The Burning World
By ALGIS BUDRYS
Illustrated by SCHOENHERR
Can the battle for freedom ever be won—as
long as some men still want to fight it?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity July 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
They walked past rows of abandoned offices in the last governmentoffice building in the world—two men who looked vastly different, butwho had crucial similarities.
Josef Kimmensen had full lips trained to set in a tight, thin line, andlive, intelligent eyes. He was tall and looked thin, though he was not.He was almost sixty years old, and his youth and childhood had beensuch that now his body was both old for its years and still a compact,tightly-wound mechanism of bone and muscle fiber.
Or had been, until an hour ago. Then it had failed him; and his onethought now was to keep Jem Bendix from finding out how close he was todeath.
Jem Bendix was a young man, about twenty-eight, with a broad, friendlygrin and a spring to his step. His voice, when he spoke, was low andcontrolled. He was the man Josef Kimmensen had chosen to replace him aspresident of the Freemen's League.
The building itself was left over from the old regime. It was perhapsunfortunate—Kimmensen had often debated the question with himself—torisk the associations that clung to this building. But a building isonly a building, and the dust of years chokes the past to death. It wasbetter to work here than to build a new set of offices. It might seem awaste to leave a still-new building, and that might tend to make peoplelinger after their jobs had finished themselves. This pile of crackingbricks and peeled marble facings would be falling in a heap soon, andthe small staff that still worked here couldn't help but be consciousof it. It was probably a very useful influence.
They walked through the domed rotunda, with its columns, echoingalcoves, and the jag-topped pedestals where the old regime's statueshad been sledge-hammered away. The rotunda was gloomy, its skylightburied under rain-borne dust and drifted leaves from the trees on themountainside. There was water puddled on the rotten marble floor undera place where the skylight's leading was gone.
Kimmensen left the day's letters with the mail clerk, and he and Bendixwalked out to the plaza, where his plane was parked. Around the plaza,the undergrowth was creeping closer every year, and vine runners wereobscuring the hard precision of the concrete's edge. On all sides, themountains towered up toward the pale sun, their steep flanks cloaked insnow and thick stands of bluish evergreen. There was a light breeze inthe crystalline air, and a tang of fir sap.
Kimmensen breathed in deeply. He loved these mountains. He had beenborn in the warm lowlands, where a man's blood did not stir so easilynor surge so strongly through his veins. Even the air here wasfreedom's air.
As they climbed into his plane, he asked: "Did anything important comeup in your work today, Jem?"
Jem shrugged uncertainly. "I don't know. Nothing that's urgent at themoment. But it might develop into something. I meant to speak to youabout it after dinner. Did Salmaggi tell you one of our families wasburned out up near the northwest border?"
Kimmensen shook his head and pressed his lips together. "No, hedidn't. I didn't have time to see him today." Perhaps he should have.But Salmaggi was the inevitable misfit who somehow creeps into everyadministrative body. He was a small, fat, tense, shrilly argumentativeman who fed on alarms like a spar