16 - Empire by Clifford D. Simak

**Clifford D. Simak** (0:00)
CHAPTER XVI of EMPIRE by Clifford Simak This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
A miracle came to pass in Rathor, when a man for whom all hope had been abandoned suddenly appeared within the city's streets. But he appeared to be something not quite earthly, for he did not have the solidity of a man. He was pale, like a wraith from out of space, and one could see straight through him, yet he still had all the old mannerisms and tricks. In frightened, awe-stricken whispers the word was spread. The spirit of John Moore Mallory had come back to the city once again. He bulked four times the height of a normal man, and there was that singular ghostliness about him. From where he had come, or how, or why, no one seemed to know. But when he reached the steps of the Federation's administration building, and walked straight through a line of troopers that suddenly masturbar his way, and when he turned on those steps, and spoke to the people who had gathered, there was none to doubt that at last a sign had come. The sign that now, if ever, was the time to avenge the Purge. Now the time to take vengeance for the blood that flowed in gutters, for the throaty chortling of the flame-guns that had snuffed out lives against a broad steel wall.
Standing on the steps, shadowy but plainly visible, John Moore Mallory talked to the people in the square below. His voice was the voice they remembered. They saw him toss his black mane of hair. They saw his clenched fist raised in terrible anger. They heard the boom of the words he spoke. Like a shrilling alarm, the words spread through the city, reverberating from the domes, seeking out those who were in hiding. From every corner of the city, from its deepest cellars and its darkest alleys, poured out a mass of humanity that surrounded the capital, and blackened the square and the converging streets with a mob that shrieked its hatred, bellowed its anger. Power! thundered the mighty shadow on the steps. Power to burn! Power to give away! Power to heat the dome, to work your minds, to drive your spaceships! Power! answered the voice of the crowd. Power! it sounded like a battle cry.
No more accumulators! roared the towering image. Never again need you rely on Spencer Chambers for your power. Callisto is yours! Ranthor is yours! The black crowd surged forward, reached the steps and started to climb, wild cheers in their throats, the madness of victory in their eyes. Up the steps came men with nothing but bare hands, screaming women, jeering children. Officers snapped orders at the troops that lined the steps, but the troopers, staring into the awful raging maw of that oncoming crowd, dropped their guns and fled, back into the capital building, with the mob behind them, shrilling bloodlust and long-awaited vengeance.
Out of the red and yellow wilderness of the deserts, a man came to Sandbar on Mars. He had long been thought dead. The minions of the government had announced that he was dead, but he had been in hiding for six years. His beard was long and grey. His eyes were curtained by hardship, his white hair hung about his shoulders, and he was clothed in the tattered leather trappings of the spaceways. But men remembered him. Tom Brown had led the last revolt against the Martian government, an ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets with washing waves of flame. When he climbed to the base of the statue in Tekor Park to address the crowd that gathered, the police shouted for him to come down, and he disregarded them. They climbed the statue to reach him, and their hands went through him. Tom Brown stood before the people, in plain view, and spoke, but he wasn't there. Other things happened in Sandbar that day. A voice spoke out of thin air, a voice that told the people the reign of interplanetary was over. It told of a mighty new source of power. Power that would cost almost nothing, power that would make the accumulators unnecessary, would make them out of date. A voice that said the people need no longer submit to the yoke of Spencer Chambers' government in order to obtain the power they needed. There was no one there, no one visible at all, and yet that voice went on and on. A great crowd gathered, listening, cheering. The police tried to break it up and failed. The troops were ordered out, and the people fought them, until the voice told them to disband peaceably, and go to their homes. Throughout Mars it was the same. In a dozen places in Sandebar the voice spoke, it spoke in a dozen places, out of empty air, in Malachon and Alexon and Adibron. Tom Brown, vanishing into the air after his speech was done, reappeared a few minutes later in Adibron, and there the police, warned of what had happened in Sandebar, opened fire upon him when he stood on a park bench to address the people. But the flames passed through and did not touch him. Tom Brown, his long white beard covering his chest, his mad eyes flashing, stood in the fiery blast that bellowed from the muzzles of the flame-rifles, and calmly talked.