A Diversity of Creatures. Rudyard Kipling
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little pointer switching from county to county as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls, urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General Communicator brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her own privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.
'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of some one.'
We brushed over a belt of forced woodland-fifteen-year-old maple sixty feet high-grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.
'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it is my own system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'
'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm sorry! We've locked up. Wait a minute.'
We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents round our knees were withdrawn.
The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile away, behind the guardian woods.
'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough. Dad's gone to Chicago to-Ah! Then it was your call I heard just now!'
She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the switch, and turned it full on.
We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards from the verandah.
'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De Forest placidly.
'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she answered. 'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'
'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went on, while Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their dignity is touched.
'Stop a minute-you don't know how funny you look!' She put her hands on her hips and laughed mercilessly.
'Don't worry about that,' said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered from the Victor Pirolo in the meadow.
'Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!' Arnott called. 'Sort it out gently, please.'
We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the verandah roof, frightening a nestful of birds. The ground-circuit was open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.
'How rude-how very rude of you!' the maiden cried.
''Sorry, but we haven't time to look funny,' said Arnott. 'We've got to go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I'd go into the cellars for the next two hours, and take mother with me.'
Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at the foot of the gang-way ladder.
'The Board hasn't shown what you might call a fat spark on this occasion,' said De Forest, wiping his eyes. 'I hope I didn't look as big a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad coming home from Chicago?'
There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the timber, fuming and sparking furiously.
'Jump!' said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the none-too-wide door. 'Never mind about shutting it. Up!'
The Victor Pirolo lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.
'There's a nice little spit-kitten for you!' said Arnott, dusting his knees. 'We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she plays a cultivator at us!'
'And then we fly,' said Dragomiroff. 'If I were forty years more young, I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!'
'I,' said Pirolo, 'would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a dirty plough; a-how do you say? – agricultural implement.'
'Oh, that is Illinois all over,' said De Forest. 'They don't content themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now, where's your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against this wench.'
Arnott pointed to the black heavens.
'Waiting on-up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole installation, sir?'
'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De Forest. 'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'
In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.
'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a little, please.'
We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines-the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red before our astonished eyes.
'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't interfere with traffic, that I can see.'
'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'
We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the edge of that glowing square.
At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and levellers. Then the words came up clearly-the words of the Forbidden Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips-poor Pat MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague-every silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet's inherited memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago-innocent, contented little Chicago-was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few generations ago!
'Once there was The People-Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!'
(Then the stamp and pause):
'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
Once there was The People-it shall never be again!'
The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the melting walls.
De Forest frowned.
'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old Days! They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert 'em, Arnott.'
'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of the Victor Pirolo ring to the command: 'Lamps! Both watches stand by! Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!'
'Keep still!' Takahira whispered to me. 'Blinkers, please, quartermaster.'
'It's all right-all right!' said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap. I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in absolute darkness.
'To save the sight,' he explained, and pushed me on to the chart-room divan. 'You will see in a minute.'
As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost intolerable light, let down from heaven at an immense distance-one vertical hairsbreadth of frozen lightning.
'Those