James Blish - A Case of Conscience

Ruiz-Sanchez pushed at it, but it was partly locked. He got it open about six inches and wormed through.

The contorted man on the floor, his incredibly puffed, taut skin slowly turning black, his eyes glassy with agony, was Agronski.

The geologist did not recognize him; he was already beyond that. There was no mind behind the eyes. Ruiz-Sanchez fell to his knees, clumsily in the tight protective clothing. He heard himself begin to mutter the rites, but he was no more hearing the Latin words than Agronski was.

This could be no coincidence. He had come here to give grace, if such a one as he could still give grace; and before him was the most blameless of the Lithian commission, struck down where Ruiz-Sanchez would be sure to find him. It was the God of Job who was abroad in the world now, not the God of the Psalmist or the Christ. The face that was bent upon Ruiz-Sanchez was the face of the avenging, the jealous God — the God who made hell before He made man, because He knew that He would have need of it. That terrible truth Dante had written down; and in the black face with the protruding tongue which rolled beside Ruiz-Sanchez' knee, he saw that Dante had been right, as every Catholic who reads the Divine Comedy knows in his heart of hearts.

There is a demonolater abroad in the world. He shall be deprived of grace, and then called upon to administer extreme unction to a friend. By this sign, let him know himself for what he is.

After a while, Agronski was dead, choked to death by his own tongue. But still it was not over. It was necessary now to make Mike's apartment secure, kill any bees that might have got in, see to it that the escaped swarm died. It was easy enough. Ruiz-Sanchez simply papered over the broken panes on the sun porch. The. bees could not feed anywhere but in Liu's garden; they would come back there within a few hours; denied entrance, they would die of starvation an hour or so later. A bee is not a well-designed flying-machine; it keeps itself in the air by expending energy, in short, by pure brute force. A trapped bumblebee can starve to death in half a day, and Liu's tetraploid monsters would die far sooner of their freedom…

The 3-V muttered away throughout the dreary business. The terror was not local, that was clear. The Corridor Riots of 1993 had been nothing but a premonitory flicker, compared to this.

Four target areas were blacked out completely. Egtverchi's uniformed thugs, suddenly reappearing from nowhere in force, had seized the control centers. At the moment, they were holding roughly twenty-five million people as hostages for Egtverchi's safe-conduct, with the active collusion of perhaps five million of them. The violence elsewhere was not as systematic, though some of the outbursts of wrecking must have been carefully planned to allow for the placing of the explosives alone, there seemed to be no special pattern to it — but in no case could it be described as “passive” or “non-violent.”

Sick, wretched and damned, Ruiz-Sanchez waited in the Michelises' jungle apartment, as though part of Lithia had followed him home and enfolded him there.

After the first three days, the fury had exhausted itself sufficiently to permit Michelis and Liu to risk the trip back to their apartment in a UN armored car. They were wan and ghastly-looking, as Ruiz-Sanchez supposed he was himself; they had had even less sleep than he had. He decided at once to say nothing about Agronski; that horror they could be spared. There was no way, however, that he could avoid explaining what had happened to the bees.

Liu's sad little shrug was somehow even harder to bear than Agronski.

“Did they find him yet?” Ruiz-Sanchez said huskily.

“We were going to ask you the same thing,” Michelis said. The tall New Englander was able to get a glimpse of himself in a mirror above a planting box and winced. “Ugh, what a beard! At the UN everybody's too busy to tell you anything, except in fragments. We thought you might have heard an announcement.”

“No, nothing. The Detroit vigilantes have surrendered, according to QBC.”

“Yes, so have those goons in Smolensk ; they ought to be putting that on the air in an hour or so. I never did think they'd succeed in pulling that operation off. They can't possibly know the corridors as well as the target area authorities themselves do. In Smolensk they got them with the fire door system — drained all the oxygen out of the area they were holding without their realizing what was going on. Two of them never came to.”

Ruiz-Sanchez crossed himself automatically. Up on the wall, the Klee muttered in a low voice; it had not been off since Egtverchi's broadcast.

“I don't know whether I want to listen to that damn thing or not,” Michelis said sourly. Nevertheless, he turned up the volume. There was still essentially no news. The rioting was dying back, though it was as bad as ever in some shelters. The Smolensk announcement was duly made, bare of detail. Egtverchi had not yet been located, but UN officials expected a break in the case “shortly.”

“'Shortly,' hell,” Michelis said. “They've run out of leads entirely. They thought they had him cold the next morning, when they found a trail to the hideaway where he'd arranged to tide himself over and direct things. But he wasn't there — apparently he'd gotten out in a hurry, some time before. And nobody in his organization knows where he would go next — he was supposed to be there, and they're thoroughly demoralized to be told that he's not.”

“Which means that he's on the run,” Ruiz-Sanchez suggested.

“Yes, I suppose that's some consolation,” Michelis said. “But where could he run to, where he wouldn't be recognized? And how would he run? He couldn't just gallop naked through the streets, or take a public conveyance. It takes organization to ship something as outré as that secretly — and Egtverchi's organization is as baffled about it as the UN is.” He turned the 3-V off with a savage gesture.

Liu turned to Ruiz-Sanchez, her expression appalled beneath its weariness.

“Then it's really not over after all?” she said hopelessly.

“Far from it,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But maybe the violent phase of it is over. If Egtverchi stays vanished for a few days more, I'll conclude that he is dead. He couldn't stay unsighted that long if he were still moving about. Of course his death won't solve most of the major problems, but at least it would remove one sword from over our heads.”

Even that, he recognized silently, was wishful thinking. Besides, can you kill a hallucination?

“Well, I hope the UN has learned something,” Michelis said.

“There's one thing you have to say for Egtverchi: he got the public to bring up all the unrest that's been smoldering down under the concrete for all these years. And underneath all the apparent conformity, too. We're going to have to do something about that now — maybe take sledgehammers in our hands and pound this damned Shelter system down into rubble and start over. It wouldn't cost any more than rebuilding what's already been destroyed. One thing's certain: the UN won't be able to smother a revolt of this size in slogans. They'll have to do something.”

The Klee chimed.

“I won't answer it,” Michelis said through gritted teeth. “I won't answer it. I've had enough.”

“I think we'd better, Mike,” Liu said. “It might be news.”

“News!” Michelis said, like a swearword. But he allowed himself to be persuaded. Underneath all the weariness, Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could detect something like a return of warmth between the two, as though, during the three days, some depth had been sounded which they had never touched before. The slight sigh of something good astonished him. Was he beginning, like all demonolaters, to take pleasure in the prevalence of evil, or at least in the expectation of it?