Chapter III: Part 3

There was another murmur, dying as a pulsing movement began near the back of the room: someone was forcing his way toward Rack. In the stillness, another voice said thinly, "My Demetrios ... my Alexander ..." It was Moulios, wailing for his two lost sons.

Red-faced, with a lock of black hair hanging over his forehead, the painter Vekshin squeezed through to the edge of the table on which Rack stood. He shouted, "I'm a man, all right. What do you call yourself, you assassin? You come here with blood dripping from your jaws like a weasel fresh from a poultry yard, and we're supposed to feel sorry for you because they wouldn't let you go on killing! The great god Rack! _Ptui!_"

Rack did not move. He said quietly, "I killed your enemies, while you sat at home and drank tea."

"Enemies!" Vekshin roared. "You're the enemy, Rack." He put his big hands on the table-top and heaved himself up.

Rack let him come. He waited until the Russian was standing on the table; then he stepped forward with a motion so smooth it seemed casual. There was a flurry of blows, none of which landed except two: one in Vekshin's midriff, the other on the point of his jaw. Five men went down as Vekshin's body hurtled into them.

Rack stepped back. "I have very little patience left," he said, "but if there is anyone else here with a personal grudge, let him step up."

Two men at the table's edge moved as if to climb up. Rack put his hand to the gun at his belt. The two men stayed where they were.

Rack stared out over the crowd. He looked suddenly very weary. It occurred to Cudyk that he must have gone without sleep for a long time.

Rack said: "This is the last call. I am not trying to deceive you. I promise you nothing, not glory, not your lives, not even that you will be able to spend your lives usefully. But if there is any man here who will serve aboard the _Armageddon_, in the last fight for mankind--raise your hand!"

There was a long moment's silence. Rack turned abruptly, with his hand still on his gun, and said to the men in front of Cudyk: "Stand back!"

The silence held for an instant, while the men at the table's end moved uncertainly away; then sound broke like an avalanche. As Rack jumped down, the crowd surged toward him, no longer an audience but a mob. Cudyk felt the pressure at his back, caught a glimpse of Rack's face, then heard the deafening report of the gun as he went hurtling forward into the melee.

The gun did not fire again. Cudyk was squeezed tightly in the center of the struggling mass. He saw Seu, a few feet away. The mayor's mouth was open; he was shouting something, but the words were lost.

Suddenly Rack came into view again, charging straight toward Cudyk, hurling bodies to either side. The lower half of his face was a smear of blood; his cap and jacket were gone, his shirt torn half away.

Cudyk was half-aware of the constriction in his throat, the pounding of blood at his temples. He wrenched one arm free and, as Rack came near, struck him full in the face.

He had one more glimpse of Rack's white features, the pale eyes staring at him with a curiously detached expression: the eyes of a Caesar or a Christ, reproachful and sad. Then the crowd surged once more, the door to the back stairway slammed open, and Rack was gone.

Cudyk found himself running through the doorway with half a dozen others. He caught sight of Rack leaping down the stairs, just short of the landing where the narrow stairway doubled back on itself.

With a regretful sigh, feeling no surprise at what he was about to do, Cudyk put both hands on the railing and swung himself over into vacancy. Then there was an instant of wild, soaring flight, Rack's foreshortened body drifting beneath him, and the shock.

* * * * *

Dazed and numb, Cudyk felt the universe moving under him like a gigantic pendulum. He saw faces appear and vanish, felt someone push him aside, heard voices faintly.

After a long time his head cleared, and there was silence. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, one arm flung over the first step. Rack was not there; no one was there but himself.

He moved cautiously and was rewarded by an astonishing number and variety of pains. But apparently he had broken no bones. He felt weak and hollow; he was afraid he might vomit. He hoisted his torso up slowly, sat on the lowest step and then put his head between his trembling knees.

He heard a foot scuff on the concrete floor, and looked up. It was Seu.

The Chinese looked at him anxiously. "You're all right?"

"Yes. I think so. I have felt better in my life."

"Do you want to get up? Did you jump or fall?"

Cudyk leaned forward, trying the strength of his thighs to raise him, and Seu put a hand under his arm to help. "I jumped," Cudyk said. "What happened, afterward?"

"The mob came down, me in the middle, and I couldn't stop to see if you were all right. They took Rack with them. He was unconscious then; he may have been dead."

"And?"

"They tore him apart," said Seu.

They moved toward the exit from the kitchen, Seu holding Cudyk's arm firmly.

"I don't know if you felt this," the mayor said stiffly, "but the way it seemed to me was that Rack suddenly represented all of it--not only the bombings, but the Quarter, the Galaxy, Earth--everything we hated. It was a feeling of release, a kind of ecstasy. Watch out for the sill."

"Scapegoat," Cudyk said, indistinctly.

"Yes.... Zydh Oran saw it, you know. He was there when the mob came out. He saw it all. This finishes the Quarter, Laszlo. After this there won't be any more reprieves."

Cudyk glanced down at Seu's plump fingers. There was a thin film of blood on the skin, and a dark line of it around each finger-nail.

* * * * *

Cudyk stood at the top of the gentle rise opposite the Washington Avenue bridge, and looked down at the Quarter. It was just after sunset, and the ranked street-lights cast a lonesome gleam. The streets were empty. There was no one left in the Quarter except one man in the powerhouse. When the time was up, he would pull the switches on the master board and come out; then the Quarter would be dead.

The Niori edict had come on the Wednesday morning after Rack's death. They had been given four days to pack their belongings, arrange for assignment of cargo space, and wind up their several affairs. Cudyk's stock was small and his personal belongings few; he had been ready two days ago.

The evening breeze, freshening, pressed Cudyk's trousers against his calves and stirred the hair at the back of his head. Looking into the east, he saw a few pallid stars in the sky.

Several hundred people had already been collected by the air-cars which served the spaceport. Cudyk, Seu, Exarkos and a few others, by unspoken assent, had taken places at the rear of the crowd, to be the last to go.

He glanced at Seu. The little man was standing with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, staring dully at the Quarter. He looked up after a moment, smiled unhappily, and shrugged.

"It's absurd to feel homesick for it, isn't it?" he said. "It was a ghetto; we had no roots there. It was cramped, and it stank, and we fought among ourselves more viciously than we ever fought on Earth. But twenty years ..."

"We could pretend that we had roots, at least," Cudyk answered. "We don't belong anywhere. Perhaps we'll be happier, in the long run, once we face that and accept it."

"I doubt it."

"So do I."

To Cudyk's right, Father Exarkos was sitting on his suitcase, hands relaxed on his thighs. Cudyk said, "If I were a believer, Astereos, I think it would do me a great deal of good to confess to you and be absolved."

The priest's dry, friendly voice said, "Why, have you sinned so terribly, Laszlo?"

"I killed a man," said Cudyk, "but that's not what I mean. I jumped over a stairway railing and stopped Rack. If it hadn't been for me, he might have got away. There would have been nothing wrong with that. He couldn't have done any more harm, one man by himself. The Guards would have captured him sooner or later, anyhow. And if he had gotten away, we wouldn't have given the Niori the one more straw they needed. In that sense, it is my fault that we were expelled."

"No, Laszlo," said Seu.

Exarkos said, "You have nothing for which to reproach yourself, on that score. You were only the instrument of history, my friend, and a minor instrument at that. And, speaking for myself, not for the Church, Rack deserved to die."

Cudyk thought, at least it was quite suitably ironic. Cudyk, the man of inaction, hurls himself through the air to kill a murderer. And the citizens of the Quarter are deported, not because one of their race murdered a billion billion Galactics, but because that same killer was killed by them.

That was one thin mark on the credit side. There was one more: the tension was gone, for some of them at least. Now the worst thing that could happen had happened; the Damocletian thread had snapped. The problems which had caused the tension no longer existed.

Earth was two months away. Cudyk expected nothing and hoped for nothing. But the Niori had agreed to set each passenger down wherever on the globe he chose to go; each man, at least, could choose his own hell. The crews of the captured battleships, and the captured staff of the base on New Earth, were also being sent back. The weapon that had been used on them had done no permanent damage; they would simply have to be retrained, to learn all over again, as if they were reborn.

Seu was going to North America, where he hoped survival for a fat cosmopolite would be a little less difficult than in Europe or Asia. Moskowitz had been born in New York, and was going back there. Exarkos was going to Istanbul first, for orders; he had no idea where he might be sent after that. Cudyk had not yet made up his mind. He thought that perhaps he would go with the priest; if he should change his mind after landing it would be no great loss; one wilderness, as Exarkos had once said, was as good as another.

It will all be anticlimax, he thought, and perhaps that is the definition of Hell: unending anticlimax.

He wondered how it would feel to be Earthbound again. The repatriation ship was to be the last Galactic vessel which would ever call at Earth. And there would be a constant guard. The Niori had learned, belatedly but well. If humanity ever climbed high enough again to reach the stars with its bloody fingers, the citizens of the galaxy would be ready.

Cudyk looked at his watch. The man in the powerhouse must be a sentimentalist; he was waiting until the last possible moment.

He heard the soft hum of the air-car behind him, turned and saw it settling lightly to the clipped lawn. The remaining passengers were moving toward it. Exarkos stood up and lifted his suitcase. Cudyk turned back for one last look at the Quarter. It was full dark now, and all he could see of it was the blocky, ambiguous outline of its darkness against the glowing buildings beyond, and the cross-hatched pattern of yellow street lights.

The lights went out.