Mack Reynolds - Earth Unaware

From their height in the hovercar, Ed Wonder and Buzz De Kemp could make out the activity. In the dead center, Ezekiel Joshua Tubber and his daughter were being buffeted this way and that, framed in the light of the burning tent behind them. There was no sign of other followers of the rejected prophet. Even in the excitement of the moment, Ed had a quick thought go through his mind. The desertion of Jesus, even by Peter, at the time of the betrayal to the Romans. Where were the followers, no matter how small a handful? Where were the pilgrims on the path to Elysium?

He slugged the lift lever, bringing them up to ten feet, shot toward the center of the shouting, club brandishing, fist brandishing mob. The smell of hate was everywhere. The fearful smell of hate and death, found seldom other than in mobs and in combat. The yells had become one, one blast of roaring rage.

Buzz yelled, “It’s impossible. Let’s get out of here. It’s too late. They’ll get us too!” The reporter’s eyes were popping fear.

Ed banged toward the center of the melee.

He yelled at Buzz, “Take the wheel, it’s on manual. Bring it down right above them!”

He squirmed over the seat into the back. He’d spotted something there earlier. Even as Buzz De Kemp grabbed at the wheel, steadying them, Ed tore the submachinegun from its rack.

“Hey!” the reporter yelled at him, still goggle-eyed.

With the butt, Ed Wonder knocked the glass out of the right rear window. The siren continued its screaming. The mob’s leaders—a dozen of them, manhandling the bearded prophet, who seemed dazed, and Nefertiti, screaming and scratching to get to her father—stared up. The siren was getting through to them for the first time.

Ed stuck the gun through the window, pointed up. He had never handled a similar weapon before. He pulled the trigger and the roar blasted back through the heavy hovercar, deafening him as he bucked the kick.

For the nonce, at least, it was effective. Below him, men scattered. He emptied the clip into the air.

“Down!” he yelled at Buzz.

“Don’t be crazy! We can’t…”

Ed leaned over the seat and knocked the lift lever up. Even before the limousine had hit earth, he had torn open the car door. He used the riot gun as a club, dashing for the staggering old man.

The sheer audacity of the attack was its success. Still swinging the heavy gun by its blisteringly hot barrel, he pulled and tugged the repudiated reformer toward and into the car’s back seat. He spun and threatened the temporarily flabbergasted crowd with the submachinegun, as though it were still loaded, yelling, “Nefertiti!” He couldn’t see her.

Buzz screamed, “Let’s get out of here!”

“Shut up!” Ed roared.

She came crying and stumbling, her clothes half torn from her, through the ranks of the bewildered lynchers. Less than gently, Ed Wonder pushed her into the back seat, grabbed hold of the ascending vehicle. He felt a hand grab his foot. He kicked back and down. The hand let go and they were off and free.

“They’ll be after us!” Buzz yelled back at him. “A thousand cars will be after us.”

Everything went out of Ed Wonder. It was all he could do to keep from vomiting. He was trembling as with a paroxysm of ague. “No they won’t,” he said, his voice shaking. “They’ll be afraid of the gun. A mob is a mob. Brave enough to take on the killing of an old man and a girl. Not brave enough to face a submachinegun.”

Nefertiti, still blubbering in hysteria, was working over her father. Getting him straight on the seat, at the same time trying to rearrange her own torn clothing.

Tubber made the first sound since the rescue. “They hate me,” he said, dazed. “They hate me. They would have destroyed me.”

Buzz De Kemp had at last shaken off his panic of the height of the excitement. “What’d you expect?” he grumbled. “An egg for your beer?”

They had a little difficulty in getting the torn and battered Tubber pair into the New Woolworth Building, but Ed had recovered by now. He glared down the guards at the entry, grabbed the phone and snapped, “General Crew. This is crash priority. Wonder, speaking.”

Crew came on in seconds.

Ed snapped, “I’ve got Tubber. We’re coming up immediately. Have Dwight Hopkins ready in his office, and the top men on my staff. I want everybody who’s informed on Project Tubber.” He looked at the guards. “And, oh yeah, tell these kooks to let us pass.” He threw the phone to the armed guard, and started toward the elevator.

Buzz was supporting the elderly prophet at one side, Nefertiti from the other.

They went directly to the topmost floor.

Buzz said, “We ought to take them to your apartment. Miss Tubber is in bad enough shape, but the old boy is just short of being in shock.”

“That’s how we want him,” Ed Wonder muttered lowly. “Come on.”

Hopkins was at his desk, the others came hurrying in, one or two at a time.

Ed got the pathetic old man seated on a leather couch, Nefertiti next to him. The others stood, or took seats, staring at the cause of the crisis which was shaking the governments of very affluent nation on earth. At the moment, he didn’t look as though he could have shaken a meeting of a small town Board of Education.

Ed said, “All right. Let me introduce Ezekiel Joshua Tubber, the Speaker of the Word. It’s now up to you gentlemen to convince him that his curses should be lifted.” Ed sat his own self down, abruptly.

For a long moment there was silence.

Dwight Hopkins, his voice tense below the crisp efficiency, said, “Sir, as spokesman for President Everett MacFerson and the government of the United Welfare States of America, I can only plead with you to reverse whatever it is you have done—if, indeed, it was you—to bring the nation to the brink of chaos where it now stands.”

“Chaos,” Tubber muttered, brokenly.

Braithgale said, “Three quarters of the population are spending the greater part of their time wandering aimlessly up and down the streets. It will take only a spark, and sparks are already beginning to fly.”

Nefertiti said indignantly, glaring around at them, “My father is ill. We were almost killed. This is no time to badger him.”

Dwight Hopkins looked at Ed Wonder, questioningly. Ed shook his head, infinitesimally. Ezekiel Joshua Tubber was at bay, they would either come to terms with him now or anything might develop when he recovered strength and poise. It was brutal, perhaps, but the situation was brutal.

Ed said, explaining to the others. “Yesterday, Ezekiel Tubber explained part of his beliefs to me. His sect thinks the country is choking on its own fat and at the same time heading for destruction by using up its resources, both natural and human, at a headlong speed. He thinks we ought to plan a simpler, less frenetic society.”

The dazed reformer looked up at him, shook his head in exhaustion. “That’s not exactly the way I would put it… loved one.”

Jim Westbrook, slumped in a heavy chair, hands in pockets, said, dryly, “The trouble is, you’ve started at the wrong end. You’ve been trying to get to the people. Change their way of looking at things. The fact is, friend, the people are slobs, and always have been. There hasn’t been a period in history when, given the chance, the man in the street hasn’t made a slob of himself. Given the license and freedom from reprisal, they’ll wallow in sadism, debauchery, destruction. Look at the Romans and their games. Look at the Germans when they were given the go-ahead by the Nazis to eliminate the inferior races, the non-Aryans. Look at any combat soldiers, of any nationality.”

Tubber shook his shaggy head, bearlike, and the faintest brace of the old spark was there. “You err, loved one,” he protested, brokenly. “Human character is determined by environment rather than heredity. Human faults are imparted by bad training. The vices of the young spring not from nature, who is equally the kind and blameless mother of all her children; they derive from the defects of education.”