CHAPTER VII
A throbbing, lurid light beat in through the front windows of the store, as the flames across the Diamond swept up the fronts of old buildings. The hoarse hallelujah-chorus of the Brotherhood, the quickened booming of the drums, was louder. And the fiery light illumined the bloodless, distorted face of their prisoner as he stared up at Wales and Martha.
Wales still felt the shock of terrible surprise. He had been so sure that only the mad Brotherhood could possibly be behind the plot to seize Kendrick, the ghastly scheme to keep millions of people on Earth until Doomsday crashed down upon them. Who else but madmen would do such a thing? Who else would have any motive?
He didn't know. But their pudgy prisoner knew. And, even at the risk of trapping Martha and himself in the holocaust of Castletown, he meant to find out.
"Please," panted Pudgy. "We haven't got a chance if we stay here longer. I've seen these maniacs and their Atonements. They won't leave a building standing here!"
Wales looked at Martha's white face. "All right, Martha, we'll get going. We'll leave this fellow here." He started to turn away.
"No, it's murder!" screamed Pudgy. "You can't leave me here, my hands tied—"
"Then tell," Wales pressed. "Who seized Kendrick? Who's behind all this?"
Beads of sweat stood out on Pudgy's dough-white face. His eyes rolled horribly, and then he said hoarsely,
"Fairlie. John Fairlie. And others—"
"Fairlie? The regional Evacuation Marshal? What about him?" Wales demanded.
"He—and friends of his, other Evacuation officials—they're the ones," Pudgy said. "They've got Lee Kendrick. They're the ones that want a lot of people left on Earth."
Furious, Wales took their prisoner by his fat throat and shook him. "All right, you had your chance," he raged. "And you tell us a brazen lie like that. By God, we are leaving you—"
Pudgy's voice rose almost to a scream. "It's the truth! You made me tell you, now I've done it, and you won't believe me! There's a bunch of them in it, I don't know how many. I know that besides Fairlie, there's a couple of assistant Evacuation Marshals in other countries and some minor officials and some others I don't know. I've seen them, up near New York. It's where they've got Lee Kendrick. They'd kill me for telling, and now I've told and you won't believe—"
Martha said uncertainly, "Oh, Jay, maybe he is telling the truth—maybe that's where Lee is!"
Wales exclaimed, "Don't you see what a lie it is? John Fairlie is one of the men charged with evacuating all the people off Earth—why would he and other Evacuation officials want to trick millions into staying here?"
"Because they don't want them on Mars, because they think they're scum and ought to be left on Earth!" Pudgy cried. "I heard them talk, didn't I? Talk about how hard it's going to be for years on Mars with too many people there, already. And about how it'd be better for everyone if a lot of ignorant crumb-bums and their families weren't taken to Mars to be a load on everyone else. Didn't I hear them—"
Wales' rage at their prisoner receded, swept away by an icy tide of terrible doubt that despite himself was rising now in his mind.
He remembered things, now. He remembered Fairlie's grim face as he'd spoken broodingly of how hard a life it would be on Mars, with every one of Earth's millions there. He remembered the bitterly contemptuous way in which Fairlie—and Bliss and Chaumez and Holst—had spoken of the looters, the ignorant resisters, the crazy folk, whom it would be difficult to evacuate from Earth.
"Only fanatics would want to trap millions on Earth—" He, Wales, had said that. He'd been thinking then of the Brotherhood. But suppose there were other and more terrible fanatics? Fanatics who ruthlessly decided that the more backward and ignorant of Earth's millions would only be a burden in the hard years ahead, on Mars—and who secretly planned to trick those millions into staying until it was too late?
Such things had been planned and done before, by egotistical, self-appointed guardians of the public interest! And if—if this was the truth, it explained why he, Wales, had been followed, it explained why Fairlie had made him suspect the Brotherhood, it explained many things—
Halle-lu-jah! roared the chorus of howling voices, out in the streets. And the ruddy, throbbing light increased in intensity suddenly.
"Jay!" cried Martha, in tones of horror. He whirled around.
The front of the hardware store was on fire, with flames writhing around the edges of the windows, outside.
"You've got us killed!" sobbed Pudgy.
Wales, his thoughts now a chaos, realized that he dared delay no longer. He picked up the Venn gun, and then yanked their prisoner to his feet.
"Come on, Martha," he said. "Out that back window."
Pudgy stumbled awkwardly, his hands still bound behind him. They hurried back through the old store, with the firelight beating brighter from behind them, and got through the window into the alley.
To their left flames shot skyward with a roar from the Penn Hotel, showers of sparks sailing into the darkness. A glance told Wales that the Brotherhood had fires going along whole blocks of Mercer and South Jefferson Streets.
"This way," he cried, starting down the alley that ran southward between the streets. He had Pudgy by the shoulder, but there was no need to make their terrified prisoner hurry.
Wales put everything from his mind, but the necessity of escape from the holocaust of this latest flaming Atonement. And the new suspicion in his mind was so shocking that he didn't want to think of it until he had to.
He knew the alleys and streets of Castletown, even in darkness. And they had light to guide them—more and more light throbbing up into the night sky behind them.
He cut across Mill Street, and on up southeastward to a residential street of cottages. Here, he gave Martha his pistol and had her stand guard over Pudgy while he himself looked for a car.
He found one, in the garage attached to the first cottage. He had to break through the house itself to enter the garage. The rooms were just as someone had left them, the furniture, the rugs, all the things they could not take with them in Evacuation, still in place.
Again, Wales felt a pang. Someone had toiled and planned for this little house and the things in it. And now it would not even endure until the common Doomsday—it would perish in the senseless flames.
He drove out into the street, and pushed Pudgy into the back seat. Taking no chances, he tied their prisoner's ankles too. Then, with Martha beside him, Wales drove fast up the steep streets southeast.
"Jay—look!" she cried, when they reached a crest. She was looking back. He stopped the car, and looked back with her.
The whole downtown section of Castletown blazed high toward the stars. The wind whirled sparks away in burning clouds, and a great pall of smoke lay toward them.
Southward from the center of town moved a river of torches. And from those streets, only now just kindling, above the crackle of flames came the distant boom of the Brotherhood drums, and their rising and falling chant.
Martha was crying. He put his arm around her, and turned her away from the sight.
"It doesn't mean anything, Martha. It would have only lasted the few months till Doomsday, anyway."
Yet he could understand her emotion. It had been a long time since he had lived in Castletown. But he wished his last look at the old town had not been like this.
He turned toward Pudgy. "Now you can talk. Let's have it."
Pudgy said sullenly, "I've already talked too much. You didn't believe me, anyway."
Wales' face hardened. He said, "All right. The flames will reach this residential section in an hour. We'll leave you here."
It was enough. Their prisoner's doughy face seemed to fall apart a little.
"All right!" he cried. "But what's the use telling you when you just say I'm lying?"
"Nevertheless, give it to me from the first," Wales ordered.
Pudgy said, "Look, this whole scheme to keep the crummy no-goods here on Earth—that wasn't my idea. Five years ago, when they were first organizing Operation Doomsday, I got a job in the Evacuation Police. I did all right. Pretty soon I was a sergeant. Then—I began to hear things about the Evacuation from one of the other sergeants."
The man paused, then went on. "Eugene—that was my friend in the Police—told me that Fairlie and some other Evacuation officials needed some men for special secret police work. Said the work was so important and so secret nobody must know about it. I said okay, I'd like to be one of these special secret Evacuation Police. So they took me in. And Fairlie himself talked to me and a couple of others."
Wales, watching Pudgy narrowly, saw him mop the sweat off his brow. "Fairlie told us, that they weren't going to be able to get everybody off Earth before Doomsday. He said it was impossible, there was bound to be millions would get left. He told us that he and some of the other officials in key places in the Evacuation had decided that since they were going to have to leave people, it'd be better to leave a lot of crummy hillbillies and share croppers and ignorant trash. He said they'd only make things tougher for everyone on Mars, anyway. It was better, Fairlie said, to weed them out and leave them here."
An icy feeling of terrible conviction began to grow in Wales, despite all his attempts to repel it.
He'd heard just that kind of talk, before. Not openly, but in sly whispers and hints. People who felt sure of escaping from Earth themselves had expressed aristocratic regret that all Earth's people must be saved, that they must be burdened on the new world by the "backward."
No one had quite dared to advocate such ideas publicly. But there were those who secretly held them. And those who did, very well might have secretly decided to see that the "useless, backward" ones didn't escape Earth. Fairlie—and others like him—could be among them—
"Fairlie told us," Pudgy went on, "that they wouldn't prevent anyone leaving that wanted to leave. But, he said, lots of the dumber ones wouldn't want to leave if things were managed right, and that would solve the whole problem."
Martha interrupted. "But my brother—what of him? You said they had Lee?"
Pudgy nodded. "I was coming to that. Fairlie called some of us in real worried one night and told us we had to go to Castletown and grab Lee Kendrick. He said they'd been sounding Kendrick out about helping along the scheme, and that Kendrick wouldn't play ball."
"You mean," Wales said quickly, "that Fairlie and his group wanted Kendrick to help them trap the 'backward ones' here on Earth?"
Pudgy's head bobbed. "Near as I got it, that was it. Kendrick could make a statement kind of throwing doubt on whether Doomsday would happen—and the boobs would decide to stay. But I guess when Fairlie sounded him out a little, Kendrick was horrified at the idea, and Fairlie had to cover up fast and say he didn't mean it."
Martha clutched Wales' arm. "Jay, that's why Lee was so terribly worried, so anxious—that's why he wouldn't leave Earth! He was afraid such a scheme was really being planned!"
Wales could imagine that. He knew Lee Kendrick, and he knew that even a breath of suspicion of a plan so ruthless and terrible would have had a shattering effect on him.
"So," Pudgy finished, "before Kendrick could get too suspicious and start talking, we went to Castletown and grabbed him, and took him to New York. And his disappearance was nearly as good as his statement would have been—the boobs all figured Kendrick hadn't left Earth, so they would not."
"But he's alive?" Martha cried. "They haven't killed him."
Pudgy shrugged. "Not so far. Fairlie still wants him to make that statement, so all the scum will feel sure it's safe and will stay on Earth till too late."
Wales suddenly felt a revulsion from all that he had heard, from the shocking nightmare quality of it.
"It's not true, it can't be true!" he exclaimed. "Martha, this man had to tell some story to save his skin, and that's all he's done!"
Her face was white in the distant firelight. "Jay, people have done things like that, terrible as it is. They have killed millions, in the past, for just such reasons."
He knew that, too, and it was a knowledge he fought against—struggling against a cold conviction that he could not quite down.
"If Lee is still alive, Lee could tell us!" she was saying. "If we could reach him, rescue him—"
Wales turned back to the sullen-faced Pudgy. "You said that Fairlie and the others were holding Kendrick near New York. Just where?"
"Where he's right handy and near, yet where nobody can walk in on him," said Pudgy. "Bedloe's Island, in New York harbor. You know, the old Statue of Liberty island."
Wales thought, his mind a turmoil. Now the flames were marching up the hillside streets toward them, and now the sound of drums and distant chanting came from away southward.
The Brotherhood were leaving Castletown, on their way to make some other lifeless city a fiery sign of their atonement.
"I still," said Wales, "can't believe it. But we'll prove it, one way or another. We'll go back to New York, and see if Lee is really on that island."
"You haven't got a prayer!" said Pudgy, his voice rising into a high whine. "They've got him guarded there."
"And you," Wales said, "can tell us just where the guards are and how best to pass them. Yes, you're going with us."
He ignored the man's frantic objections, and started the car. He headed eastward, to skirt the flaming city at a safe distance.
The danger ahead, the hunters who would still be seeking him, Wales ignored. What was there anywhere but danger, on an Earth rocking toward Doomsday?