Part 35 (1/2)

Austin's voice was mechanical, also. ”You are forgetting something,” he said. He refused to let the thoughts creep in. He refused to wonder about the voice that came through closed lips, about where the natives could have found soil or fresh panther bones or. . - ”No one,” he said to the old man, ”has fought back--yet.”

”But why would you do that, Mr. Austin, since you do not believe in the existence of your enemy? Whom shall you fight?” Bokawah smiled.

The crowd of natives remained quiet, unmoving, in the dying firelight.

”The only fear you hold for us,” Austin said, ”is the fear that you may prove psychologically harmful.” He looked at the crushed doll at his feet. The face was whole; otherwise, it lay hideouslydisfigured.

”Yes?”

”Right now, Bokawah, my government is sending men. They will arrive soon. When they do, they will study what has happened. If it is agreed that your rites-- however harmless in themselves--cause currents of fear--are in _any way_ responsible for the disease--you will be given the opportunity to go elsewhere or--”

”Or, Mr. Austin?”

”--you will be eliminated.”

”Then people will come to Mbarara. Despite the warnings and the death, they will come?”

”Your magic sticks aren't going to scare away five hundred thousand men and women.”

”Five hundred thousand ...” The old man looked at the bones, sighed, nodded his head. ”You know your people very well,” he murmured.

Austin smiled. ”Yes, I do.”

”Then I think there is little left for us to talk about.”

Austin wanted to say, No, you're wrong. We must talk about Mag! She's dying and I want to keep her from dying. But he knew what these words would mean. They would sketch his real feelings, his fears and doubts. And everything would be lost. He could not admit that the doll was anything more than a doll. He must not!

The old man picked up a calabash and ran water over his hands. ”I am sorry,” he said, ”that you must learn the way you must,”

A slow chant rose from the natives. It sounded to Austin like Swahili, yet it was indistinct. He could recognize none of the words, except _gonga_ and _bagana_. Medicine? The man with the medicine? It was a litany, not unlike the Gregorian chants he had once heard, full of overpowering melancholy. Calm and ethereal, and sad as only the human voice can be sad. It rode on the stale air, swelling, diminis.h.i.+ng, cutting through the stench of decay and rot with profound dignity.

Austin felt the heaviness of his clothes. The broken machines had stopped pumping fresh breezes, so the air was like oil, opening the pores of his body, running coldly down his arms and legs.

Bokawah made a motion with his hand and sank back onto the smooth floor. He breathed wrackingly, and groaned as if in pain. Then he straightened and looked at Austin and hobbled quickly away.

The drums began. Movement eased back into the throng and soon the dancers were up, working themselves back into their possessed states, Austin turned and walked quickly away from the ceremony. When he reached the shadows, he ran. He did not stop running until he had reached the lift, even while his muscles, long dormant, unaccustomed to the activity, turned to stone, numb and throbbing stone.

He stabbed the b.u.t.ton and closed his eyes, while his heart pumped and roared sound into his ears and colored fire into his mind. The platform descended slowly, unemotional and calm as its parts.

Austin ran out and fell against a building, where he tried to push away the image of the black magic ceremony, and what he had felt there, He swallowed needles of pain into his parched throat, And the fear mounted and mounted, strangling him slowly - The towers of Mbarara loomed, suddenly, to Austin, more unreal and anachronistic than the tribal rites from which he had just come. Stalagmites of crystal pus.h.i.+ng up to the night sky that bent above them; little squares and diamonds and circles of metal and stone. Office buildings; apartments; housing units; hat stores and machine factories and restaurants; and, cobwebbing among them, all these blind and empty sh.e.l.ls, the walkways, like colored ribbons, like infinitely long reptiles, sleeping now, dead, still.

Or, were they only waiting, as he wanted to believe?

Of course they're waiting, he thought. People who know the answers will come to Mbarara tomorrow. Clear-headed scientists who have not been terrorized by a tribe of beaten primitives. And thescientists will find out what killed the workers, correct it, and people will follow. Five hundred thousand people, from all over the closetcrowded world, happy to have air to breathe once more--air that hasn't had to travel down two-hundred feet--happy to know the Earth can yet sustain them. No more talk, then, of ”population decreases”--murder was a better word--; no more government warnings screaming ”depopulation” at you . - - The dream would come true, Austin told himself. Because it must. Because he'd promised Mag, and they'd lived it all together, endless years, hoped and planned and fought for the city. With Mbarara, it would begin: the dark age of a sardine can world would end, and life would begin. It would be many years before the worry would begin all over--for half the earth lay fallow, wasted. Australia, Greenland, Iceland, Africa, the Poles. . . And perhaps then the population graph would change, as it had always changed before, And men would come out of their caverns and rat-holes and live as men.

Yes. But only if Mbarara worked. If he could show them his success here . . .

Austin cursed the men who had gone back and screamed the story of what had happened to the other engineers. G.o.d knew there were few enough available, few who had been odd enough to study a field for which there seemed little further use.

lf they'd only kept still about the disease! Then others would have come and . . .

Died. The word came out instantly, uncalled, and vanished.

Austin pa.s.sed the Emperor, the playhouse he had thought of that night with Mag, ten years before. As he pa.s.sed, he tried to visualize the foyer jammed with people in soup-and-fish and jeweled gowns, talking of whether the play had meat or not. Now, its marbled front putting out yellow glow, it looked foolish and pathetic. The placard case shone through newly gathered dust, empty.

Austin tried to think of what had been on this spot originally. Thick jungle growth alone. Or had there been a native village--with monkeys climbing the trees and swinging on vines and white widows mourning under straw roofs?

Now playing: JULIUS CAESAR. Admission: Three coconuts.

Be still. You've stayed together all this time, he thought, you can hold out until tomorrow.

Tcheletchew will be here, sputtering under his beard, and they'll fly Mag to a hospital and make her well and clear up this nonsense in a hurry.

Just get home. Don't think and get home, and it will be all right.

The city was actually without formal streets. Its plan did not include the antiquated groundcars that survived here and there in old families. Therefore, Mbarara was literally a maze. A very pretty maze.

Like an English estate--Austin had admired these touches of vanished gentility--the areas were sometimes framed by green stone hedges, carved into functional shapes.

He had no difficulty finding his way. It was all too fresh, even now, the hours of planning every small curve and design, carefully leaving no artistic 'holes' or useless places. He could have walked it blindfolded.

But when he pa.s.sed the food dispensary and turned the corner, he found that it did not lead to the 'copter-park, as it should have. There were buildings there, but they were not the ones they ought to have been.

Or else he'd turned the wrong--He retraced his steps to the point where he had gone left. The food dispensary was nowhere in sight. Instead he found himself looking at the general chemistry building.

Austin paused and wiped his forehead, The excitement of course, It had clouded his mind for a moment, making him lose his way.

He began walking. Warm perspiration coursed across his body, turning his suit dark-wet, staining his jacket.

He pa.s.sed the food dispensary.

Austin clenched his fists. It was impossible that he could have made a complete circle. He had built this city, he knew it intimately. He had walked through it without even thinking of direction, in the half-stages of construction, and never taken a wrong step.

How could he be lost?

Nerves. Nothing strange in it. Certainly enough had happened to jar loose his sense of direction._Calmly, now. Calmly_.

The air hung fetid and heavy. He had to pull it into his lungs, push it out. Of course, he could go below and open the valves--at least they could be operated by hand. He could, but why? It would mean bunching down in a dark shaft--d.a.m.n, should have made that shaft larger! And, there were, after all, enough openings in the sealing-bubble to keep a breathable flow of oxygen in circulation. If the air was heavy and still outside the bubble, he could scarcely expect it to be different within.

He looked up at the half-minaretted tower that was one of the 'copter repair centers. It was located in exactly the opposite direction to the one he thought he'd taken.

Austin sank onto a stone bench. Images floated through his mind. He was lost; precisely as lost as if he had wandered into the jungle that had stood here before the building of Mbarara, and then tried to find his way back.

He closed his eyes and saw a picture, startling clear, of himself, running through the matted growths of dark green foliage, stumbling across roots, b.u.mping trees, face grotesque with fear, and screaming . . .

He opened his eyes quickly, shook away the vision. His brain was tired; that was why he saw such a picture. He must keep his eyes open.

The city was unchanged. The park, designed for housewives who might wish to pause and rest or chat, perhaps feed squirrels, surrounded him, Across the boating lake was the university.

Behind the university was home.