And Kenniston slept, but neither much nor well. In spite of his exhaustion, Gorr Holl’s words rang like passing bells in his mind all the rest of that night—evacuate, evacuate—to the world of another star. And he thought of all the people of Middletown who happily believed their troubles were over, and of Carol—particularly of Carol—and most of all he thought of Varn Allan, whom he had begun to hate. And he was afraid.
It did not take much imagination to divine what the Mayor’s narrowness had missed—a vast and powerful machinery of government directing this future universe, a machinery of which the big starship and its occupants were but a symbol. It did not seem likely that a handful of people on a dying planet could successfully defy that government for very long.
Hubble woke him at last out of an uneasy slumber, to tell him that Varn Allan and Lund had come, and that the Mayor had called the City Council.
“We need you to interpret, Ken,” he said. “You speak the language better than any of us, and this is too important to take any chances of misunderstanding.”
Neither of them talked much on the way to the soaring tower that was now City Hall. And Kenniston could see that Hubble was as worried and oppressed as he.
A crowd had gathered in the plaza, a happy crowd, come to cheer their good friends who had helped them so much. Inside City Hall, the Council of Middletown sat around a massive metal table. The Mayor, Borchard the coal dealer, Moretti the wholesale produce merchant, half a dozen more, facing at one end of the table the woman and the man who came from Vega and who were Administrators over a vast sector of space with all its worlds and peoples.
Mayor Garris fastened on Kenniston the moment he came in. He looked as though he had slept even less than Kenniston, and his mood had not changed since the night before.
“You ask her, Kenniston,” he said. “You ask her if this evacuation story is true.” He asked her.
Varn Allan nodded. “Quite true. I’m sorry that Gorr Holl spoke so prematurely—is seems to have upset your people.” She glanced at the ominous faces of the City Council and the tense countenance of the Mayor. It struck Kenniston that she had been all through this situation before with other populations, and was attacking the problem with a kind of weary patience.
“I am sure,” she said, “that when they understand, they will realize that we are only serving their best interests.”
“Best interests?” cried Garris, when he had heard that. “Then why didn’t you tell us at first? Why plan this behind our backs?”
Norden Lund, a smug look on his face, said to the woman, “I told you it would have been better—”
“We’ll discuss that later,” she flashed. Kenniston could see the effort she made to keep her imperious temper in check as she went on, speaking directly to him, “We wanted to wait until we could present a complete plan of evacuation, so as not to upset your people too much.”
“In other words,” said Kenniston angrily, “you were dealing with a bunch of primitive aborigines who had to be coaxed along?”
“Aren’t you acting in just such fashion?” Varn Allan demanded. Again, she visibly got a grip on her irritation. She said, carefully as though explaining to a child, “A shipful of evacuation experts is on its way here, should arrive soon. They can assess the needs of your people, and find a world that will fit their physical and psychological needs. We will see that it is a world as much like your past Earth as possible.”
“That,” said Kenniston ironically, “is very decent of you.” The woman’s blue eyes flashed open hostility at him. He turned away from her, for Garris was demanding a translation. He gave it, and in his own resentment he did not soften it.
Garris forgot oratory, in his indignation. He sputtered, “If they think we are going to move away from Earth to some crazy world out in the sky, they’re badly mistaken! You make that clear to them!”
Varn Allan looked honestly bewildered, when Kenniston did. “But surely you people don’t want to stay in the cold and hardship of this dying world?”
Kenniston, watching the anger and the instinctive, basic fear grow still stronger in the Mayor’s white face, could understand his feelings. His own reaction was the same.
“Not want to stay here?” said Garris, forcing words out painfully from a throat constricted with emotion. “Not want to? Listen, you people! We have left our own time. We have had to leave our own city, our homes.
That’s enough. It’s all we can stand in one lifetime. Leave Earth, leave our own world? No!” There was no oratory about him now, at all. He was like a man who has been asked to die.
Kenniston spoke to Varn Allan. His own voice was not quite steady.
“Try to understand. We are Earth-born. Our whole life, all the generations before us, since the beginning…”
He could not put it into words, this sudden passionate oneness with Earth.
The Earth hath He given to the children of men… The Earth, the soil, the winds and the rains, the growth and the dying over the ages, beast and tree and man. You could not forget that. You could not let drop the heritage of a world as though it had never been.
The sorrel-haired Norden Lund was speaking to Varn Allan, looking contemptuously at the Middletowners as he spoke. “I warned you, Varn, that these primitives are too emotional for ordinary methods.”
The woman, her blue eyes troubled, ignored Lund and addressed Kenniston. “You must make them recognize the facts. Life here is impossible, and therefore they must go.”
“Let her tell that to the people,” said the Mayor, in an oddly tight voice.
“No. I’ll tell them myself.”
He rose and left the council room. There was a curious dignity about his plump figure now. Borchard and Moretti and the others followed.
They, too, showed a shrinking, instinctive dread of the thing that had been proposed. They went out on the steps, and Kenniston and Hubble and the two from the stars went with them.
Outside in the plaza were still gathered thousands of the Middletowners, millhand, housewife, banker and bookkeeper, the old men and the little children. They were still happy, and they cheered, sending up a great joyous shout to echo from the towers.
Mayor Garris took the microphone of the loudspeaker system.
“Folks, listen carefully! These new people are telling us now that we ought to leave Earth. They say they’ll give us a better world, somewhere out there among the stars. What about it? Do you want to go—away from Earth?”
There was a long moment of utter silence, in which Kenniston saw the Middletowners’ faces grow bewildered, incredulous. He looked at Van Allan’s clearcut face and saw that the shadow of weariness on it was deeper. He realized again that two epochs, two utterly different ways of life were looking at each other here, and finding it difficult to understand each other.
When, finally, the crowd of Middletowners had grasped the suggestion, their answer came as a rising chorus of exclamations.
“Go off and live someplace in the sky? Are these people nuts?”
“It was bad enough to leave Middletown for this place! But to leave Earth?”
A large-handed, stocky man whom Kenniston recognized as Lauber, McLain’s truckdriver, came to the steps and spoke up to the Mayor.
“What’s all this about, anyway? We’re getting along here all right now.
Why would we want to go off to the Moon or somewhere?”
The Mayor turned to the two star-folk. “You see? My people wouldn’t listen to an idea like that for a minute!”
Kenniston told the woman, “The people completely reject the whole proposal.”
Varn Allan stared at him, in honest surprise. “But it is not a ‘proposal’—it is a formal order of the Board of Governors! I recommended this evacuation, and they have approved it.”
Kenniston said dryly, “Unfortunately, our people don’t recoganize any authority but their own government, so the order means nothing to them.”
The woman looked appalled. “But nobody defies the Governors! They are the executive body of the whole Federation of Stars.”
The Federation of Stars? It had a sound of distant thunder in it, and again Kenniston realized the
