One and Wonder Read Online Free Page B

created the new technology of atomic war, and so destroyed the whole world's freedom. It was just the trend of specialization that made the Directorate and flung Tyler to the top of it—no more responsible than a pebble flung up by a wave.”
    Pressed deep in the cushions, Lord sat peering back with confused suspicion in his yellow eyes. Fortunately for Cameron, he was now concerned with dangers more immediate than ideological heresy. His nasal voice rasped angrily: “Well? What happened then—according to your theory?” Cameron answered with an easy grin.
    “Quite likely, the division of labor broke down at last.”
    “Watch your manner, Mister.” Lord clearly didn't like his grin. “Whatcould break it down?”
    “Rebellion, perhaps.” Cameron was properly respectful. “For America had a permanent garrison of nine thousand specialists in death. They were prepared to devastate any part of the earth—or all of it. Perhaps they were just too thorough.”
    Uneasily, the little Squaredealer licked his thin lips. “Then why should the fort itself be silent?”
    “Disease, perhaps—some biological weapon out of control.” In Cameron's blue eyes, I caught a faint glint of malicious amusement. “Or famine—maybe they left the earth unable to feed them. Or natural cataclysm.”
    Lord fought the acceleration-pressure, to sit bolt upright. His bleak narrow face was filmed with sweat of effort—and of fear.
    “Cataclysm?” He peered into Cameron's lean, sardonic face. “Explain!”
    “Twenty years at space has shown us the insensate hostility of the universe.” Cameron's low voice deepened my own unease. “Man lives at the mercy of blind chance, surviving only through a peculiar combination of improbable factors. Just suppose we find the earth stripped of oxygen.” He grinned at Lord, satanically. “As efficiently as the planets of the Dark Star were robbed of uranium?”
    Before we reached the moon, Lord had turned a sallow green with acceleration-sickness.
    Fort America was hidden beneath a crater in the tawny desolation of the Mare Nubium. We wheeled above the mountain ring, just above the highest crags, searching the dozen miles of barren floor.
    “It hasn't changed!” I whispered to Cameron. “The valves, the roads, the docks—just as they used to be!” I tried to point through the small quartz port. “There's where the Great Director stood.”
    “But it has changed.” Cameron glanced at me; and the strong glare of the moonscape, striking his haggard face from below, made his habitual sardonic expression seem oddly diabolic. “It's abandoned, now.”
    And I remembered. Great trucks once had rolled over that white web of roads. Colored signal lights had blinked and flickered from the domes over the pits. Tall, tapered ships had stood like rows of silver pillars on the immense, dark fields.
    But now the crater was an empty bowl. The lowering sun made all the westward rim a jagged lip of shattered ebony. Sharp fingers of the dark crept across the empty miles, to clutch the empty domes and seize the empty roads.
    Nothing moved, anywhere. No metal flashed beneath the sun. No signals flickered, now, out of the cold, increasing shadow. Men had been here once, armed with atomic science, bold with conquest. Now they were gone.
    Yet the crater wasn't empty, quite—for it held a riddle. What had silenced man's greatest citadel? Cold dread sank into me, out of that black, expanding shadow. The brooding mystery of it numbed my senses like some spreading biotoxin.
    We landed at last, well out in the retreating sunlight, on a concrete road near one of the valves. We clambered into space-armor—Cameron and I, and Captain Doyle. Laden with assorted equipment, we scrambled one by one through the small air-lock, leaping clumsily down to the moon. Victor Lord remained aboard. He was ill. I believe his apprehensive thoughts had fastened too strongly on Cameron's malicious suggestion of interstellar invasion. I think