CHAPTER XV - THE AIRSCOUTS’ FORTRESS
So I told them my story from the beginning. I spoke of the days of the Institute and Lazaroff’s experiment, of my awakening within the cylinder at the end of a century of sleep, my flight from the cellar and my discovery by Jones. I continued, telling of my first bewilderment in London, of David’s kindness which had saved my reason, described my summons that morning and the relays of spies who had led me to the Temple. When I narrated my discovery of the cylinder containing Esther’s living body I raised my eyes to David’s and perceived that I was no longer in the position of a prisoner awaiting death.
David’s aspect had changed; he was trembling violently and struggling to speak. He looked fearfully at me, and Jones was hardly less moved. Then Elizabeth slipped her hand into mine.
“We believe you, Arnold,” she said.
Three times David attempted to speak while I was sketching briefly the remainder of my story up to the point of my encounter with Elizabeth, and each time his voice failed him.
“Arnold, forgive me,” he managed to say at last. “We know that every word you have told us is true, if only you had told me before! But I see how incredible you must have thought your story. Now listen to me!
“The horrors of this government will not last much longer. Plans are well under way to make an end of democracy and restore liberty to the world. You have unwittingly placed a wonderful weapon in our hands. No man can be neutral in such times. Now, Arnold, you have to make a decision which will affect not yourself only, but all of us, Britain, the Federation, and the race of men. You must choose your party.” He turned to Jones. “He must be told nothing until the time arrives,” he continued, assuming a tone of authority. “You will say nothing—nor you, Elizabeth.”
He turned to me again.
“Arnold,” he said, “you must make your choice now. Lembken needs you for reasons which are patent to us, thanks to your statement. If you go back to him he can give you power and liberty to lord it over the people until the quick day of reckoning arrives. If you join us you must become an outlaw and an associate in the most desperate endeavor, play a leading part and share our dangers.”
“How can you doubt me?” I asked. “I am with you, now, and at all times.”
David held up his hand. “Wait!” he said. “You must first understand our situation, and why we are here tonight.”
“It is not necessary, David,” I answered.
“Yes, it is necessary. Because you do not know the depth of our intolerable bondage. I am going to tell you of my own life, that you may judge.
“I begin with my father. As I told you, he was epileptic in youth. He outgrew the attacks, and because the Liberal government never dared to enforce the Defectives’ Law which it passed in 1930, he was able to marry, much later, a girl to whom he had been engaged for many years. They had lived quietly in what was then called Wales, in a rural community that had somehow managed to escape the excesses which began in 1945.
“But my father was a marked man, because he was on the secret defectives’ list, and a Conservative. A few weeks after his marriage the storm of revolution burst over Dolgelly. The army of clerks and civil officers that followed the troops of the victorious democracy raked the country fine for victims. With his young bride my father fled to the mountains, where I was born, and they existed there, heaven knows how, till an opportunity arrived for flight abroad. When the restoration came he returned, and rebuilt his ruined home.
“My father was a student of history, and he knew that the peace which had descended over the distracted country was only a lull in the storm of violence. He resolved to teach me all the old knowledge, which had fallen into decay. He wanted me to play a leading part in political life, as his forebears had done. But the second revolution was upon us when I was a youth of nineteen. Fortunately, my parents were both dead.
“The mob started burning defectives then. For many there was the chance of submission to the new government, nominally under Boss Rose, which Sanson was constructing; but there was none for me, since epilepsy was then, owing to the ephemeral theory of some forgotten scientist, regarded as the unpardonable sin. I managed to escape to Denmark, and spent the next sixteen years upon the Continent, wandering from place to place as the Federation came into being. I married a Swiss lady at Lausanne, where Elizabeth was born. We had to fly by night, when the child was a week old. My wife could not survive the journey over the mountain passes in the middle of winter. She died in what was called Austria, two days after our arrival there. With Elizabeth I continued my flight eastward, and found refuge in Greece.
“I said that the mob had begun to burn defectives. But the Council changed that. The word ‘productivity’ was the new fetish, and, seeing that the murder of half the population would decrease the output, the Council resolved to imprison defectives in the workshops for life instead. But even this did not work. In 1999 Boss Rose became alarmed at the depopulation caused by the universal terror. Men denounced their brothers for small rewards, and wives their husbands, when they grew tired of them. Men and women were crossing the North Sea in tiny skiffs, or perishing in the waves, flying into the glens of Scotland, organizing in bands and living a hunted life within the forests that had begun to cover the country. Boss Rose issued an amnesty decree. Defectives who returned and were able to produce a hektone and a quarter monthly were not to be proscribed. I returned to Britain and secured employment in the Strangers’ Bureau, which had just been established, a post for which my education and experiences abroad qualified me.
“Ten years ago Boss Rose fell under an assassin’s dagger. The Council, under the influence of Sanson, issued a decree that no faith was to be kept with defectives. Sanson, then supreme behind the mask of Lembken, began to harry the people. It was then he introduced his system of mating under Council supervision.”
“It is abominable!” I cried.
“Yet, like all our institutions, it has its roots far back in the past,” said David, “and only needed the abandonment of the Christian ethic to spring full-fledged into existence. The Prophet Wells foreshadowed it, as did also Ellen Key; and on this point the followers of Galton joined the Socialist government in a concerted attack upon monogamy. This, in fact, has been the crux of the old battle between Socialism and the Church: on the one hand the old ideal of the family as the unit of society, and marriage an indissoluble bond; on the other the individual, free from responsibility and seeking his own fancied freedom. Even in the Prophet’s time America had practically abandoned monogamy, while the anti-social propaganda was being secretly carried on by the teaching of what was called sex hygiene in the schools. When the churches compromised with divorce, Protestantism finally collapsed, and flung half the civilized world back into paganism.”
“It was said that the children—” I began.
“The answer was State rearing, Arnold, as had been urged by many men and some women of liberal and progressive minds. We tried that in 2002. Elizabeth was torn from me. For six months we had public crèches in every city. There was much public dissatisfaction, though the children were not taken from their mothers till they had been weaned. That was the time when the Guard was formed, consisting of Janissaries trained from youth by the Council and pledged to them. However, what caused the bandonment of the crèche system was a quite unexpected happening. Despite the utmost care, despite a process of automatic feeding in germ-proof incubators, which made it impossible for any of the little inmates to lack the advantages of the latest hygienic theories, the children died.
“This phenomenon was never explained satisfactorily, and the mortality, which ranged from eighty to ninety per cent, shocked the Province profoundly, for it meant an intolerable lessening in the productivity of the next generation. The children were returned to their parents. Elizabeth, who was above the age curve of maximum mortality, came back to me, and, in spite of rigorous inspection by the officials of the Children’s Bureau, I have managed to keep her.
“But I must be brief, Arnold. I have told you that it was decreed no faith was to be kept with defectives. The net was cast over all who, trusting to the proclamation, had returned from the forests and waste places, and from abroad. Gradually they were sorted out and ascribed. Many records of heredity had disappeared during the Revolution, but they had my father’s in the Bureau of Pedigrees and Relationships. Since then I have waited in suspense daily. They know it, and, if I have not been condemned to the workshops, it is through Lembken’s favor, for he was head of the Strangers’ Bureau before the assassination of Boss Rose, and I worked under him.”
“But is there no law?” I cried. “Is there no charter of liberty at all?”
“Why, yes, Arnold. We still have Magna Charta, and Habeas Corpus, and many other documents, and occasionally these are invoked. There is an old man in the paper shops who has appealed against imprisonment and carried his case through twenty or thirty courts since he was shut up as a boy, and if he lives long enough his appeal will come before the Council. But you see, Arnold, one of the first acts of the victorious democracy was to institute the election and the recall of judges.
“They think I fear for my own liberty,” he continued, beginning to pace the floor. “They do not know—happily they do not know.”
Then he went on to tell me that which concerned the girl’s arrest that afternoon.
It appeared that Elizabeth was one of those very few who were physically almost perfect, and, as such, she had been in danger of being placed on the list of those who were to enter the harems of the whites. David’s sole hope of saving her lay in the fact that she was penalized six points because her grandfather had had epileptic seizures. But she approximated so closely to the Sanson norm—and the child had been innocent enough to head the district list of those qualifying in mentality by examination upon the Binet board—that there had been little hope for her. This fear had been increased by the fact that Lembken had seen Elizabeth, and had recently summoned her and her father to the Council Hall, under the pretext of wishing to confer some favor upon an old subordinate.
Now I gathered in the last threads of the skein. David had returned from the Strangers’ Bureau that afternoon to find the apartment empty. Jones had conveyed the news to him, and had secreted him in the Airscouts’ Fortress, pending a plan of rescue, a task which was only rendered possible through the disaffection of Lembken’s airscouts. Jones had seen me in my priest’s robes, and the two had come to the natural conclusion that I had been a spy, playing one of the romantic parts in fashion among the whites, and approved in the Council’s novels, in order to see Elizabeth before selecting her. We had been discovered at the window, the position of the little house had given Jones the opportunity of rescuing the girl with his scoutplane, and, but for my return while the rope still dangled before the aperture, I should never have known the secret of Elizabeth’s disappearance. No wonder David had flown at my throat.
“Now, we must act at once,” said David. “We are going to seek refuge in the forests where our friends are hiding. Jones will carry us there tonight when he starts in his scoutplane on patrol duty. It is a difficult problem to pass the night patrol. But Jones can get us through. And now, Arnold, what is your decision?”
“I made it long ago,” I answered.
“You are with us?”
“Indeed, I am.”
David wrung my hand hard. “You have decided wisely,” he said, “and by your decision you have taken the only means possible to save the woman you love. For the Sanson régime is crumbling, and your presence means, what you cannot yet imagine, to the cause of liberty. We have five thousand outlaws and fugitives from the defectives’ shops, scattered in secret hiding places about London. We have made Ray rods in the shops and have secreted provisions. Tonight the heads of the movement are to assemble—”
“In the cellar where I lay so long!” I exclaimed, with sudden intuition. “And Jones had been there with Ray rods when he found me!”
“Correct,” answered Jones, in his laconic manner.
“We remain here until midnight,” said David. “Then Jones will take us when he starts to relieve the first patrol.”
“Be assured that I am with you to the end,” I said. And I swore that I would do all in my power, so long as I had life and liberty, to fight for human freedom. And as I swore I had a vision of the girl, mangled and crushed upon the stones beneath that tropical, aerial hell beneath the noble dome of England’s shameful temple.
I think the resolution in my manner must have enkindled David’s hopes, for he put out his hand and caught mine again, and wrung and held it.
“You do not know, Arnold, how necessary you are to us,” he said. “But tonight you shall be told. I am old, Arnold, and I have little courage. I have lived through too many changes and frustrated hopes. I had grown used and resigned to things that had come to seem unchangeable. The freedom of my youth was only a dream to me. Sometimes I doubted whether men had ever been free. It was your surprise, your ignorance, then the indignation which you thought I did not see that made me begin to understand my own degradation. And it was today’s events that gave me heart to work with all my might for the cause to which I had only languidly adhered. I have been one of the revolutionary committee for months, and now I shall fight whole-heartedly, and you with me.”
“David,” I said with sudden conviction, “you are a Christian.”
His eyes suddenly seemed to blaze. “I am!” he cried. “As we all are. I have temporized with evil all these years, but now I cannot do so any more. The hope of the world can never be crushed out; it is spreading everywhere. All of us are enlisted under that flag that was raised on the Mount two thousand years ago. We see that without Christ, life is intolerable. I knew your faith from the first, Arnold, although I dared not speak, I knew it at the beginning because I thought you were a Russian. That was why I befriended you. We know our own!” he cried triumphantly.
Elizabeth put one arm about her father’s neck and extended her free hand to me. I clasped it, and then the airscout’s; and so we pledged ourselves.
CHAPTER XVI - THE MESSIAH’S ANNUNCIATION
Jones left us and came back with some food. Upon his arm he carried a stranger’s uniform, which he handed to me.
“You cannot wear those robes,” he said. “Take this. It should fit you; it belonged to one of our recruits who was ascribed last week and has not yet returned it to the Wool Stores.”
I was glad to see the last of the priest’s robes. He carried them away, promising to return for us in an hour. Elizabeth made us eat, but we had little heart to do so. At her insistence, however, we made the best display of appetite that was possible.
The room was only faintly illumined by the reflected solar light that issued up the elevator shaft. With it there mounted the sound of the voices of the airscouts in their barracks below. Sometimes the elevator rushed by, arousing a thrill of fear in each of us.
David drew me toward him and began speaking softly.
“You know nothing of Paul,” he said. “His name is Paul Llewellyn—for we observe Sanson’s laws no longer. He was to have mated Elizabeth.”
“Married?”
“Yes, married, before the Cold Solstice. His grandfather was my father’s steward at Dolgelly. Our families remained in touch through all the civil turmoil, and he is the last of his, as Elizabeth is the last of mine. He was given the name Paul, the father retaining the family name, which was to alternate in each generation, as is the custom nowadays. That law of Sanson’s must be one of the first to go. It aimed, of course, to destroy the vestiges of the family that remained.
“Paul was a Grade 1 defective, and we felt sure that Elizabeth would come under the same classification, so that they would be free to mate. They were waiting for the lists to be published, but Elizabeth had not been ascribed when the last list went up, and meanwhile Paul was sent to the defectives’ shops. Arnold, did you ever hear of the doctrine called Apostolic Succession?”
“Of course, David.”
“That the functions of the priesthood are transmitted by the laying on of hands? The English Church possessed the tradition, and it has never been lost, though most of our people attach, I am afraid, some magical idea to the ancient rite. Our bishop is a poor, illiterate old man, a machinist by trade, but Bonham laid his hands on him before he was burned in Westminster Hall. Bishop Alfred was to have blessed the union. A week before Fruit Equinox, Paul was taken in the bishop’s home by Sanson’s spies. Both were condemned to life imprisonment in the defectives’ shops as Christians. Both escaped among the last batch of fugitives. Elizabeth hopes to meet Paul tonight.”
“And I hope so, with all my heart,” I answered.
The cage stopped at the door and Jones came in.
“We can go now. The last of the scoutplanes has gone,” he said.
We went up to the roof. Deep night was over and about us. The phosphorescent fronts of the glow-painted buildings gave London the aspect of long lines of parallel and intersecting palisades of ghostly light; but the glow paint illumined nothing, and the deep canyons of the streets were of velvety blackness. The white circle of the fortress wall surrounded us. Outside the region of the glow, London was an indistinguishable blurred shadow, save where the searchlights from the departing scoutplanes illumined it. They hovered in a long line above the city, their position only discernible from the white searchrays that emanated from them as they swept the city below. Slowly they made their way into the southern distance.
I groped for reality in this succession of bewildering scenes, and hardly found it. Rain began to fall, spattering on the crystal walls of the adjacent gardens, in which the flickering colored lights still twinkled. My face was wet with it. I was thinking of the old days, when life was free: Sir Spofforth’s rain-swept garden, the scent of Esther’s tea-roses, and the hum of the ungainly, noisy town of Croydon that last evening. I saw Esther’s face vividly upon the velvet screen of the night.
Elizabeth’s hand stole into mine.
“You are our hope, Arnold. You can inspire us to victory,” she whispered.
Jones had gotten the scoutplane ready, and the vessel now rested on the flat roof, as a bird on its perching place. It was a little craft, even smaller than my memory of it had been, and it carried no Ray shield to betray its presence. Jones drew David aside and held a whispered colloquy with him.
“We are about ready,” he said, as they came back to us. “I’ve shifted the searchlight to the rear socket to balance the extra weight. She’ll carry us. I’ll have time to take you to your destination and report for scout duty when Hancock comes the round. But if I fly with the searchlight showing, any of the planes may signal me to stop—”
He rubbed his chin, and the old irresolution came upon his face.
“If I fly dark it’s a leather vat offense,” he added. “And the battleplanes would fire on us.”
He paused and rubbed his chin again.
“I’ll fly dark,” he said, and so settled the matter firmly in his own mind. And, his mind thus made up, I knew nothing would change it.
There was some difficulty in disposing of us. Finally Jones placed us three in the double seat, Elizabeth in the center and David and I on either side of her. He himself squatted upon the chassis before us, the wheel in his hands. He touched the starting lever with his right foot, and the craft rose heavily into the air, straining beneath her burden. In spite of the counterbalance of the searchlight behind, the nose of the plane dipped constantly, so that our flight was a succession of abrupt ascents and declinations.
It was freezing cold up in the air. Gradually we ascended, till I felt the fresh wind from the Thames estuary beat on my face. Presently the south was cleft by flaming serpents, with eyes of fire.
“The food airvans from France,” said David, pointing.
Now we soared over the outlying factories and warehouses. A huge, glow-painted building sprang into view out of the shadows below.
“The defectives’ workshops for this district,” David continued. “Yonder is the Council’s art factory.”
The darkness in front of us began to be studded with long parallelograms of dazzling glow, set at wide intervals, each capped with the conical Ray guns. From these, extending fanwise toward the ground, appearing pink in contrast with the glow’s intensely purple white, the searchlights wavered.
Jones halted the scoutplane. “The battleplanes,” he said, pointing. “They are posted nightly around London now. You know the reason, David?”
David started and placed his hand in inquiry upon the airscout’s shoulder. Jones’s voice sank to a whisper.
“It is the merest rumor among our men,” he said. “One reads it in their faces rather than hears it spoken, for we are afraid of one another. One can be sure that Sanson has his spies among us. But the scoutplanes are sufficient to patrol London and detect fugitives, and if the battleplanes are sent out there is hope the rumor may be true. If the Tsar has broken out from Tula—”
“Thank God!” said David in a tense whisper.
“He will overrun Skandogermania in a week, for it is as disaffected as Britain. The airscouts there will go over to him. There is no force to stop him, except our planes and the Guard.”
I saw the joy on David’s face. Could barbarous Russia indeed bring freedom to the Western World?
“It is only a rumor,” continued Jones. “A rumor, you understand, David, backed by the presence of the battleplane squadron around the city nightly, words let fall in the People’s House, retailed by gossiping servants, the sudden summons last night of Air-Admiral Hancock—”
“But the Russians have been slaughtered in thousands!” I exclaimed. “I saw the picture upon the screen.”
Jones laughed and David smiled.
“Those pictures are for the people,” said the airscout. “They were taken by night inside the fortress here. The Guard dressed for the part.”
“Still, how could the Russians win without the Ray?” asked David doubtfully.
“I can answer that,” I said. “All history shows that no weapon is strong enough to conquer men who are ready to die for a right idea against an evil one. Ideas are stronger than the deadliest arm man has contrived. That has always been so and always will be so.”
Again Elizabeth’s hand crept into mine. “You must tell our people that, Arnold,” she said. “You know the secret of stirring them.”
“But Hancock will stand by Lembken?” inquired David.
“Yap, and will hold at least a quarter of our men to him,” said Jones. “He will serve Lembken through Sanson, so long as Sanson remains loyal. If Sanson turns against Lembken to seize the supreme power, Hancock will fight him to the death. Sanson sent the Air-Admiral’s son to the Rest Cure as a moron, years ago, when Hancock was unknown. Sanson doesn’t remember it, but Hancock remembers.”
I shuddered. “Why, then, is not Hancock with us?” I asked.
“There are traditions of loyalty in his family,” answered Jones. “Hancock is queer. Now we go up. Hold fast.”
The scoutplane creaked and rocked and plunged like a ship in a gale as, foot by foot, he jerked her head into the higher air. The gleaming glow parallelograms of the battleplanes seemed to shoot downward as we soared above them. We had passed them when, like some black air monster, a large, dark plane glided beneath us. I felt our scoutplane thrill as she shot upward, so suddenly that she rose almost to the perpendicular, jerking us back against the uprights.
Jones was straining madly at the wheel, and I realized that the dark plane was in pursuit of us. I saw her swoop out of the night, missing us by a yard. She disappeared. I heard the divided air hiss as she approached again, and the next instant the blinding searchlight enveloped us, and a voice hailed us, piping thin through the frosty night. Then the light was astern, and groping impotently beneath us as we rose to a higher level. Jones strained at the vertical rudder, pushing the plane’s nose up and still upward, battling like a weather-beaten bird against the wind.
Again the searchlight found us, and then, out of the heart of it, turning the keen white glare to a baby pink that fringed it, there hissed a light ten times more brilliant, snapping and crackling, into the void. Jones veered, still mounting. The dazzling light flared out again. The upright that I held snapped in my hand. I slipped in my seat, but David reached out and held me.
Once more the Ray flash came, but under us. The darkness and our pilot’s courage had saved us. The searchlight groped far underneath. Our scoutplane dipped, soared, dipped, caught the wind, and we volplaned at furious speed for miles down a gradient of cushiony air.
I felt Elizabeth tremble, and placed my arms around her to hold her. Jones stayed the plane and clapped his numbed hands together, whistling through his teeth. He jerked his head around. The moon was beginning to rise; it was a little lighter, and I saw that his face was dripping wet.
“A thread of an escape!” he said. “If she had struck us fair with the Ray we’d have buckled up like paper. Snapped one upright, didn’t it?”
There was a cut of two inches in the steel—a clean cut, and the edges fused as if from fire.
“That was Hancock’s dispatchplane,” said Jones. “He carries no light. But—the voice didn’t sound like Hancock’s.”
“Are we safe now?” asked David, looking back to where the shrunken figures of the battleplanes were ranged behind us on the horizon.
“Safe long ago,” said Jones. “But it was touch-and-go while I was trying to top that southeaster. He lost us at the summit, though, and he couldn’t have caught us on that down-grade.”
We started again, traveling more slowly, at a lower altitude, and planing downward until I heard the wind in the tree boughs and saw the glistening snow beneath. We brushed the top-most twigs. The scoutplane flitted backward and forward, seeking the old road.
“I ought to know it in the dark,” said Jones. “I don’t want to turn on the searchlight if I can help it.”
To and fro we went like a fluttering bird, until the cleft of the road appeared among the trees. Then we dropped softly to the ground. I was almost too cramped and cold to move. With difficulty I descended and helped Elizabeth out. David followed, and we three stood chafing our hands and stamping until the circulation was restored.
Jones leaned forward from the airplane. “I’ll run her into the trees in case anyone comes along and sees her,” he said.
“We shall not see you until—?” asked David.
“I’m not going back,” answered the airscout. “Not after this night’s work. You’ll see me in ten minutes.”
“You are going to join us?” inquired David, joyfully. “Is it—do you mean Hancock knew you?”
“No. That wasn’t Hancock, either. I know who it was—at least, I think I know. No, I’ve had enough of the Twin Bosses, after Elizabeth’s adventures. Put me down as the first airscout who went over.”
David grasped him by the hand and shook it warmly. Jones whistled again, drew back, and the scoutplane rose to the tops of the trees, beat about, and vanished.
David turned to me. “Arnold, are you prepared for a great and stunning revelation?” he asked.
“Yes, he is prepared,” answered Elizabeth for me.
We set off through the trees along a small, well-worn trail, until the crumbling bricks beneath us heaped themselves into a mound, and I saw the ruined foundations of the Institute before me, and the hole in the cellar roof. A sentinel leaped out at us.
“For man?” he asked, leveling a Ray rod.
“And freedom,” answered David.
The sentinel called, and in a moment a crowd came rushing up a short ladder, wild-looking men with beards and hanging hair, all dressed in tatters and rags, a woman or two, and a youth who ran forward with a cry and caught Elizabeth in his arms. I saw the happiness they shared.
David led me to a tall old man with bowed shoulders and a ragged white beard that spread fanwise across his breast. His hands were seared and twisted like those of one who has lived years of hardest toil, and the staff on which he leaned had a crooked handle.
“Bishop Alfred,” he said, “this is the Messiah who was to come.”
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