The Complete Margaret of Urbs Page 5

  “They’re a mutation, an artificial mutation,” Jan explained. “When Martin Sair’s discovery became known, thousands sought to imitate him. It was understood that

  he was working with hard radiations, but just what was a mystery—whether as hard as the cosmic rays or as soft as the harder x-rays. Nevertheless, many charlatans claimed to be able to give immortality, and there were thousands of eager victims. It was a mania, a wave of lunacy. The laboratories of the tricksters were packed.

  “There were four directions of error to be made; those who had not Sair’s secret, erred in all four. People who were treated with too hard radiations died; those treated with too soft rays simply became sterile. Those treated with the right rays, but for too long a time, remained themselves unchanged, but bore amphimorphs as children; those treated for too short a time bore Panate metamorphs.

  “Can you imagine the turmoil? In a world just emerging from barbarism, still disorganized, of course some of the freaks survived. Near the sea coasts amphimorphs began to appear, and in lakes and rivers; while in the hills and forests the Children of Nature, the Panate type, went trouping through the wilderness.”

  “But why weren’t they exterminated?” asked Connor tensely. “You’ve bred out criminals. Why let these creatures exist?”

  “Criminals could be reached and sterilized. It’s impossible to sterilize beings who slip into the sea at one’s approach, or who fade like shadows into the depths of a forest.”

  “Then why not kill them off?”

  “Would you favor such a measure?”

  “No,” Connor said, adding in impassioned tone: “It would be nothing less than murder, even to kill the swimmers! Are they—intelligent?”

  “In a dim fashion. The amphimorphs are creatures cast back to the amphibious stage of the human embryo—just above the gilled period. The others, the Panates, are strange. Except for an odd claustrophobia, the fear of enclosed things—of houses or clothing—they’re quite as intelligent as most of us. And they’re comparatively harmless.”

  CONNOR heaved a sigh of relief. “Then they aren’t a problem?”

  “Oh, there were consequences,” Jan said wryly. “Their women are often very beautiful, like the marble figures of nymphs dug up in Europe. There have been many cases like Evanie’s. Many of us may have a drop or so of metamorphic blood. But it falls hardest on the first offspring, the hybrids, miserable creatures unable to endure civilized life, and often most unhappy in the wilds. Yet even these occasionally produce a genius. Evanie’s grandfather is one.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was known as Montmerci the Anodominist, half human, half metamorph. Yet his was a powerful personality. He was strong enough to lead an abortive revolution against the Master. Both humans and metamorphs followed him. He even managed to direct a group of amphimorphs, who got into the city’s water supply and erupted into the sewers by hundreds.”

  “But what happened to the revolution?”

  “It was quickly suppressed,” Jan said bitterly. “What could a horde armed with bows and knives do against the Rings and ionic beams of Urbs?”

  “And Montmerci?”

  “He was executed—a rare punishment. But the Master realized the danger from this wild metamorph. A second attempt might have been successful. That’s why Evanie hates Urbs so intensely.”

  “Evanie!” Connor said musingly. “Tell me, what was it that led to her father’s marrying a—a—”

  “A cross? Well, Evan Sair was like Evanie, a doctor. He came upon Meria, the daughter of Montmerci, down in the mountain region called Ozarky. He found her there sick just after the collapse of the uprising. So Evan Sair cared for her and fell in love with her. He brought her here to his home, and married her, but she soon began to weaken again from lack of the open woods and sunlight.

  “She died when Evanie was born, but she would have died anyway.” Jan Orm paused and drew a long breath. “Now do you see why Evanie fears her own blood? Why she has driven away the youths who tried to arouse even friendship? She’s afraid of the sleeping metamorphic nature in her, and needlessly afraid, since she’s safely human. She has even tried to drive me away, but I refuse to be so driven. I understand.”

  “So do I,” said Connor soberly. “And I’m going to marry her.”

  JAN ORM smiled dryly. “And if she thinks otherwise?”

  “Then I must convince her.”

  Jan shook his head in mild wonderment. “Perhaps you can,” he said, with the barest hint of reluctance. “There’s something dynamic about you. In some ways you’re like the Immortals of Urbs.”

  When they reached the village, Connor left Jan Orm and trudged in a deep reverie up Evanie’s hill, musing on the curious revelations he had heard, analyzing his own feelings. Did he really love the bronze-haired Evanie? The query had never presented itself until Jan had put it to him, so bluntly, yet now he was certain he did. Admitting that, then—had he the right to ask her to marry a survival of the past, a revivified mummy, a sort of living fossil?

  What damage might that millenium of sleep have done him? Might he not awake some morning to find the weight of his years suddenly upon him? Might he not disintegrate like a veritable mummy when its wrappings were removed? Still he had never felt stronger or healthier in his life. And was he such a freak, after all, in this world of Immortals, satyrs, and half-human swimmers?

  He paused at the door of the cottage, peering within. The miraculous cook-stove hissed quietly, and Evanie was humming to herself as she stood before a mirror, brushing the shining metal of her hair. She glimpsed him instantly and whirled. He strode forward and caught her hands.

  “Evanie—” he began, and paused as she jerked violently to release herself.

  “Please go out!” she said.

  He held her wrists firmly. “Evanie, you’ve got to listen to me. I love you!

  “I know those aren’t the right words,” he stumbled on. “It’s just—the best I can do.”

  “I don’t—permit this,” she murmured.

  “I know you don’t, but—Evanie I mean it!”

  He tried to draw her closer but she stood stiffly while he slipped his arms about her. By sheer strength he tilted her head back and kissed her.

  For a moment he felt her relax against him, then she had thrust him away.

  “Please!” she gasped. “You can’t! You don’t—understand!”

  “I do,” he said gently.

  “Then you see how impossible it is for me to—marry?”

  “Any wildness in any children of ours,” he said with a smile, “might as easily come of the Connor blood.”

  For a long moment Evanie lay passive in his arms, and then, when she struggled away, he was startled to see tears.

  “Tom,” she whispered, “if I say I love you will you promise me something?”

  “You know I will!”

  “Then promise you’ll not mention love again, nor try to kiss me, nor even touch me—for a month. After that, I’ll—I’ll do as you wish. Do you promise?”

  “Of course, but why, Evanie? Why?”

  “Because within a month,” she murmured tensely, “there’ll be war!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  In Time of Peace

  CONNOR held strictly to his word with Evanie. But the change in their relationship was apparent to both of them. Evanie no longer met his gaze with frank steadiness. Her eyes would drop when they met his, and she would lose the thread of her sentences in confusion.

  Yet when he turned unexpectedly, he always found her watching him with a mixture of abstractedness and speculation. And once or twice he awakened in the morning to find her gazing at him from the doorway with a tender, wistful smile.

  One afternoon Jan Orm hailed him from the foot of Evanie’s hill.

  “I’ve something to show you,” he called, and Connor rose from his comfortable sprawl in the shade and joined him, walking toward the factory across the village.

  “I’ve been th
inking, Jan,” Connor remarked. “Frankly, I can’t yet understand why you consider the Master such a despicable tyrant. I’ve yet to hear of any really tyrannous act of his.”

  “He isn’t a tyrant,” Jan said gloomily. “I wish he were. Then our revolution would be simple. Almost everybody would be on our side. It’s evidence of his ability that he avoids any misgovernment, and keeps the greater part of the people satisfied. He’s just, kind, and benevolent—on the surface!”

  “What makes you think he’s different underneath?”

  “He retains the one secret we’d all like to possess—the secret of immortality. Isn’t that evidence enough that he’s supremely selfish? He and his two or three million Immortals—sole rulers of the Earth!”

  “Two or three million!”

  “Yes. What’s the difference how many? They’re still ruling half a billion people—a small percentage ruling the many. If he’s so benevolent, why doesn’t he grant others the privilege of immortality?”

  “That’s a fair question,” said Connor slowly, pondering. “Anyway, I’m on your side, Jan. You’re my people now; I owe you all my allegiance.” They entered the factory. “And now—what was it you brought me here to see?”

  Jan’s face brightened.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Have a look at this.”

  He brought forth an object from a desk drawer in his office, passing it pridefully to Connor. It was a blunt, thick-handled, blue steel revolver.

  “Atom-powered,” Jan glowed. “Here’s the magazine.”

  He shook a dozen little leaden balls, each the size ©f his little fingernail, into his palm.

  “No need of a cartridge, of course,” commented Connor. “Water in the handle? . . . I thought so. But here’s one mistake. You don’t want your projectiles round; you lose range and accuracy. Make ’em cylindrical and blunt-pointed.” He squinted through the weapon’s barrel. “And—there’s no rifling.”

  He explained the purpose of rifling the barrel to give the bullet a rotary motion.

  “I might have known enough to consult you first,” Jan Orm said wryly. “Want to try it out anyway? I haven’t been able to hit much with it so far.”

  THEY moved through the whirring factory. At the rear the door opened upon a slope away from the village. The ground slanted gently toward the river. Glancing about for a suitable target, Connor seized an empty can from a bench within the door and flung it as far as he could down the slope. He raised the revolver, and suddenly perceived another imperfection that had escaped his notice.

  “There are no sights on it!” he ejaculated.

  “Sights?” Jan was puzzled.

  “To aim by.” He explained the principle. “Well, let’s try it as is.”

  He squinted down the smooth barrel, squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp report, his arm snapped back to a terrific recoil, and the can leaped spinning high into the air, to fall yards farther toward the river.

  “Wow!” he exclaimed. “What a kick!”

  But Jan was leaping with enthusiasm.

  “You hit it! You hit it!”

  “Yeah, but it hit back,” Connor said ruefully. “While you’re making the other changes, lighten the charge a little, else you’ll have broken wrists in your army. And I’d set somebody to work on ordnance and rifles. They’re a lot more useful than revolvers.” At Jan’s nod, he asked, “You don’t expect to equip the whole revolution with the products of this one factory, do you?”

  “Of course not! There are thousands like it, in villages like Ormon. I’ve already sent descriptions of the weapons we’ll need. I’ll have to correct them.”

  “How many men can you count on? Altogether, I mean.”

  “We should muster twenty-five thousand.”

  “Twenty-five thousand for a world revolution? An even twenty-five thousand to attack a city of thirty million?”

  “Don’t forget that the city is all that counts. Who holds Urbs holds the world.”

  “But still—a city that size! Or even just the three million Immortals. We’ll be overwhelmed!”

  “I don’t think so,” Jan said grimly. “Don’t forget that in Urbs are several million Anadominists. I count on them to join us. In fact, I’m planning to smuggle arms to them, provided our weapons are successful. They won’t be as effective as the ionic beam, but—we can only try. We’ll have at least the advantage of surprise, since we don’t plan to muster and march on Urbs. We’ll infiltrate slowly, and on the given day, at the given hour, we’ll strike!”

  “There’ll be street fighting, then,” Connor said. “There’s nothing like machine-guns for that.”

  “What are they?”

  JAN’S eyes glowed as Connor explained.

  “We can manage those,” he decided. “That should put us on a par with the Urban troops, so long as we remain in the city where the air forces can’t help them. If only we had aircraft!”

  “There’re airplanes, such as my generation used.”

  “Too flimsy. Useless against the fliers of Urbs. No, what we need is the secret of the rocket blast, and since that’s unobtainable, we’ll have to do without. We’ll manage to keep our fighting in the City itself. And how we’ll need you!”

  Connor soon came to realize the truth of Jan’s words. What little he knew of trajectories, velocities, and the science of ballistics was taxed to the uttermost. He was astounded to discover that calculus was a lost knowledge, and that Jan was even unacquainted with the use of logarithms and the slide rule.

  Rather than plod through hours and hours of mathematical computation, it seemed to Connor the shorter method was to work out a table of logarithms to four places, and to construct a slide rule; in both of these operations Jan joined with growing enthusiasm as understanding increased.

  As the preparations progressed,

  Connor began to notice other things—the vanishing of familiar faces, the lack of youthful activities. He knew what that meant. The revolutionaries were gradually filtering into Urbs, and the day of the uprising was at hand.

  How close it was, however, he never dreamed until he emerged one morning to find Evanie talking to Jan Orm, with her eyes alight. She turned eagerly to Tom, led him back into the cottage.

  “Kiss me!” she whispered. “The day is here! We leave for Urbs tonight!”

  ALL day there was a hush over the village. It was bereft of youth, girls as well as men. Only the oldsters plodded about in street and field.

  Jan Orm confessed to Connor that he was not entirely pleased with all details. His estimate of the number of revolutionaries who would join him had been too high. But the infiltration into the city had been successful, and twenty-two thousand villagers lay armed and hidden among their Urban sympathizers. This, Jan argued, promised a great accession to their ranks once the hour had struck.

  “What are your arrangements?” Connor asked.

  “Each village has chosen its leader. These leaders have again centralized their command into ten, of whom our Ormon leader happens to be one. But each variety of Weed has its own corps.” He smiled. “They call us Weeds, because we’re supposed to run wild.”

  And again there came to Connor a quick mental picture of his beautiful girl of the forest. She, too, had spoken of “Weeds,” a little contemptuously, he seemed to remember now. He had not understood her allusion then, had not asked her to explain. But it was plain enough now. Her lofty attitude toward “Weeds,” or the common people, must have been because she was an aristocrat herself. Who could she have been? He had seen no one hereabouts bearing any faintest resemblance to her.

  He brought his mind swiftly back to Jan.

  “If you win,” he observed, “you’ll have a general battle over the spoils. You may find yourself worse off after the revolution than before.”

  “We know that,” Jan said grimly. “Yet we’ll fight side by side until the Master’s done for. Afterward—” He spread his hands expressively.

  “You mentioned ‘our Ormon leader’,” remar
ked Connor. “That’s you, of course.”

  “Oh, no!” Jan chuckled. “That’s Evanie.”

  “The devil!” Connor stared amazed at the gentle, shy, and quiet girl.

  “Jan exaggerates,” she said, smiling. “I depend on all the rest of you. Especially Jan—and you, Tom.”

  He shook his head, puzzled about this revolution—shadowy, vague, ill-planned. To assault a world ruler in a colossal city with untrained rabble using weapons unfamiliar to them! Surely the Master must know there was sedition and plotting among his people.

  He was about to voice his doubts when a flash of iridescence down the sunny slope caught his eye. It seemed more like a disturbance in the air or a focus of light than a material body. It swept in wide circles as if hunting or seeking, and—Connor heard its high, humming buzz. The creature, if it were a creature, was no more than eighteen inches long, and featureless save for a misty beak at the forward end.

  It circled closer, and suddenly he perceived an amazing phenomenon. It was circling the three of them and, he had thought, the cottage too. Then he saw that instead of circling the building it was passing through the walls!

  “Look!” he cried. “What’s that?”

  CHAPTER IX

  The Way to Urbs

  THE effect on Jan and Evanie was startling. As they perceived the almost invisible thing, the girl shrieked in terror.

  “Don’t look at it!” Jan choked out. “Don’t even think of it!”

  Both of them covered their faces with their hands.

  They made no attempt to flee; indeed, Connor thought confusedly, how could one hide from a thing that could pass like a phantom through rock walls? He tried to follow their example, but could not resist another peep at the mystery. It was still visible, but further off down the slope

  toward the river, and as he gazed, it abandoned its circling, passed like a streak of mist over the water, and vanished.

  “It’s gone,” he said mildly. “Suppose you tell me what it was.”