Читать книгу Deluge II - Robert F. Young - Страница 5

The ancient stresses were ready to tear the earth apart, and only Anton Burke was ready. He planned to choose his passenger-list with care. But when the time came, his space-ship Ark was empty—save for the strangest friends a man could have on a journey to the stars.

The brazen throat of war had ceased to roar; All now was turned to jollity and game

—PARADISE LOST

In common with Stendhal, he sought after mistresses; in common with Stendhal, he won but few; in common with Stendhal, he was ugly to look at; in common with Stendhal, he was gifted with foresight. But he was destined to give his world no Julien Sorel, no exquisite Madame de Renal. His world would have received them with even less grace than Stendhal’s had. What he had to give was of a much more material nature—and yet, ironically, it brought him ridicule rather than fame. His name was Anton Burke.

He looked down now on the veldt over which his noiseless shooting-platform was bearing him. It was a vast veldt, and he owned every inch of it. Zebra roamed it; gnu, okapi and giraffe. Lion and lioness lolled in its sun-warmed grasses, hippopotamus and water buffalo wallowed in its muddy streams, rhinoceros and elephant grazed on its rolling plains. Incongruously there were tiger, kangaroo and ocelot. An acreage of riotous jungle harbored chimpanzee, gibbon and baboon; gorilla, Cercopithecidae—and orangutan. The Veldt, as the gleaming sign above its ornate entrance on Diversion Street in Old York proclaimed, was an all-purpose hunting-ground. Anton Burke, rich to begin with, had populated it at great expense with the species of fauna that had almost been killed off during the pre-exodus era, and as a result had become even richer.

Far to his right, smoke rose in a tenuous blue-white column. There were numerous hunting-parties abroad, and one of them could have grounded their platform in order to cook a midday meal. Or perhaps one of the maintenance androids was burning litter. Burke weighed both possibilities, tentatively rejected them. Recently the apartheid savages, whose reservation adjoined his land, had devised a means of penetrating his force-field fence and begun poaching —a circumstance that had prompted his present tour of investigation. The smoke could very well be their doing. He veered the platform to the right, leaned back in the harness and unslung his rifle. The ground dipped into a shallow gully, and the platform lurched slightly with the change of terrain. The source of the smoke proved to be a small cook-fire on the bank of a little brook. A solitary figure squatted before it, turning a spit over the flames—the figure of a girl. She did not see the platform till it was almost over her; then, too late, she sprang to her feet and began running along the bank. Burke raised the rifle, aimed and squeezed the trigger. The girl collapsed in mid-stride and rolled into the brook.

He grounded the platform, stepped off and pulled her up on the bank. She was clad in a skimpy sarong made of antelope hide—standard attire for apartheid females. Her long hair was midnight-black, and her dark delicate eyebrows were so vivid that they gave the impression of having been penciled on. Her face was thin, and surprisingly young—at the very most, she couldn’t be a day over thirty. Indeed, the striking symmetry of her body denoted an even younger age. The apartheids had been less susceptible than had the coloreds to the radiation storms, and consequently sterilization had not occurred in them quite so soon.

While he was waiting for the girl to recover from the stun-charge, Burke walked back along the bank to her cook-fire. Skewered on the crude spit was a hind-quarter cut of okapi flesh. A dozen yards away, the carcass lay half-hidden in the deep grass, the shaft of a primitive spear protruding from its side. He stared at the carcass in cold fury, mentally estimating how much the girl’s contemplated meal had cost him; then he kicked the spit and the fire into the brook and returned to the platform. After contacting the veldt-base on the radio-phone, he gave his location and told his wife to send out a maintenance android to pick the carcass up. It would never do for any of his carnivores to get a taste of okapi flesh, else they might come to prefer it to the standard beef-rations each of them was fed daily. Okapis, in common with the rest of his animals, had been unaffected by the radiation storm, and their numbers were increasing. Never-the-less, they were still too rare to risk decimation.

The girl had not yet stirred. He sat down on the platform, rested his rifle on his knees and idly ran his eyes over her. He hated every inch of her, but he had to admit that every inch of her was good to look at. Ironically, the sun had tanned her skin a golden brown, and in comparison his own was lily-white. But then, he was a light-complexioned man.

As he sat there, he found himself thinking of his current mistress. Eulalie Bernard was the best Frivolity Street had to offer, but her blond beauty withered into tinselly prettiness next to the dark and vivid beauty of this savage he had felled. Eulalie hated him quite cordially, and he knew it; he also knew that she put up with him solely because he could afford a more luxurious love-nest than his rivals. However, a man in his position needed a striking mistress and Eulalie had been the most striking he could find.

A striking mistress...This apartheid savage now—wouldn’t she be striking though?

Washed and dressed, her hair aligned in a cosmetically correct coiffeur; her crude manners disciplined to conform to the conventions of mid-twenty-sixth century society? He pictured himself showing up at the forthcoming mayoral ball in Old York with her on his arm, and he found the picture thrilling—so thrilling, in fact, that when the girl’s eyes fluttered open, his heart began to pound and blood throbbed thickly in his temples.

The eyes were a deep cold blue. Loathing leaped into them the second she saw him. He directed the muzzle of the rifle at the center of her forehead. “Get up,” he said. Grudgingly she complied. He got a nylon snare-net out of the platform locker, dropped it over her upper body and secured it. He shoved her toward the platform. “Get on.” She whirled, blue eyes diamond-bright with fury. “Don’t touch me!” He drew back his hand to slap her face, but it was an empty gesture and he knew it. He was incapable of hitting anyone, Anton Burke was, and an apartheid savage was no exception. Self-contempt suffused him. “Get on,” he repeated.

This time she complied. The platform was a standard two-man job, and after securing her in one of the two harnesses, he secured himself in the other, lifted to sixty feet and headed back for the base. Mountains rimmed the western edge of the veldt, and for a long while nothing was visible against their misty-blue background. Gradually, however, the tall tapered shape of his reconditioned and reconverted starship emerged from the blueness, and not long afterward the dome of the old radar-telescope building that housed his veldt living-quarters could be seen gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Beyond the dome, the base-buildings showed faintly at the feet of the mountains, and far to the right lay the deserted structures of the old Bantu staging-area.

The girl never once took her eyes from the ship from the moment it emerged from its blue background till the moment they came down in front of the dome. Despite her undisguised loathing for him, Burke found the picture he had drawn more and more intriguing. And there was an excellent chance that it could be brought to life. Poaching by an apartheid was punishable by death, and with such an alternative hanging over her head, she should prove to be most cooperative. He ushered her into the dome and down a paneled hall to the living room. The living room occupied the entire rear-half of the building, and a wide window extending from the apex of the concave ceiling to the floor provided a splendid view of a jungle-clad mountainside. After removing the snare-net, he indicated a twenty-foot sofa, and she sat down reluctantly.

He wasted no time in outlining his proposition. Standing before her, his short bulky body silhouetted against the mountainside, he pointed out first of all what would be in store for her if he turned her over to the Old York authorities; then he told her what he had in mind. She was sitting bolt-upright on the sofa when he finished, eyes glittering with hatred. “Do you think I’d sleep with you?” she demanded. He wanted to point out that he was not a negro, but a colored, and that the negro blood that flowed in his veins was as negligible as the negro blood that flowed in the veins of most modern Americans; but doing so would have given her the false impression that he was ashamed of that blood. Therefore, he let the epithet pass. “You would be my mistress in name only,” he explained, “and the whorl-lock on the love-nest in which I established you would be adjusted to respond to your touch alone. Surely you can see the advantages of such a way of life. For the first time since you were born you would have enough to eat and a roof other than a skin tarpaulin over your head. You would have clothes to wear—the best clothes Old York has to offer—and you would be a respected member of civilized society. And your only obligations would be to attend public gatherings with me and to give the impression while doing so that you respected and admired me. I am, in effect, offering to touch you with my magic wand—and my magic wand is hard cold cash.

She was regarding him narrowly. “Why?”

“I—I need someone like you. Someone unusual who will attract favorable attention to me and to my business.” He with-drew a lavender kerchief from the pocket of his tailored hunting-jacket and patted his forehead. To his astonishment, he saw that his hand was trembling. He replaced the kerchief and took a deep breath. “There is yet another advantage that would accrue from your acceptance.”

“Yes?”

“I had two reasons for purchasing this tract of land,” Burke said. “One was its rich potentials as a hunting-ground; the other was the spaceport and ship that came with it. The ship is the last of its kind—the last the World-office of Stellar Migration had built—and it was never put into use because at the time of its completion, the predicted radiation storms had already begun and the emigration ban was in effect. Both the ship and the spaceport then became the property of the new center of world-government—Old York—and after the few Bantus who had been left behind took telepassage to the city, both were allowed to fall into desuetude. I got them for a song, and several months ago, when I became convinced that my seismograph extrapolations were correct, I had the ship reconditioned. When the forthcoming tectonic revolution begins, I, and I alone, will have the means of escaping destruction, and I and I alone, will choose my fellow-passengers. Many of them I have already chosen, though I’ve informed none of them yet. I have room for many more.”

He paused, searching her eyes for the awe which his words should have evoked. He did not find it. Presently, “Let me elaborate,” he went on. “In tech-school I specialized in seismology. Today it is no longer taught, and the tutorobot who taught it has since been scrapped; but even then it was an unpopular subject. But for some reason it fascinated me—so much so, in fact, that I have made a hobby of it ever since. Today, in the basement of The Veldt building in Old York, I have a central coordinator which is attuned to hundreds of hypersensitive seismographs located in key positions all over the world. The coordinator interprets their recordings, correlates them and projects the result on a huge graph. I instituted the setup because I had been led to believe from my earlier seismic observations that centuries of weather-control have interfered with the normal cooling-off process of the planet and have brought about the conditions necessary for a new kind of tectonic disturbance. I have found out since that such is actually the case, and thanks to the efficiency of my seismic setup, I can predict the beginning of the end almost to the day. The new tectonic revolution will commence on or near the seventh of July—less than a month from now.”

He began pacing up and down, and when he spoke again, his voice was slightly louder than it had been before: “But this time, as I inferred, the revolution will be the result of expansion, rather than contraction. This time, the mountains will not rise, but the continents will sink, and as a prelude, there will be rains such as man has never known before!” He swept his arm in a wide arc, and his voice rose higher. “All will be covered, save for the tops of the highest mountains, and they will be as barren islands in a vast planetary sea. Let the civic dignitaries and their mistresses laugh at me behind my back—I don’t care! When the time comes they’ll listen to me. ‘Save us, Anton Burke!’ they’ll say. ‘Save us, please!’ “ He darted over to a huge tele-window, tuned it into the spaceport. He pointed at the ship with a rigid forefinger. “There it is—the Deucalion —and I own it, it’s mine! It will carry me and whomever I choose to accompany me to Alpha Centauri VI, and there I will establish a colony far superior to the one established on Alpha Centauri V by the unfortunates who escaped the radiation storms, and I will call it Asgard—the abode of the gods!” He turned from the tele-window and triumphantly faced the girl. His blob-like body and ugly moon-shaped face anticlimaxed his rhetoric, but he was blissfully unaware of the aspect he presented. “As my mistress,” he concluded, his voice calmer now, “your salvation would, of course come first.”

There was awe in her eyes now all right—or was it simply fear? “Be—before your wife’s?” she asked.