So I told them my story from the beginning. I spoke of the days of the Institute and Lazaroff’s experiment, of my awakening within the cylinder at the end of a century of sleep, my flight from the cellar and my discovery by Jones. I continued, telling of my first bewilderment in London, of David’s kindness which had saved my reason, described my summons that morning and the relays of spies who had led me to the Temple. When I narrated my discovery of the cylinder containing Esther’s living body I raised my eyes to David’s and perceived that I was no longer in the position of a prisoner awaiting death. David’s aspect had changed; he was trembling violently and struggling to speak. He looked fearfully at me, and Jones was hardly less moved. Then Elizabeth slipped her hand into mine. “We believe you, Arnold,” she said. Three times David attempted to speak while I was sketching briefly the remainder of my story up to the point of my encounter with Elizabeth, and each time his voice failed him. “Arnold, forgive me,” he managed to say at last. “The horrors of this government will not last much longer. Plans are well under way to make an end of democracy and restore liberty to the world. You have unwittingly placed a wonderful weapon in our hands. No man can be neutral in such times. Now, Arnold, you have to make a decision which will affect not yourself only, but all of us, Britain, the Federation, and the race of men. You must choose your party.” He turned to Jones. “He must be told nothing until the time arrives,” he continued, assuming a tone of authority. “You will say nothing—nor you, Elizabeth.” He turned to me again. “Arnold,” he said, “you must make your choice now. Lembken needs you for reasons which are patent to us, thanks to your statement. If you go back to him he can give you power and liberty to lord it over the people until the quick day of reckoning arrives. If you join us you must become an outlaw and an associate in the most desperate endeavor, play a leading part and share our dangers.” “How can you doubt me?” I asked. “I am with you, now, and at all times.” David held up his hand. “Wait!” he said. “You “It is not necessary, David,” I answered. “Yes, it is necessary. Because you do not know the depth of our intolerable bondage. I am going to tell you of my own life, that you may judge. “I begin with my father. As I told you, he was epileptic in youth. He outgrew the attacks, and because the Liberal government never dared to enforce the Defectives’ Law which it passed in 1930, he was able to marry, much later, a girl to whom he had been engaged for many years. They had lived quietly in what was then called Wales, in a rural community that had somehow managed to escape the excesses which began in 1945. “But my father was a marked man, because he was on the secret defectives’ list, and a Conservative. A few weeks after his marriage the storm of revolution burst over Dolgelly. The army of clerks and civil officers that followed the troops of the victorious democracy raked the country fine for victims. With his young bride my father fled to the mountains, where I was born, and they existed there, heaven knows how, till an opportunity arrived for flight abroad. When the restoration came he returned, and rebuilt his ruined home. “My father was a student of history, and he knew “The mob started burning defectives then. For many there was the chance of submission to the new government, nominally under Boss Rose, which Sanson was constructing; but there was none for me, since epilepsy was then, owing to the ephemeral theory of some forgotten scientist, regarded as the unpardonable sin. I managed to escape to Denmark, and spent the next sixteen years upon the Continent, wandering from place to place as the Federation came into being. I married a Swiss lady at Lausanne, where Elizabeth was born. We had to fly by night, when the child was a week old. My wife could not survive the journey over the mountain passes in the middle of winter. She died in what was called Austria, two days after our arrival there. With Elizabeth I continued my flight eastward, and found refuge in Greece. “I said that the mob had begun to burn defectives. But the Council changed that. The word ‘productivity’ was the new fetish, and, seeing that the murder “Ten years ago Boss Rose fell under an assassin’s dagger. The Council, under the influence of Sanson, issued a decree that no faith was to be kept with defectives. Sanson, then supreme behind the mask of Lembken, began to harry the people. It was then he introduced his system of mating under Council supervision.” “It is abominable!” I cried. “Yet, like all our institutions, it has its roots far back in the past,” said David, “and only needed the “It was said that the children—” I began. “The answer was State rearing, Arnold, as had been urged by many men and some women of liberal and progressive minds. We tried that in 2002. Elizabeth was torn from me. For six months we had public crÈches in every city. There was much public dissatisfaction, though the children were not taken from their mothers till they had been weaned. That was the time when the Guard was formed, consisting of Janissaries trained from youth by the Council and pledged to them. However, what caused the “This phenomenon was never explained satisfactorily, and the mortality, which ranged from eighty to ninety per cent, shocked the Province profoundly, for it meant an intolerable lessening in the productivity of the next generation. The children were returned to their parents. Elizabeth, who was above the age curve of maximum mortality, came back to me, and, in spite of rigorous inspection by the officials of the Children’s Bureau, I have managed to keep her. “But I must be brief, Arnold. I have told you that it was decreed no faith was to be kept with defectives. The net was cast over all who, trusting to the proclamation, had returned from the forests and waste places, and from abroad. Gradually they were sorted out and ascribed. Many records of heredity had disappeared during the Revolution, but they had my father’s in the Bureau of Pedigrees and Relationships. Since then I have waited in suspense daily. They know it, and, if I have not been condemned to the workshops, it is through Lembken’s favor, for he was head of the Strangers’ Bureau “But is there no law?” I cried. “Is there no charter of liberty at all?” “Why, yes, Arnold. We still have Magna Charta, and Habeas Corpus, and many other documents, and occasionally these are invoked. There is an old man in the paper shops who has appealed against imprisonment and carried his case through twenty or thirty courts since he was shut up as a boy, and if he lives long enough his appeal will come before the Council. But you see, Arnold, one of the first acts of the victorious democracy was to institute the election and the recall of judges. “They think I fear for my own liberty,” he continued, beginning to pace the floor. “They do not know—happily they do not know.” Then he went on to tell me that which concerned the girl’s arrest that afternoon. It appeared that Elizabeth was one of those very few who were physically almost perfect, and, as such, she had been in danger of being placed on the list of those who were to enter the harems of the whites. David’s sole hope of saving her lay in the fact that she was penalized six points because her grandfather had had epileptic seizures. But she approximated so closely to the Sanson norm—and the child had been innocent enough to head the district Now I gathered in the last threads of the skein. David had returned from the Strangers’ Bureau that afternoon to find the apartment empty. Jones had conveyed the news to him, and had secreted him in the Airscouts’ Fortress, pending a plan of rescue, a task which was only rendered possible through the disaffection of Lembken’s airscouts. Jones had seen me in my priest’s robes, and the two had come to the natural conclusion that I had been a spy, playing one of the romantic parts in fashion among the whites, and approved in the Council’s novels, in order to see Elizabeth before selecting her. We had been discovered at the window, the position of the little house had given Jones the opportunity of rescuing the girl with his scoutplane, and, but for my return while the rope still dangled before the aperture, I should never have known the secret of Elizabeth’s disappearance. No wonder David had flown at my throat. “Now, we must act at once,” said David. “We are going to seek refuge in the forests where our friends are hiding. Jones will carry us there tonight “I made it long ago,” I answered. “You are with us?” “Indeed, I am.” David wrung my hand hard. “You have decided wisely,” he said, “and by your decision you have taken the only means possible to save the woman you love. For the Sanson rÉgime is crumbling, and your presence means, what you cannot yet imagine, to the cause of liberty. We have five thousand outlaws and fugitives from the defectives’ shops, scattered in secret hiding places about London. We have made Ray rods in the shops and have secreted provisions. Tonight the heads of the movement are to assemble—” “In the cellar where I lay so long!” I exclaimed, with sudden intuition. “And Jones had been there with Ray rods when he found me!” “Correct,” answered Jones, in his laconic manner. “We remain here until midnight,” said David. “Then Jones will take us when he starts to relieve the first patrol.” “Be assured that I am with you to the end,” I said. And I swore that I would do all in my power, so long as I had life and liberty, to fight for human I think the resolution in my manner must have enkindled David’s hopes, for he put out his hand and caught mine again, and wrung and held it. “You do not know, Arnold, how necessary you are to us,” he said. “But tonight you shall be told. I am old, Arnold, and I have little courage. I have lived through too many changes and frustrated hopes. I had grown used and resigned to things that had come to seem unchangeable. The freedom of my youth was only a dream to me. Sometimes I doubted whether men had ever been free. It was your surprise, your ignorance, then the indignation which you thought I did not see that made me begin to understand my own degradation. And it was today’s events that gave me heart to work with all my might for the cause to which I had only languidly adhered. I have been one of the revolutionary committee for months, and now I shall fight whole-heartedly, and you with me.” “David,” I said with sudden conviction, “you are a Christian.” His eyes suddenly seemed to blaze. “I am!” he cried. “As we all are. I have temporized with evil all these years, but now I cannot do so any more. Elizabeth put one arm about her father’s neck and extended her free hand to me. I clasped it, and then the airscout’s; and so we pledged ourselves. |