CHAPTER VI
Julia shrank back, trying to cover her nakedness with her arms. Taigue became a statue, a statue staring with horrified eyes at a shining goddess who had abruptly deteriorated into a mere woman. I tore the gun from his grasp before he could recover himself and bludgeoned him beneath the heart. But his eyes were glazed even before the charge struck him. I looked at him disgustedly as he sank gasping to the floor. The self-righteous idealism with which he had clothed Julia had been even thinner than the earthly clothes I had ripped away.
I turned to Julia. She had retrieved the prison dress, had slipped into it, and was improvising a catch to hold it together. Her face was white but her eyes were dry. I searched those eyes anxiously. I don't know why I should have been relieved to find understanding rather than anger in them, but I was relieved—more relieved than I would have cared to admit.
"Can you pilot a 'copter?" I asked.
She nodded. "I've been piloting them since I was twelve."
"There's a 'copter port on the roof. If we can reach it, we've got a chance. I don't know where we'll go, but we'll go somewhere—"
"We'll go to Mars, Roger. If you're willing." She had finished repairing her dress and stood calm and poised before me.
"This is no time for jokes," I said.
"And I'm not joking. There's a ramp not far from here that will take us to the roof. Come on, Roger!"
We peered up and down the corridor. It was empty. I followed Julia down the grim passage. In the distance, the arena entrance was bright with afternoon sunlight. At the first intersection, she turned right. The new passage was narrow, dimly lighted. At its far end a ponderous stone door opened reluctantly to the pressure of our shoulders and we found ourselves at the base of a sharply slanting ramp.
"You seem to know this place like a book," I said. "Were you ever in the cell block before?"
She nodded. "I visited my mother often before she was stoned."
"Your mother! Stoned?"
"Yes. Stoned. That's why I'm a ghoul. Hurry, Roger!"
We started up the ramp. After a dozen yards, it turned abruptly, became a steep spiral. Breathing was difficult, conversation impossible. Now and then, a slit of a window looked out into the crowded amphitheater.
The port boasted one derelict 'copter and one guard. The guard had his back to us when we crept cautiously onto the roof. He must have sensed our presence, for he turned. But I doubt if he ever saw us. The charge from my gun struck him in the side before he even completed his turn, and he crumpled to the sun-drenched concrete.
We were aboard the 'copter in an instant. Julia's experienced fingers made deft maneuvers on the control panel and then we were aloft, soaring over the amphitheater, the sky blue above us, the stoning platform a chiaroscuro of gray- and black-garbed men and women below us. The arena proper was a bleak expanse of packed dirt, unrelieved by a single blade of grass. I could hear the obscene murmur of the crowd above the whirring of the blades.
There was a telescreen above the control panel. I turned it on to see if our escape had been discovered. Apparently it had not been, for the scene coming over the single channel was the same I had just witnessed, viewed from a different angle. The telecamera had been set up opposite the arena entrance so that the upper echelon members of the hierarchy, who could afford such luxuries as TV sets, would have an excellent view of the expected chastisement.
The announcer was intoning the sixth commandment over and over in a deep resonant voice. I lowered the volume and turned to Julia. We were over the parsonage apartments now, headed in a northerly direction.
"Don't you think it's time you told me where we're going?" I said.
"I told you before but you wouldn't believe me. We're going to Mars, provided you're willing, of course. And I'm afraid you haven't much choice."
"Stop being ridiculous, Julia. This is a serious situation!"
"I know, darling. I know. And if the ship has already blasted, it will be a far more serious situation."
"What ship are you talking about?"
"The Cadillac-ship; the Ford-ship; the Plymouth-ship. Call it what you will. Cars are made of metal, so are spaceships. By applying the right temperatures, and the right techniques, dedicated people can transform Cadillacs and Fords and Plymouths into highways to the stars."
I was staring at her. "The ghouls—"
"Are people like myself—the new Pilgrims, if you like. Pilgrims sick of a society that evades population control by consigning its marriages to a computer deliberately designed to produce incompatible unions that will result in few, if any, children. Pilgrims who want no more of a civilization victimized by an outdated biblical exhortation, exploited by false prophets hiding behind misinterpretations of Freudian terminology."
The hives were flickering beneath us, gaunt precipices flanking narrow canyons. The verdure of the Cadillac Cemetery showed in the distance, and beyond it, eroded hills rolled away.
"I'm glad you did alter our data cards," I said after a while. "But I wish you'd done it for a different reason. I wish you could have loved me, Julia."
"I do love you," Julia said. "You see, darling, I couldn't accompany the colonists without a husband and I didn't want the kind of a husband the integrator would have given me. So I computed my own marriage. That was why I was so rude to you at the Cathedral. I—I was ashamed. Not that it was the first marriage I'd computed, but all the others—like Betz's and Kester's—involved people who were working on the ship, people who were already in love. There—there wasn't anyone in the group whom I cared for myself, so I had to look elsewhere. You and I are ideally suited, Roger. I didn't need the data cards to tell me that—all I needed was my eyes."
We were high above the Cadillac Cemetery and she was looking anxiously ahead at the rolling, dun-colored hills. "If only they haven't left yet," she said. "The last Cadillac we exhumed provided enough metal to finish the ship. But perhaps they waited for us."
A sudden crescendo in the murmur of the waiting crowd in the Coliseum brought the TV unit back to life. Slowly, the murmur rose into a great vindictive roar. Glancing at the screen, I saw the reason why.
The charcoal-uniformed figure that had just stepped through the arena entrance was unmistakable. The distance was considerable, and the eyes appeared only as dark shadows on the thin, haunted face. But I could visualize the terrible guilt burning in their depths; the consuming, the unbearable guilt—
I watched the first stone with horror. It missed, rolled to a stop in the dirt. The next one missed, too. But the one after it didn't, nor the one that followed. Taigue sank to his knees, and the stones became a murderous hail. And then, abruptly, it was all over, and Taigue lay dead and bleeding on the stone-littered ground, the scarlet letter he had pinned to his breast vivid in the merciless sunlight.
Thou shalt not look at a woman and lust—
Taigue had kept faith with himself to the end.
We were drifting over the hills. "There," Julia said suddenly. "There's the one, Roger!"
It looked like all the others to me—drab, scarred by innumerable gullies, lifeless. But when Julia opened the door of the cockpit and leaned out and waved, the gullies rivened, and the whole hill opened up like an enormous metallic flower.
I saw the ship then, the tall burnished ship poised on its concrete launching platform. I saw its name—the Mayflower II.
We drifted down past the tapered prow, the gleaming flanks. The other Pilgrims were already aboard. Betz and Kester waved to us as we passed the open lock. We stepped out upon the launching platform. The ship towered above us. The lathes and presses and furnaces of the subterranean factory stood silent in the gloom around us.
I looked at Julia. Her eyes were iridescent with relieved tears, her smile tremulous with happiness. "Mars, Roger," she whispered. "The ship can make it. But perhaps the old colony has perished and we'll have to start a new one. It won't be easy, darling. But will you come?"
I felt the way Samuel Fuller and Christopher Martin must have felt five centuries ago, standing on a lonely wharf in Southampton. The way William White and John Alden must have felt—
No, not quite the way John Alden had felt. I already had my Priscilla Mullins. I bent and kissed her. Then, hand in hand, we ascended the spiral gang-plank of the Mayflower II to begin our journey to the New World.