ground-zero of some horrendous blast, a decade or more old.
Gla.s.sy and sterile hectares were surrounded by the stumps of crags and recent, tender life in the form of scattered, stunted-looking greenery.
Farther from the central scar, the stumps of buildings, half-buried now in drifted sand, made a larger ring.
This, then, had been a city, and probably a harbor. There were no signs that humans had ever tried to reoccupy the place.
He rode on. His homework-reading had informed him that the whole Ungavan continent was hardly more than one great, wide range of mountains. Between the barren peaks and crests, long valleys, some still fertile, twisted or ran nearly straight, marked here and there by narrow lakes. Now he could see people and machines working in some of the sheltered lowlands, tending or gathering crops. As his aircraft bore him through one valley at low alt.i.tude, he could see how some of the farmers looked up at his roaring pa.s.sage, while others kept their attention on the earth. A few times he pa.s.sed small buildings, never large enough to house the numbers of people he beheld.
The landing strip, he saw upon approaching it, looked like a plowed field too-no, itwas a plowed field.
Whatever his craft put down in the way of landing gear engaged the shallow furrows neatly, and the landing felt pleasantly slow and safe, if not exactly smooth.
His canopy slid back. People in drab, ill-fitting uniforms were all around him, smiling, most of them talking at the same time in accents newly strange to Shen-yang's ears. His ride had come to a stop under cover of a great tree. He was being helped out, and in a moment he was standing within a chest-high revetment between great rocks decorated with twin portraits of the High Leader. Leafy branches made a visually impenetrable cover overhead and hung on all sides in a s.h.a.ggy veil. Welcome clamored on all sides, and there was no counting the hands held out for him to shake. The general impression was of youth, eagerness, and energy.
When a girl handed him a hot drink and some simple food, Shen-yang noticed what he thought were radiation keloids on her arm and side. He thought the scars were not boldly enough undraped to be meant for intentional display. He supposed the whole countryside must be chronically hot. Well, before leaving home he had taken what medical steps he could in the way of radiation prophylaxis for himself.
They led him to a car, a ma.s.s of twenty or more people all enthusing at the same time about the rare privilege that he was being granted. The privilege was a talk with the High Leader himself; the young folk dropped their envious voices to a whisper whenever they mentioned that old man by his t.i.tle or his name.
Four or five got into the car with him, and they were off. The road twisted and turned, seemed to be inside a tunnel as often as not, but still gave him a good chance to see the countryside. Not that there was anything much different from what he had already seen. Blast-marks, crops, workers, rocky hills. Here and there the entrance to some other tunnel, enigmatically unmarked. Once an organized gaggle of children pelted the speeding car with flowers and waved more pictures of the leader at it. The pictures and the flowers and some of the growing crops possessed the only bright colors to be seen below the sky. Everyone wore drab, and everyone looked busy.
He was taken to the High Leader at once, and, despite all the awed fore-shadowing, with practically no ceremony. He found that old man waiting for him in a simply furnished cave, a great chamber beneath an immensely beetling brow of limestone and about one third open to the air.
two simole chairs and one small table in the cave, and a cl.u.s.ter of cables pa.s.sing crudely through it at the back. Shen-yang found himself left alone there with a toughly stout and greatly aged man, whose long white sideburns, a personal trademark, looked exactly as they did in all the pictures. What the pictures could not show was in the eyes.
They were seated, Shen-yang at a little distance from the old man and his table, upon which he seemed to like to rest his calloused, age-grooved hands, as if it were a lectern.
”And did you have a pleasant journey across the ocean?”
”Pleasant enough. I marvel at how well your air service runs. It must be difficult to keep it going.”
The old man appeared pleased. ”Mr. Shen-yang, there is really no secret to how we keep things going.
We rely not upon our machines but upon our people. That is why we shall win this war in the end.”
Shen-yang thought to himself that had his air-craft failed in midflight, no ma.s.s of a hundred or a million peasants rus.h.i.+ng out to catch him in their arms would have helped in the least. So, on a surface level, what the old man had just said was nonsense. But Shen-yang thought that there were other levels in the statement, and in those other levels somewhere there was truth.
Still, he was not going to let it pa.s.s unchallenged. ”You do have machines, though, and to some extent you do depend upon them.”
”We use complex machinery when it is available and when it suits our plans. We do not use it when it is not suitable; therefore we do not need it, and our victory does not depend upon it.”
If this old man, thought Shen-yang, tells me that this mountain we are under will turn to jelly in the next minute, my mouth will fall open with surprise when it does not. Dare I-can I-say tothis man that the war is over?
The leader, after a courteous pause, was going on. ”The enemy, on the contrary, has all along relied upon machines to crush us. That is why he must fail in the end.”
”Your losses no doubt have been terrible.”
”They have been great. I myself have walked for a kilometer on the dead bodies of my people, because there was no s.p.a.ce between dead bodies to put down one's feet. That was after the blast and firestorm at Kinjanchunga. But it is not huge losses that sap a people's will.” Whatever words the old man said seemed to come out of his mouth engraved upon eternal slabs of granite. ”What saps their will is a too-great concern with things that do not matter.”
Shen-yang hitched his hard chair a little closer. ”What matters-” he began and had a thought in mind that he could never afterwards recall because it was melted in a vast disruption of the world. A blue-white welder's torch came on to seal the sky, with one electric flick, across the entrance to the cave, and Shen-yang had a mad and trivial thoughtIdidn't mean it about the jelly, and then the whole mountain made a fist and struck him in the mouth.
His chin was bleeding. Both of his ears now rang numbly. What sound had just come and gone was already as far beyond memory as it had been beyond hearing in its pa.s.sage. He got up from where he found himself on hands and knees on the smooth cave floor and saw the High Leader, a fussy housekeeper, setting up his small table and his own old chair again. If the leader had been in the least damaged, or even excited by the blast, he did not show it.
With commotion, there were suddenly a dozen, a score, of frightened men's and women's faces looking in around one rocky corner and another. Not one looked for a moment at Shen-yang, but he was free to study them-the faces of people who had briefly felt their souls' in peril but who were once more convinced of their salvation when they saw their G.o.d was still alive, unhurt, and with His people.
The old man had a sharp, practical-sounding question or two for them, in the local tongue, which Shen-yang could not follow. Answers were received and orders issued. The people as they turned away now looked elated by his new challenge.
Turning back to his guest, the old man addressed him once more in their common tongue. ”More missiles may be on their way. It seems the Condaminers have tagged you with a tracer of some kind for them to home on, something our own search devices failed to detect, planted on you, your clothing, or perhaps your luggage. Doubtless they calculated that you would be having a talk with me shortly after your arrival here. To kill me, they will spare no effort.” He turned toward the rear of the cave, gesturing Shen-yang to follow. ”Their superior technology, you see. And you see that again it avails them nothing.”
Around a fold of rock, an aide was standing by an open door. A moment later the three of them were descending in an elevator, which looked as neat as anything in Hondurman's foreign ministry.
”Here we will be safe.” After the old man had said that, no missile in the world would dare to touch them.
When they got out of the elevator at its lowest level, Shen-yang looked about him, at the size and shape of the place in which he found himself, at the instruments ranked below the clock and the leader's portrait, at the texture of the walls that spoke to an expert eye of super-toughness.
The leader looked at him, started to say some-thing, and then waited, bright eyes probing.
”This is what weused to call a technicians' bay,” Shen-yang announced in a slow voice. ”And-through that door-there will be an inter-continental ballistic missile waiting in its silo.”
His host made a grave gesture of a.s.sent.
”You have them, then,” said Shen-yang. ”Do you really have a thousand?”
Again, the confirmation.
”Then, all this time...why didn't you fire them when you could?”
”When I could, Mr. Shen-yang?” The leader's face s.h.i.+vered into a thousand wrinkles, because that of a smiling, wise old demon. And he raised, on a chain that hung around his neck, the carven symbol of his party and his faith. Shen-yang could see the tiny studs projecting from it, coded secretly no doubt, so that one man alone possessed the power, day or night, to....