Islands in the Sky Read online

  The parade, led by a rider on a white horse, executed a circuit of the arena, a cut-across, and finally halted, saluting to the peal of a fanfare. A microphone sprouted from a trap-door, rising on a metal stalk. The mounted leader addressed the stadium through loudspeakers, booming out greetings, program announcements, promises of thrills. Finally:

  “It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce a performer who will be in action next week. Blackie Peyton, protégé of General Argyle!”

  “Stand up,” the overseer in the howdah bade Peyton.

  Peyton did so. A searchlight rested blinkingly upon him. On impulse he mitted himself to the crowd, boxer fashion. They thundered approval of him. He sat down, feeling sick from the glare.

  “That was to amplify you for a televise,” the overseer said. “They all got a glimpse of you. Now they’re hungry to see the color of your blood.

  The parade ambled back through the main doorway. Dismounting, Peyton followed a fawning usher along a passageway to a small door.

  Through this he stepped into the box of General Argyle.

  The general shook hands with theatrical cordiality, introduced him to a dozen groomed and scented guests. Then he paused, for the moment of noon was at hand. Into view against the sun came the vast cushion-shaped shadow of the Flying Island. From it seemed to gush a beam, straight down upon the arena.

  “Television message,” someone whispered.

  A cloud was forming above the sand. In its midst, as in a clairvoyant’s crystal, was a radiant, flashing glimpse of a city, all golden spires and rainbow bubbles.

  “That,” whispered the someone beside Peyton, “is how the Flying Island must look.”

  Then the vision melted into a colossal reflection of a man’s head and shoulders. It was Marshal Torridge, whom Peyton had seen televised once before.

  “People of New York, I regret that I can be with you in image only. My best wishes to you and to General Argyle, your new commander. Enjoy the great circus which is now spread for your enjoyment.”

  The beam was gone and the dark patch slid away from the sun. Peyton gazed after it. Had he truly seen what it was like, or had he yet to find out?

  “You look magnificent in that costume,” Thora, beside him, was saying. “How do you feel?”

  “Silly.”

  The man who had whispered spoke from the other side.

  “You and I are artists, Peyton—you of swords, I of words.”

  PEYTON turned and looked at him.

  The man was a few years younger than he, slender and artificial in chocolate brown. His tawny hair seemed to be skillfully curled.

  “My name is Bengali,” he said. “I am a poet, recite twice a week over the radio. I maybe inspired by you to a really fine set of verses.”

  He leaned back in his chair and fixed his blue eyes on the vault of the sky. He began to speak measuredly, as though he read words written up there.

  “Across the smooth and sanded floor

  Advanced, to high applause,

  A swarthy hero, armed for war . . .

  “Work in a lion’s claws,” suggested Peyton. “They’ve got cages and cages of lions.” To Thora he said, “I’ve heard that there’s no trade to supply us with real coffee or tobacco. How do they get lions and elephants to New York?”

  She made no reply, for just then the show began. The dancing girls capered forth in a really graceful ballet, stopped in the middle of a tableau with shrieks. They broke into wild flight.

  A monstrous rhinoceros, goaded from its pen, galloped after them in swift, clumsy rage. Head down, it almost caught the slowest of the girls on its horn, which had been stained black and highly polished to set off blood.

  She reached the wall and someone in a box helped her to safety.

  Alone, the armored monster lumbered around on the sand. Its dinosaur head, survival of a past age, tossed and swayed. It squealed and snorted like a mad stallion.

  A shrill whistle blew from across the sand. Another small portal opened and Willie Burgoyne emerged. He was greeted with yells and cheers from the spectators, many of whom called him by name. The rhinoceros, too, faced that way. It peered like a short-sighted old man. Willie advanced at a trot, the strung bow in his left hand, with an arrow laid across.

  The beast charged him, ungainly as a hog, swift as an antelope. Willie stood still. That deadly downflung plow of a horn slashed almost at his feet when he took a long, smooth stride to the left.

  As the bulk of his adversary blundered by, he set the head of his arrow and released the string. The whole stadium, abruptly silent, heard the twang. Willie took long backward steps toward the center of the arena, while the wounded rhinoceros buck-jumped awkwardly in pain. It came at him again, more slowly than before.

  “Magnificent!” murmured Bengali, the poet. “It is the legend of the unicorn’s hunting, enacted before our eyes. But, of course,” he added with pedantic superiority, “only a maiden, pure and beautiful and snow-white, can destroy the unicorn.”

  “Well,” said Peyton, “my money rides on that dark lad out there to win. Want to bet?”

  Nobody took him up on it.

  AS THE rhinoceros drew near for the second time, Willie again stepped aside. He set a swift, black hand on the shoulder-hump of the beast and vaulted easily upon its back. The rhinoceros stopped, as though powerful brakes had been applied. Willie dropped his bow and whipped out his straight sword. His free forefinger touched a point behind the left shoulder, then his weapon drove in to the hilt. He dismounted with an airy leap, ran several steps away, turned his back and bowed with a graceful flourish.

  The rhinoceros collapsed and died behind him.

  Howls and hurrahs rang out. Willie made his exit and a midget tractor chugged forth to haul away the carcass.

  Attendants threw sand on the splotches of blood.

  A horseman rode out, dressed as a cowboy. He waved his hands to the applauding multitude and reined in to look for his foe. It appeared from a door opposite—a bison bull, almost as large as the rhinoceros and fully as intent on destruction.

  Head low, shaggy hump high, it hurled itself at the cowboy.

  “I thought those things were extinct,” said Peyton.

  “There are great herds reported out West,” volunteered Bengali. He patted a yawn with his beringed right hand, then sat up abruptly. “Oh, this is delicious!”

  His approval was for the sudden victory of the bison bull. The cowboy had expertly spread a lariat, whirling it around his head. He launched it at the oncoming bison, settling it down over the black bulk and rearing back quickly. The noose, given a second’s opportunity, would have tightened around all four feet. But the bison, by chance or by cunning, leaped high at that moment. The noose flickered away without catching.

  A moment later the two curved horns had dipped under the belly of the horse, lifting it and hurling it ten yards away. The crowd was yelling, but not loud enough to drown the shrill scream of the gored horse. The man fell beside his floundering mount, plowing the sand with his face. He got to his hands and knees, then to his feet. He ran, staggering.

  Spinning on its bunched toes, as a cat spins, the bull leaped, tossed him like an empty sack. He fell heavily. The horns scooped him up and tossed him again. The sun illuminated his flying body, picked out the bright crimson blood.

  Another figure sped forth, a gladiator in the costume of a clown. As the bison prodded the prone cowboy for a third time, this newcomer caught and pulled the corkscrew tail. The beast left its victim and the gaily dressed clown ran comically before it. There was loud laughter on all sides.

  As they shot past another door, Willie Burgoyne stepped out and launched a quick arrow. The bison somersaulted and lay kicking. The applause was like spring thunder.

  “Still bored?” Thora asked Peyton.

  He shook his head bleakly.

  “Many people are frightened at their first circus,” said Argyle.

  “Not me,” replied Peyton. “Only sick to my
stomach.”

  Everyone in the box turned and stared. Peyton didn’t care. He had spoken the truth.

  Riches, expense, lavishness, a morbid mess of thrills for these New Yorkers who were kept pent up in their great box of a city! The Airmen, with their flying craft, could import rhinoceros and buffalo, but not coffee and tobacco. The Pit had been a better prison, because it didn’t pretend to be anything else.

  The warden had said that the world was changed. He should have said that the world had reverted to barbarism.

  The Flying Island, though, might be different.

  VI

  GRAMP waited for Peyton in the dressing room. Willie had already changed and sought his living quarters nearby.

  “You look like an advance agent for the Fourth World War,” Gramp said. “What made you mad?”

  Peyton scowled still more blackly.

  “Didn’t you see that poor cowpoke?”

  “If you’re going to be a gladiator, you’d better get used to blood.”

  It was a new thought. Peyton mulled it over while he doffed his dress armor.

  “Things have changed, all right—for the worse.” He dropped his cloak on the dressing table. “I ought to go out and get drunk.”

  Gramp looked up from unstrapping his sandals.

  “Can you scrounge a holiday from that blond peril?”

  “Thora? Sure. That’s just part of my work, anyway.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” commented Gramp tritely. “Come with me tonight down to the Underways.”

  “Underways?” repeated Peyton.

  “What used to be slums. We’ll have fun.”

  “General Argyle gave me only thirty thousand dollars yesterday for pin money.”

  “It’s a fortune in the Underways. Scrub off that pretty suntan paint and wear your old clothes.”

  The covered, dimly lighted street they came to was fenced with mighty concrete pilings instead of buildings. Glancing between these, Peyton saw other pilings of wood, plastic or cement, like the trunks of a dismal forest. Only a few buildings lined the streets. Traffic was made up of pedestrians, mostly heavy-laden. Some carried huge parcels. Others balanced baskets on pole-ends, like Chinese coolies. Peyton saw no vehicles at all.

  “And you say lots of people live down here?” he demanded of Gramp. “What for?”

  “Because they’re made to. Somebody has to look after all these piles and braces.”

  Peyton paused and stared through the seemingly endless thickets of upright columns. It was a dismal view.

  “This is the basement of New York,” continued Gramp. “With all the weight that’s on these supports, they need to be repaired, or replaced, or guy-wired, or strengthened all the time. So most of the poor people—like me, before I got too old for it—are down here, slaving and messing around. Naturally they live down here.”

  “Naturally?”

  Gramp smiled fiercely in his beard.

  “Another thing the Airmen figured out. If the boys who keep the town braced up live down here, they’ll do the job well. They’ll be crushed first and flattest by any slip—in here, Blackie.”

  AMONG the pilings stood a slovenly shack. They went in through an atmosphere rank with synthetic tobacco fumes. There was a bar, a fly-specked mirror, a throng of shabby men, mostly old. They all drank industriously. One or two hailed Gramp by name. He hailed back and steered Peyton to a free space at the bar.

  “Tony,” he said to the bartender, “my pal Blackie will buy some beer.”

  Peyton laid down a five-hundred-dollar bill.

  “Have something yourself,” he invited the bartender. “Here’s looking, Gramp.” He lifted his glass. “I like this place. No fluff and no Airmen.”

  “Most of these guys work at propping up the town,” explained Gramp. “The older ones are charity dolers, like me. Most of them are good eggs, done a job or two in their lives.”

  “We have that,” assured a nearby oldster with a hooked nose. “Me, I was a sailor when I was a boy. Huh! Who sails now?”

  “The Airmen,” replied Peyton. “They sail through the air with the greatest racket of all time. Have a beer, sailor.”

  The old tar dipped his beak into the drink.

  “None of us like the Airmen down here, and they kind of keep out of our way. Pilings have been known to fall on snoopers.”

  Peyton drank, too.

  “This beer’s not synthetic, anyway. Boys, you sound like you’re boiling up a poor man’s fight against the Airmen.”

  He wondered if he was talking too much, but Gramp’s rejoinder was frank enough to reassure him.

  “It’s every man’s fight, Blackie. Everybody suffers. They tax the rich and work the poor. Nobody really has much to lose.”

  “If this talk got back to General Argyle—” mused Peyton.

  “If it did,” the sailor interrupted grimly, “somebody might stick a knife into you and walk it all the way around you. Remember that, before you sing to any Airmen.”

  “None of that talk, sailor,” Gramp cautioned. “Blackie’s square. I wouldn’t be training with him if he wasn’t.”

  “More beer,” said Peyton.

  When they had their second round, Gramp put his beard close to Peyton’s ear.

  “Follow me,” he whispered.

  He led Peyton to the back of the room. There was a door marked “Kitchen.”

  They entered a room where a red-faced benefits for the aged and work for the cook boiled ham and cabbage, passed through a door marked “Pantry,” a dark passage beyond. Peyton’s Pit glow face lighted them to a third door, where Gramp knocked four times.

  “Joe Hooker,” he called.

  An automatic lock buzzed and the door swung wide. They came into a small, bare, windowless room. A man looked up from behind a battered desk. He was lean and had tawny hair that was artificially curled.

  “Say,” exclaimed Peyton, stopping. “Aren’t you Bengali, the radio poet?”

  “Stand easy,” invited Bengali in a voice unlike his affected tones at the circus. “The Airmen figured me for a fool. I want them to. But I was there to observe you, decide if Gramp Hooker was right when he said you might be useful to us.”

  Peyton rested his knuckles on the desk top.

  “What are you?”

  “Chief of Council for the Committee against the Airmen.”

  Peyton relaxed. “Oh, revolution.”

  “Not exactly. Revolution implies something new. We want only the old. The days before Nineteen-Sixty weren’t perfect, but they were free—and better than this. You admit as much. You don’t like the Airmen.”

  “Being an Airman is being expert at a certain job,” said Peyton. “I don’t squawk about anybody who does his job right. But when a bunch of high-class mechanics begins to push itself on top of everybody and roosts up there, playing God—”

  He broke off. Again he feared he was talking too much.

  “That’s putting it clearly,” stated Bengali calmly. “The war ended with peace in the hands of Airmen throughout the world. They organized, holding all the arms and all the authority. Nobody could give them an argument. The terms sounded wonderful. No more war. All weapons to remain in the hands of an international governing class. Dole poor. Taxes on the rich. Production and other activity to be supervised. All to be run by the men best fitted by service and training for the job of ruling. How does that sound?”

  “Perfect,” replied Peyton, “but it isn’t working out.”

  BENGALI nodded. “Exactly. If the Airmen had played the game square and above-board, this would be heaven. They played it crooked, to get power and gain for themselves, and it’s purgatory. And they themselves aren’t pleased, either.”

  “Not pleased?” blurted Peyton. “That’s hard to understand.”

  Bengali paused to clarify the idea.

  “There are just a few of them and so many of us, they need that great Flying Island to keep spinning around Earth to keep a weather eye on everything.
Population centers like this—everybody crowded together, with no scattered rural sub-centers and wild country where outlaws might escape to—helps simplify the problem, but not too much.

  “Twenty thousand Airmen have to keep busy. Most of them are stationed at the various towns, policing, supervising and governing. And the ones who began it, after twenty years, aren’t so young and brash and energetic any more. They want to relax, take a vacation. They don’t dare. The younger Airmen, chafing to take their places, might step in.”

  “You sound sure,” commented Peyton.

  “I can even give you names. General Argyle, a very able man, has been put in command of New York. He’s not satisfied. He wants to be marshal, master of everything, in the place of Torridge up there on that Island.” Bengali smiled again, as though there were a happy side to what he said. “If the Airmen fall out among themselves, we who are planning against them can do something.”

  “Let me think for a moment,” Peyton pleaded.

  He had no doubt that Bengali, traveling in high circles and low, could be pretty sure of his facts. The Airmen had their work cut out for them, governing the world. A split would mean dissension, reduction of numbers, diverting of attention. A strong move on the part of the ground folk might have an effect, but if only the poor and old and overworked were in that movement—

  Bengali read that thought. “I have headquarters and aliases down here, because these people have more desperation and hope of gain than anybody. I don’t trust many of the rich. My setup there is no more than a skeleton.”

  Peyton felt that Bengali, no matter how smart, was slipping. How could these cellar-prowlers fight against the Airmen, armed and winged and with the Flying Island? Atomic energy as fuel and explosive was imperative. The whole city of New York could be blasted away. Probably he, Peyton, was lucky to be finding this out. He could use such knowledge.