Spartan Planet - A. Bertram Chandler [55]
Down the extended ramp ran six men. Peggy Lazenby met them, cried, "This way!" and led them to the still open hatchway. And a vastly amplified voice was booming from the ship, "Board at once, please! Board at once!"
Heraklion hustled his people into some sort of order, got them onto the gangway, the women first. He stayed with Brasidus, making sure that the evacuation proceeded in an orderly manner. Still the two men waited, although the loudspeaker was blaring, "Get a move on, there! Get a move on!"
At last the six men and Peggy Lazenby were emerging from the hatch, she last of all. They were heavily burdened, all of them, and she, clasping it to her as tenderly as she had clasped the rescued child, carried the antique log book. "What are you waiting here for?" she demanded of Heraklion.
He said, "We have no spaceships, but we have read books. We know of the traditions. This crèche is my ship, and I shall be the last to leave."
"Have it your own way," she told him.
She and Brasidus went up the ramp after the six marines. Heraklion followed them. Just as he reached the airlock, a geyser of flame erupted from the open hatch and the once flat surface of the roof cracked and billowed and, as Seeker hastily lifted, collapsed.
"That was my ship," whispered the Doctor.
"You can build another," Peggy told him.
"No," he said. "No. No longer do we have any excuse not to revert to the old ways."
"And your old ways," she said, "are not the old ways of Diomedes and his party. That is why he hated and feared you. But can you do it?"
"With your help," he said.
"That," she said, "is a matter for the politicians back home. But let's get out of this damned airlock and into the ship, before we fall out. It's a long way down."
Brasidus, looking at the burning building far below, shuddered and drew back hastily. It was, as she had said, a long way down.
Chapter 24
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES was over, the Night of the Long Knives and the four action packed days and nights that had followed it. The power had fallen into the streets, and Admiral Ajax, warned by his own intelligence service of the scheduled assassinations of himself and his senior captains, had swooped down from the sky to pick it up. The birth machine was destroyed, the caste system had crumbled, and only the patrolling airships of the Navy kept Sparta safe from the jealous attentions of the other city-states. Cresphontes—a mere figurehead—skulked in his palace, dared make no public appearances.
Grimes and his Seeker had played little active part in quelling the disturbances, but always the spaceship had been there, hanging ominously in the clouds, always her pinnaces had darted from one trouble spot to another, her Marines acting as ambulance men and firemen—but ambulance men and firemen backed by threatening weaponry to ensure that they carried out their tasks unmolested.
Brasidus had rejoined his own police unit, and, to his surprise, had found that greater and greater power and responsibilities were being thrust upon him. But it made sense. He knew the spacemen, had worked with them—and it was obvious to all that, in the final analysis, they and the great Federation that they represented were the most effective striking force on the planet. They did not strike, they were careful not to fire a single gun or loose a single missile, but they were there, and where they had come from there were more and bigger ships with even heavier armaments.
The universe had come to Sparta, and the Spartans, in spite of centuries of isolationist indoctrination, had accepted the fact. Racial memory, Margaret Lazenby had said, long and deep-buried recollections of the home world, of the planet where men and women lived and worked together in amity, where the womb was part of the living female body and not a complex, inorganic