Читаем His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction полностью

"That brings us down to 1939, the beginning of the war. The few Basques left fight with the French, the Spanish and any other army they fancy. Most of them die. A few thousand are left in the lower mountain villages. One day in 1951 the villages are bombed by German planes—

blown right off the map. Squads of soldiers hunt down the rest of the Basques in the hills and pop them off."

"But not Jose!" interjected the old man with considerable excitement and a little pride.

"That's right. Not Jose. Hoe was so well hidden that half the time he couldn't find his own den for a month once he had left it. Anyway—

there aren't any Basque villages nor any Basques. Yet the next year the Pyrenese Peoples' Republic is announced and in the next they held DeCuerva's army, which never did get through. Now, a dozen years later we see this uncannily perfect city of the future, achieved by a handful of men and women—whom we've seen—and that's that."

"That's what?" asked the girl abstractedly.

"That's what I was planning to ask you as soon as you regained consciousness."

"You've waited in vain," said Kay, licking her fingers. "I can't think on a full stomach. Nobody can. By the way, you neglected to explain the events of the night of a week ago. How did you know they suspected us of suspecting them of being not what they seemed to be?"

"You know the Mayor's office building?"

"Like a book. I might almost say I know it backwards."

"Right, child. You do know it backwards, and what's more you don't know the half of it. Because more than the half of it is underground. I bumbled on the Mayor that night going down into the basement of his building and asked if I could go too. Taking something of a chance I pushed by him before he could make an excuse.

"I guess he didn't have a gun, because I wasn't shot in the back for seeing what I saw. There were some machines there that make their hydroelectric turbines look like a pinwheel. Big—very big—and mysterious in function, to me at least. Simply didn't look like anything at all—except maybe a glorified and electric concrete mixer. And a couple of people mucking around with oiling-cans.

"They drew and fired; I shoved the mayor in and rolled the hall-desk against the door, propped that with my walking-stick for leverage and beat it for your flat."

"Nice condensed narration," she said thoughtfully. "But what made you poke around in the first place? Dashed if I had any grounds for suspicion of conspiracy and such."

"You've forgotten a lot since we took those psych courses. How do you tell a louse from an honest man?"

"A louse doesn't trust anybody."

"Right. Not even when he's middle aged does he trust a couple of moonstruck lovers. Any nasty old man who'd break in on a tete-a-tete is bad from head to toe.

"And the clincher, to me at least, was this bloody, mysterious and cancerous growth of the so-called Basque people in less than two decades. There was something too awfully methodical about their city.

It didn't show any of the right traits. No, not a single one. It was as though they'd deliberately set out to build themselves a city of the future intended to impress and amaze—one, also, geared to the maximum in efficiency."

Kay listened quietly. Finally she suggested, with a little shudder:

"Gestapo?"

"Couldn't be anything else, sweet." Ballister fell silent in the contemplation of bucking the secret police that had held the German empire of conquest together by torture, fire and sword for years beyond its normal lifespan. They were wise, villainous and tricky, the Gestapo.

It had been thought that the majority of them had been killed off by the Captives' Revolt years ago. Surely there couldn't be enough left to fill that city!

"It's a bridgehead," he said at last. "A stepping-stone for attack on an unprecedented scale and in an altogether new technique. You guess what that is?"

"Like the story about the rabbits, perhaps," Kay suggested diffidently.

"There were two rabbits being chased by a pack of hounds. They were tired, completely winded. There was no chance of them outrunning the hounds, who were young and fresh. So one rabbit said to the other rabbit: 'Let's hide in that bush until we outnumber them.' "

"Maybe," said Ballister. "Too bad reconnaissance is out of the question.

They must be patrolling the woods seven deep looking for us." He brooded for a while, then exploded: "And the young monster of a hydro-dam? What's that for?"

"Electric light," said Kay. She reconsidered after a moment. "No.

Because they have a strict curfew, so they don't need street-lights. And that dam would deliver twenty times the power needed for street-lighting. Maybe a hundred times that. I'm no installations engineer, boy."

"It's very important, that dam. Otherwise they wouldn't risk building a big, suspicious thing like that. And they do want to hide it; they did their best along that line to keep us from noticing it."

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