| Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol X | |
| Various | |
| Halcyon Press Ltd. (2010) | |
Product Description
This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains fifty science fiction short stories and novellas by more than forty different authors. Most of the stories in this collection were published during the heyday of popular science fiction magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Included within this work are stories by H. Beam Piper, Murray Leinster, Mack Reynolds, Randall Garrett, Robert Sheckley, Stanley Weinbaum, Alan Nourse, Phillip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak, Raymond Z. Gallun, Andre Norton, and many others.
This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.
Contents:
THE RECORD OF CURRUPIRA
By Robert Abernathy
THE DRAW
By Jerome Bixby
CONTROL GROUP
By Roger Dee
THE EEL
By Miriam Allen DeFord
BADGE OF INFAMY
By Lester del Rey
SECOND VARIETY
By Philip K. Dick
OUT OF THE EARTH
By George Edrich
THE VERY BLACK
By Dean Evans
THE WEDGE
By H. B. Fyfe
THE PLANET STRAPPERS
By Raymond Z. Gallun
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
By Randall Garrett
THIN EDGE
By Randall Garrett
SPACE PRISON
By Tom Godwin
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
By Arthur G. Hill
THE WOMAN-STEALERS OF THRAYX
By Fox B. Holden
THE DAY OF THE DOG
By Andersen Horne
ADVANCED CHEMISTRY
By Jack G. Huekels
FIELD TRIP
By Gene Hunter
THE SHINING COW
By Alex James
ROUGH TRANSLATION
By Jean M. Janis
JOHN JONES'S DOLLAR
By Harry Stephen Keeler
SECURITY
By Ernest M. Kenyon
THE MAD PLANET
by Murray Leinster
THE THIEF OF TIME
By S. P. Meek
REEL LIFE FILMS
By Sam Merwin
SONG IN A MINOR KEY
By C. L. Moore
STAR HUNTER
By Andre Norton
CONTAMINATION CREW
By Alan E. Nourse
DERELICT
By Alan E. Nourse
ALL DAY WEDNESDAY
By Richard Olin
THE HAPPY MAN
By Gerald W. Page
OOMPHEL IN THE SKY
By H. Beam Piper
OPERATION R.S.V.P.
By H. Beam Piper
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
By Frederik Pohl
SUMMIT
By Mack Reynolds
LION LOOSE
By James H. Schmitz
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
By Robert Sheckley
THE WORLD THAT COULDN'T BE
By Clifford D. Simak
TELEMPATHY
By Vance Simonds
LOOT OF THE VOID
By Edwin K. Sloat
COLLECTOR'S ITEM
By Evelyn E. Smith
PERFECT CONTROL
By Richard Stockham
SOLAR STIFF
By Chas. A. Stopher
MAN MADE
By Albert R. Teichner
PLEASANT JOURNEY
By Richard F. Thieme
THERE WILL BE SCHOOL TOMORROW
By V. E. Thiessen
THE POINT OF VIEW
By Stanley G. Weinbaum
ROBOTS OF THE WORLD! ARISE!
By Mari Wolf
THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES OF L-472
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
By Murray F. Yaco
Halcyon Classics Series
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME X:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF 50 SHORT STORIES
Contents
By Robert Abernathy
By Jerome Bixby
By Roger Dee
By Miriam Allen DeFord
By Lester del Rey
By Philip K. Dick
By George Edrich
By Dean Evans
By H. B. Fyfe
By Raymond Z. Gallun
By Randall Garrett
By Randall Garrett
By Tom Godwin
By Arthur G. Hill
By Fox B. Holden
By Andersen Horne
By Jack G. Huekels
By Gene Hunter
By Alex James
By Jean M. Janis
By Harry Stephen Keeler
By Ernest M. Kenyon
by Murray Leinster
By S. P. Meek
By Sam Merwin
By C. L. Moore
By Andre Norton
By Alan E. Nourse
By Alan E. Nourse
By Richard Olin
By Gerald W. Page
By H. Beam Piper
By H. Beam Piper
By Frederik Pohl
By Mack Reynolds
By James H. Schmitz
By Robert Sheckley
By Clifford D. Simak
By Vance Simonds
By Edwin K. Sloat
By Evelyn E. Smith
By Richard Stockham
By Chas. A. Stopher
By Albert R. Teichner
By Richard F. Thieme
By V. E. Thiessen
By Stanley G. Weinbaum
By Mari Wolf
THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES OF L-472
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
By Murray F. Yaco
THE RECORD OF CURRUPIRA
By Robert Abernathy
From ancient Martian records came the grim song of a creature whose very existence was long forgotten.
James Dalton strode briskly through the main exhibit room of New York's Martian Museum, hardly glancing to right or left though many displays had been added since his last visit. The rockets were coming home regularly now and their most valuable cargoes--at least from a scientist's point of view--were the relics of an alien civilization brought to light by the archeologists excavating the great dead cities.
One new exhibit did catch Dalton's eye. He paused to read the label with interest--
MAN FROM MARS:
The body here preserved was found December 12, 2001, by an exploring party from the spaceship NEVADA, in the Martian city which we designate E-3. It rested in a case much like this, in a building that had evidently been the municipal museum. Around it, in other cases likewise undisturbed since a period estimated at fifty thousand years ago, were a number of Earthly artifacts. These finds prove beyond doubt that a Martian scientific expedition visited Earth before the dawn of our history.
On the label someone had painstakingly copied the Martian glyphs found on the mummy's original case. Dalton's eyes traced the looping ornamental script--he was one of the very few men who had put in the years of work necessary to read inscriptional Martian--and he smiled appreciation of a jest that had taken fifty thousand years to ripen--the writing said simply, Man From Earth.
The mummy lying on a sculptured catafalque beyond the glass was amazingly well preserved--far more lifelike and immensely older than anything Egypt had yielded. Long-dead Martian embalmers had done a good job even on what to them was the corpse of an other-world monster.
He had been a small wiry man. His skin was dark though its color might have been affected by mummification. His features suggested those of the Forest Indian. Beside him lay his flaked-stone ax, his bone-pointed spear and spear thrower, likewise preserved by a marvelous chemistry.
Looking down at that ancient nameless ancestor, Dalton was moved to solemn thoughts. This creature had been first of all human-kind to make the tremendous crossing to Mars--had seen its lost race in living glory, had died there and became a museum exhibit for the multiple eyes of wise grey spiderish aliens.
"Interested in Oswald, sir?"
Dalton glanced up and saw an attendant. "I was just thinking--if he could only talk! He does have a name, then?"
The guard grinned. "Well, we call him Oswald. Sort of inconvenient, not having a name. When I worked at the Metropolitan we used to call all the Pharaohs and Assyrian kings by their first names."
Dalton mentally classified another example of the deep human need for verbal handles to lift unwieldy chunks of environment. The professional thought recalled him to business and he glanced at his watch.
"I'm supposed to meet Dr. Oliver Thwaite here this morning. Has he come in yet?"
"The archeologist? He's here early and late when he's on Earth. He'll be up in the cataloguing department now. Want me to show you--"
"I know the way," said Dalton. "Thanks all the same." He left the elevator at the fourth floor and impatiently pushed open the main cataloguing room's glazed door.
Inside cabinets and broad tables bore a wilderness of strange artifacts, many still crusted with red Martian sand. Alone in the room a trim-mustached man in a rough open-throated shirt looked up from an object he had been cleaning with a soft brush.
"Dr. Thwaite? I'm Jim Dalton."
"Glad to meet you, Professor." Thwaite carefully laid down his work, then rose to grip the visitor's hand. "You didn't lose any time."
"After you called last night I managed to get a seat on the dawn-rocket out of Chicago. I hope I'm not interrupting?"
"Not at all. I've got some assistants coming in around nine. I was just going over some stuff I don't like to trust to their thumb-fingered mercies."
Dalton looked down at the thing the archeologist had been brushing. It was a reed syrinx, the Pan's pipes of antiquity. "That's not a very Martian-looking specimen," he commented.
"The Martians, not having any lips, could hardly have had much use for it," said Thwaite. "This is of Earthly manufacture--one of the Martians' specimens from Earth, kept intact over all this time by a preservative I wish we knew how to make. It's a nice find, man's earliest known musical instrument--hardly as interesting as the record though."
Dalton's eyes brightened. "Have you listened to the record yet?"
"No. We got the machine working last night and ran off some of the Martian stuff. Clear as a bell. But I saved the main attraction for when you got here." Thwaite turned to a side door, fishing a key from his pocket. "The playback machine's in here."
The apparatus, squatting on a sturdy table in the small room beyond, had the slightly haywire look of an experimental model. But it was little short of a miracle to those who knew how it had been built--on the basis of radioed descriptions of the ruined device the excavators had dug up on Mars.
Even more intriguing, however, was the row of neatly labeled boxes on a shelf. There in cushioned nests reposed little cylinders of age-tarnished metal, on which a close observer could still trace the faint engraved lines and whorls of Martian script. These were the best-preserved specimens yet found of Martian record films.
Sound and pictures were on them, impressed there by a triumphant science so long ago that the code of Hammurabi or the hieroglyphs of Khufu seemed by comparison like yesterday's newspaper. Men of Earth were ready now to evoke these ancient voices--but to reproduce the stereoscopic images was still beyond human technology.
Dalton scrutinized one label intently. "Odd," he said. "I realize how much the Martian archives may have to offer us when we master their spoken language--but I still want most to hear this record, the one the Martians made right here on Earth."
Thwaite nodded comprehendingly. "The human race is a good deal like an amnesia patient that wakes up at the age of forty and finds himself with a fairly prosperous business, a wife and children and a mortgage, but no recollection of his youth or infancy--and nobody around to tell him how he got where he is.
"We invented writing so doggone late in the game. Now we get to Mars and find the people there knew us before we knew ourselves--but they died or maybe picked up and went, leaving just this behind." He used both hands to lift the precious gray cylinder from its box. "And of course you linguists in particular get a big charge out of this discovery."
"If it's a record of human speech it'll be the oldest ever found. It may do for comparative-historical linguistics what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptology." Dalton grinned boyishly. "Some of us even nurse the hope it may do something for our old headache--the problem of the origin of language. That was one of the most important, maybe the most important step in human progress--and we don't know how or when or why!"
"I've heard of the bowwow theory and the dingdong theory," said Thwaite, his hands busy with the machine.
"Pure speculations. The plain fact is we haven't even been able to make an informed guess because the evidence, the written records, only run back about six thousand years. That racial amnesia you spoke of.
"Personally, I have a weakness for the magical theory--that man invented language in the search for magic formulae, words of power. Unlike the other theories, that one assumes as the motive force not merely passive imitativeness but an outgoing will.
"Even the speechless subman must have observed that he could affect the behavior of animals of his own and other species by making appropriate noises--a mating call or a terrifying shout, for instance. Hence the perennial conviction you can get what you want if you just hold your mouth right, and you know the proper prayers or curses."
"A logical conclusion from the animistic viewpoint," said Thwaite. He frowned over the delicate task of starting the film, inquired offhandedly, "You got the photostat of the label inscription? What did you make of it?"
"Not much more than Henderson did on Mars. There's the date of the recording and the place--the longitude doesn't mean anything to us because we still don't know where the Martians fixed their zero meridian. But it was near the equator and, the text indicates, in a tropical forest--probably in Africa or South America.
"Then there's the sentence Henderson couldn't make out. It's obscure and rather badly defaced, but it's evidently a comment--unfavorable--on the subject-matter of the recording. In it appears twice a sort of interjection-adverb that in other contexts implies revulsion--something like ugh!"
"Funny. Looks like the Martians saw something on Earth they didn't like. Too bad we can't reproduce the visual record yet."
Dalton said soberly, "The Martian's vocabulary indicates that for all their physical difference from us they had emotions very much like human beings'. Whatever they saw must have been something we wouldn't have liked either."
The reproducer hummed softly. Thwaite closed the motor switch and the ancient film slid smoothly from its casing. Out of the speaker burst a strange medley of whirrings, clicks, chirps, trills and modulated drones and buzzings--a sound like the voice of grasshoppers in a drought-stricken field of summer.
Dalton listened raptly, as if by sheer concentration he might even now be able to guess at connections between the sounds of spoken Martian--heard now for the first time--and the written symbols that he had been working over for years. But he couldn't, of course--that would require a painstaking correlation analysis.
"Evidently it's an introduction or commentary," said the archeologist. "Our photocell examination showed the wave-patterns of the initial and final portions of the film were typically Martian--but the middle part isn't. The middle part is whatever they recorded here on Earth."
"If only that last part is a translation...." said Dalton hopefully. Then the alien susurration ceased coming from the reproducer and he closed his mouth abruptly and leaned forward.
For the space of a caught breath there was silence. Then another voice came in, the voice of Earth hundreds of centuries dead.
It was not human. No more than the first had been--but the Martian sounds had been merely alien and these were horrible.
It was like nothing so much as the croaking of some gigantic frog, risen bellowing from a bottomless primeval swamp. It bayed of stinking sunless pools and gurgled of black ooze. And its booming notes descended to subsonic throbbings that gripped and wrung the nerves to anguish.
Dalton was involuntarily on his feet, clawing for the switch. But he stopped, reeling. His head spun and he could not see. Through his dizzy brain the great voice roared and the mighty tones below hearing hammered at the inmost fortress of the man's will.
On the heels of that deafening assault the voice began to change. The numbing thunder rumbled back, repeating the pain and the threat--but underneath something crooned and wheedled obscenely. It said, "Come ... come ... come...." And the stunned prey came on stumbling feet, shivering with a terror that could not break the spell.
Where the squat black machine had been was something that was also squat and black and huge. It crouched motionless and blind in the mud and from its pulsing expanded throat vibrated the demonic croaking. As the victim swayed helplessly nearer the mouth opened wide upon long rows of frightful teeth....
The monstrous song stopped suddenly. Then still another voice cried briefly, thinly in agony and despair. That voice was human.
Each of the two men looked into a white strange face. They were standing on opposite sides of the table and between them the playback machine had fallen silent. Then it began to whir again in the locust speech of the Martian commentator, explaining rapidly, unintelligibly.
Thwaite found the switch with wooden fingers. As if with one accord they retreated from the black machine. Neither of them even tried to make a false show of self-possession. Each knew, from his first glimpse of the other's dilated staring eyes, that both had experienced and seen the same.
Dalton sank shivering into a chair, the darkness still swirling threateningly in his brain. Presently he said, "The expression of a will--that much was true. But the will--was not of man."
* * * * *
James Dalton took a vacation. After a few days he went to a psychiatrist, who observed the usual symptoms of overwork and worry and recommended a change of scene--a rest in the country.
On the first night at a friend's secluded farm Dalton awoke drenched in cold sweat. Through the open window from not far away came a hellish serenade, the noise of frogs--the high nervous voices of peepers punctuating the deep leisured booming of bullfrogs.
The linguist flung on his clothes and drove back at reckless speed to where there were lights and the noises of men and their machines. He spent the rest of his vacation burrowing under the clamor of the city whose steel and pavements proclaimed man's victory over the very grass that grew.
After awhile he felt better and needed work again. He took up his planned study of the Martian recordings, correlating the spoken words with the written ones he had already arduously learned to read.
The Martian Museum readily lent him the recordings he requested for use in his work, including the one made on Earth. He studied the Martian-language portion of this and succeeded in making a partial translation--but carefully refrained from playing the middle section of the film back again.
Came a day, though, when it occurred to him that he had heard not a word from Thwaite. He made inquiries through the Museum and learned that the archeologist had applied for a leave of absence and left before it was granted. Gone where? The Museum people didn't know--but Thwaite had not been trying to cover his trail. A call to Global Air Transport brought the desired information.
A premonition ran up Dalton's spine--but he was surprised at how calmly he thought and acted. He picked up the phone and called Transport again--this time their booking department.
"When's the earliest time I can get passage to Belem?" he asked.
With no more than an hour to pack and catch the rocket he hurried to the Museum. The place was more or less populated with sightseers, which was annoying, because Dalton's plans now included larceny.
He waited before the building till the coast was clear, then, with handkerchief-wrapped knuckles, broke the glass and tripped the lever on the fire alarm. In minutes a wail of sirens and roar of arriving motors was satisfyingly loud in the main exhibit room. Police and fire department helicopters buzzed overhead. A wave of mingled fright and curiosity swept visitors and attendants alike to the doors.
Dalton, lingering, found himself watched only by the millennially sightless eyes of the man who lay in state in an airless glass tomb. The stern face was inscrutable behind the silence of many thousand years.
"Excuse me, Oswald," murmured Dalton. "I'd like to borrow something of yours but I'm sure you won't mind."
The reed flute was in a long case devoted to Earthly specimens. Unhesitatingly Dalton smashed the glass.
* * * * *
Brazil is a vast country, and it cost much trouble and time and expense before Dalton caught up with Thwaite in a forlorn riverbank town along the line where civilization hesitates on the shore of that vast sea of vegetation called the mato. Night had just fallen when Dalton arrived. He found Thwaite alone in a lighted room of the single drab hotel--alone and very busy.
The archeologist was shaggily unshaven. He looked up and said something that might have been a greeting devoid of surprise. Dalton grimaced apologetically, set down his suitcase and pried the wax plugs out of his ears, explaining with a gesture that included the world outside, where the tree frogs sang deafeningly in the hot stirring darkness of the near forest.
"How do you stand it?" he asked.
Thwaite's lips drew back from his teeth. "I'm fighting it," he said shortly, picking up his work again. On the bed where he sat were scattered steel cartridge clips. He was going through them with a small file, carefully cutting a deep cross in the soft nose of every bullet. Nearby a heavy-caliber rifle leaned against a wardrobe. Other things were in evidence--boots, canteens, knapsacks, the tough clothing a man needs in the mato.
"You're looking for it."
Thwaite's eyes burned feverishly. "Yes. Do you think I'm crazy?"
* * * * *
Dalton pulled a rickety chair toward him and sat down straddling it. "I don't know," he said slowly. "It was very likely a creature of the last interglacial period. The ice may have finished its kind."
"The ice never touched these equatorial forests." Thwaite smiled unpleasantly. "And the Indians and old settlers down here have stories--about a thing that calls in the mato, that can paralyze a man with fear. Currupira is their name for it.
"When I remembered those stories they fell into place alongside a lot of others from different countries and times--the Sirens, for instance, and the Lorelei. Those legends are ancient. But perhaps here in the Amazon basin, in the forests that have never been cut and the swamps that have never been drained, the currupira is still real and alive. I hope so!"
"Why?"
"I want to meet it. I want to show it that men can destroy it with all its unholy power." Thwaite bore down viciously on the file and the bright flakes of lead glittered to the floor beside his feet.
Dalton watched him with eyes of compassion. He heard the frog music swelling outside, a harrowing reminder of ultimate blasphemous insult, and he felt the futility of argument.
"Remember, I heard it too," Dalton said. "And I sensed what you did. That voice or some combination of frequencies or overtones within it, is resonant to the essence of evil--the fundamental life-hating self-destroying evil in man--even to have glimpsed it, to have heard the brainless beast mocking, was an outrage to humanity that a man must...."
Dalton paused, got a grip on himself. "But, consider--the outrage was wiped out, humanity won its victory over the monster a long time ago. What if it isn't quite extinct? That record was fifty thousand years old."
"What did you do with the record?" Thwaite looked up sharply.
"I obliterated that--the voice and the pictures that went with it from the film before I returned it to the Museum."
Thwaite sighed deeply. "Good. I was damning myself for not doing that before I left."
The linguist said, "I think it answered my question as much as I want it answered. The origin of speech--lies in the will to power, the lust to dominate other men by preying on the weakness or evil in them.
"Those first men didn't just guess that such power existed--they knew because the beast had taught them and they tried to imitate it--the mystagogues and tyrants through the ages, with voices, with tomtoms and bull-roarers and trumpets. What makes the memory of that voice so hard to live with is just knowing that what it called to is a part of man--isn't that it?"
Thwaite didn't answer. He had taken the heavy rifle across his knees and was methodically testing the movement of the well-oiled breech mechanism.
Dalton stood up wearily and picked up his suitcase. "I'll check into the hotel. Suppose we talk this over some more in the morning. Maybe things'll look different by daylight."
But in the morning Thwaite was gone--upriver with a hired boatman, said the natives. The note he had left said only, Sorry. But it's no use talking about humanity--this is personal.
Dalton crushed the note angrily, muttering under his breath, "The fool! Didn't he realize I'd go with him?" He hurled the crumpled paper aside and stalked out to look for a guide.
* * * * *
They chugged slowly westward up the forest-walled river, an obscure tributary that flowed somewhere into the Xingú. After four days, they had hopes of being close on the others' track. The brown-faced guide, Joao, who held the tiller now, was a magician. He had conjured up an ancient outboard motor for the scow-like boat Dalton had bought from a fisherman.
The sun was setting murkily and the sluggish swell of the water ahead was the color of witch's blood. Under its opaque surface a mae dágua, the Mother of Water, ruled over creatures slimy and razor-toothed. In the blackness beneath the great trees, where it was dark even at noon, other beings had their kingdom.
Out of the forest came the crying grunting hooting voices of its life that woke at nightfall, fiercer and more feverish than that of the daytime. To the man from the north there seemed something indecent in the fertile febrile swarming of life here. Compared to a temperate woodland the mato was like a metropolis against a sleepy village.
"What's that?" Dalton demanded sharply as a particularly hideous squawk floated across the water.
"Nao é nada. A bicharia agitase." Joao shrugged. "The menagerie agitates itself." His manner indicated that some bichinho beneath notice had made the noise.
But moments later the little brown man became rigid. He half rose to his feet in the boat's stern, then stooped and shut off the popping motor. In the relative silence the other heard what he had--far off and indistinct, muttering deep in the black mato, a voice that croaked of ravenous hunger in accents abominably known to him.
"Currupira," said Joao tensely. "Currupira sai á caçada da noite." He watched the foreigner with eyes that gleamed in the fading light like polished onyx.
"Avante!" snapped Dalton. "See if it comes closer to the river this time."
It was not the first time they had heard that voice calling since they had ventured deep into the unpeopled swampland about which the downriver settlements had fearful stories to whisper.
Silently the guide spun the engine. The boat sputtered on. Dalton strained his eyes, watching the darkening shore as he had watched fruitlessly for so many miles.
But now, as they rounded a gentle bend, he glimpsed a small reddish spark near the bank. Then, by the last glimmer of the swiftly fading twilight, he made out a boat pulled up under gnarled tree-roots. That was all he could see but the movement of the red spark told him a man was sitting in the boat, smoking a cigarette.
"In there," he ordered in a low voice but Joao had seen already and was steering toward the shore.
The cigarette arched into the water and hissed out and they heard a scuffling and lap of water as the other boat swayed, which meant that the man in it had stood up.
He sprang into visibility as a flashlight in Dalton's hand went on. A squat, swarthy man with rugged features, a caboclo, of white and Indian blood. He blinked expressionlessly at the light.
"Where is the American scientist?" demanded Dalton in Portuguese.
"Quem sabe? Foi-se."
"Which way did he go?"
"Nao importa. O doutor é doido; nao ha-de-voltar," said the man suddenly. "It doesn't matter. The doctor is crazy--he won't come back."
"Answer me, damn it! Which way?"
The caboclo jerked his shoulders nervously and pointed.
"Come on!" said Dalton and scrambled ashore even as Joao was stopping the motor and making the boat fast beside the other. "He's gone in after it!"
The forest was a black labyrinth. Its tangled darkness seemed to drink up the beam of the powerful flashlight Dalton had brought, its uneasy rustlings and animal-noises pressed in to swallow the sound of human movements for which he strained his ears, fearing to call out. He pushed forward recklessly, carried on by a sort of inertia of determination; behind him Joao followed, though he moved woodenly and muttered prayers under his breath.
Then somewhere very near a great voice croaked briefly and was silent--so close that it poured a wave of faintness over the hearer, seemed to send numbing electricity tingling along his motor nerves.
Joao dropped to his knees and flung both arms about a tree-bole. His brown face when the light fell on it was shiny with sweat, his eyes dilated and blind-looking. Dalton slammed the heel of his hand against the man's shoulder and got no response save for a tightening of the grip on the treetrunk, and a pitiful whimper, "Assombra-me--it overshadows me!"
Dalton swung the flashlight beam ahead and saw nothing. Then all at once, not fifty yards away, a single glowing eye sprang out of the darkness, arched through the air and hit the ground to blaze into searing brilliance and white smoke. The clearing in which it burned grew bright as day, and Dalton saw a silhouetted figure clutching a rifle and turning its head from side to side.
He plunged headlong toward the light of the flare, shouting, "Thwaite, you idiot! You can't--"
And then the currupira spoke.
Its bellowing seemed to come from all around, from the ground, the trees, the air. It smote like a blow in the stomach that drives out wind and fight. And it roared on, lashing at the wills of those who heard it, beating and stamping them out like sparks of a scattered fire.
Dalton groped with one hand for his pocket but his hand kept slipping away into a matterless void as his vision threatened to slip into blindness. Dimly he saw Thwaite, a stone's throw ahead of him, start to lift his weapon and then stand frozen, swaying a little on his feet as if buffeted by waves of sound.
Already the second theme was coming in--the insidious obbligato of invitation to death, wheedling that this way ... this way ... was the path from the torment and terror that the monstrous voice flooded over them.
Thwaite took a stiff step, then another and another, toward the black wall of the mato that rose beyond the clearing. With an indescribable shudder Dalton realized that he too had moved an involuntary step forward. The currupira's voice rose triumphantly.
With a mighty effort of will Dalton closed fingers he could not feel on the object in his pocket. Like a man lifting a mountain he lifted it to his lips.
A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmare drums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blew and blew....
Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins, tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the currupira's song.
Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestral instinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powers of the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, the death-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.
But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, life returning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love. Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, life even of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their form and their meaning for this moment.
Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite--but the other remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment, while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The light of the flare was reddening, dying....
After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up. The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief. As it echoed the currupira's voice was abruptly silent. In the bushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slithering movement of a huge body.
They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward them heedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed and revealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, and Thwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for a renewed flurry of cracking twigs.
Along the water's edge, obscured by the trees between, moved something black and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee and began firing at it, emptying the magazine.
They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing in the deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water's surface and the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.
Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, "Damned lucky for me you got here when you did. It--had me."
Dalton nodded without speaking.
"But how did you know what to do?" Thwaite asked.
"It wasn't my discovery," said the linguist soberly. "Our remote ancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwise man might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martian records when I succeeded in translating them. Fortunately the Martians also preserved a specimen of the weapon our ancestors invented."
He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist's eyes widened with recognition.
Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples were fading out. "In the beginning there was the voice of evil--but there was also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that in mankind's makeup there's more than one fundamental note!"
THE DRAW
By Jerome Bixby
Stories of the old West were filled with bad men who lived by the speed of their gun hand. Well, meet Buck Tarrant, who could outdraw them all. His secret: he didn't even have to reach for his weapon....
Joe Doolin's my name. Cowhand--work for old Farrel over at Lazy F beyond the Pass. Never had much of anything exciting happen to me--just punched cows and lit up on payday--until the day I happened to ride through the Pass on my way to town and saw young Buck Tarrant's draw.
Now, Buck'd always been a damn good shot. Once he got his gun in his hand he could put a bullet right where he wanted it up to twenty paces, and within an inch of his aim up to a hundred feet. But Lord God, he couldn't draw to save his life--I'd seen him a couple of times before in the Pass, trying to. He'd face a tree and go into a crouch, and I'd know he was pretending the tree was Billy the Kid or somebody, and then he'd slap leather--and his clumsy hand would wallop his gunbutt, he'd yank like hell, his old Peacemaker would come staggering out of his holster like a bear in heat, and finally he'd line on his target and plug it dead center. But the whole business took about a second and a half, and by the time he'd ever finished his fumbling in a real fight, Billy the Kid or Sheriff Ben Randolph over in town or even me, Joe Doolin, could have cut him in half.
So this time, when I was riding along through the Pass, I saw Buck upslope from me under the trees, and I just grinned and didn't pay too much attention.
He stood facing an old elm tree, and I could see he'd tacked a playing card about four feet up the trunk, about where a man's heart would be.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him go into his gunman's crouch. He was about sixty feet away from me, and, like I said, I wasn't paying much mind to him.
I heard the shot, flat down the rocky slope that separated us. I grinned again, picturing that fumbly draw of his, the wild slap at leather, the gun coming out drunklike, maybe even him dropping it--I'd seen him do that once or twice.
It got me to thinking about him, as I rode closer.
* * * * *
He was a bad one. Nobody said any different than that. Just bad. He was a bony runt of about eighteen, with bulging eyes and a wide mouth that was always turned down at the corners. He got his nickname Buck because he had buck teeth, not because he was heap man. He was some handy with his fists, and he liked to pick ruckuses with kids he was sure he could lick. But the tipoff on Buck is that he'd bleat like a two-day calf to get out of mixing with somebody he was scared of--which meant somebody his own size or bigger. He'd jaw his way out of it, or just turn and slink away with his tail along his belly. His dad had died a couple years before, and he lived with his ma on a small ranch out near the Pass. The place was falling to pieces, because Buck wouldn't lift a hand to do any work around--his ma just couldn't handle him at all. Fences were down, and the yard was all weedgrown, and the house needed some repairs--but all Buck ever did was hang around town, trying to rub up against some of the tough customers who drank in the Once Again Saloon, or else he'd ride up and lie around under the trees along the top of the Pass and just think--or, like he was today, he'd practise drawing and throwing down on trees and rocks.
Guess he always wanted to be tough. Really tough. He tried to walk with tough men, and, as we found out later, just about all he ever thought about while he was lying around was how he could be tougher than the next two guys. Maybe you've known characters like that--for some damfool reason they just got to be able to whup anybody who comes along, and they feel low and mean when they can't, as if the size of a man's fist was the size of the man.
So that's Buck Tarrant--a halfsized, poisonous, no-good kid who wanted to be a hardcase.
But he'd never be, not in a million years. That's what made it funny--and kind of pitiful too. There wasn't no real strength in him, only a scared hate. It takes guts as well as speed to be tough with a gun, and Buck was just a nasty little rat of a kid who'd probably always counterpunch his way through life when he punched at all. He'd kite for cover if you lifted a lip.
I heard another shot, and looked up the slope. I was near enough now to see that the card he was shooting at was a ten of diamonds--and that he was plugging the pips one by one. Always could shoot, like I said.
* * * * *
Then he heard me coming, and whirled away from the tree, his gun holstered, his hand held out in front of him like he must have imagined Hickock or somebody held it when he was ready to draw.
I stopped my horse about ten feet away and just stared at him. He looked real funny in his baggy old levis and dirty checkered shirt and that big gun low on his hip, and me knowing he couldn't handle it worth a damn.
"Who you trying to scare, Buck?" I said. I looked him up and down and snickered. "You look about as dangerous as a sheepherder's wife."
"And you're a son of a bitch," he said.
I stiffened and shoved out my jaw. "Watch that, runt, or I'll get off and put my foot in your mouth and pull you on like a boot!"
"Will you now," he said nastily, "you son of a bitch?"
And he drew on me ... and I goddam near fell backwards off my saddle!
I swear, I hadn't even seen his hand move, he'd drawn so fast! That gun just practically appeared in his hand!
"Will you now?" he said again, and the bore of his gun looked like a greased gate to hell.
I sat in my saddle scared spitless, wondering if this was when I was going to die. I moved my hands out away from my body, and tried to look friendlylike--actually, I'd never tangled with Buck, just razzed him a little now and then like everybody did; and I couldn't see much reason why he'd want to kill me.
But the expression on his face was full of gloating, full of wildness, full of damn-you recklessness--exactly the expression you'd look to find on a kid like Buck who suddenly found out he was the deadliest gunman alive.
And that's just what he was, believe me.
Once I saw Bat Masterson draw--and he was right up there with the very best. Could draw and shoot accurately in maybe half a second or so--you could hardly see his hand move; you just heard the slap of hand on gunbutt, and a split-second later the shot. It takes a lot of practise to be able to get a gun out and on target in that space of time, and that's what makes gunmen. Practise, and a knack to begin with. And, I guess, the yen to be a gunman, like Buck Tarrant'd always had.
When I saw Masterson draw against Jeff Steward in Abilene, it was that way--slap, crash, and Steward was three-eyed. Just a blur of motion.
But when Buck Tarrant drew on me, right now in the Pass, I didn't see any motion atall. He just crouched, and then his gun was on me. Must have done it in a millionth of a second, if a second has millionths.
It was the fastest draw I'd ever seen. It was, I reckoned, the fastest draw anybody's ever seen. It was an impossibly fast draw--a man's hand just couldn't move to his holster that fast, and grab and drag a heavy Peacemaker up in a two foot arc that fast.
It was plain damn impossible--but there it was.
And there I was.
* * * * *
I didn't say a word. I just sat and thought about things, and my horse wandered a little farther up the slope and then stopped to chomp grass. All the time, Buck Tarrant was standing there, poised, that wild gloating look in his eyes, knowing he could kill me anytime and knowing I knew it.
When he spoke, his voice was shaky--it sounded like he wanted to bust out laughing, and not a nice laugh either.
"Nothing to say, Doolin?" he said. "Pretty fast, huh?"
I said, "Yeah, Buck. Pretty fast." And my voice was shaky too, but not because I felt like laughing any.
He spat, eying me arrogantly. The ground rose to where he stood, and our heads were about on a level. But I felt he was looking down.
"Pretty fast!" he sneered. "Faster'n anybody!"
"I reckon it is, at that," I said.
"Know how I do it?"
"No."
"I think, Doolin. I think my gun into my hand. How d'you like that?"
"It's awful fast, Buck."
"I just think, and my gun is there in my hand. Some draw, huh!"
"Sure is."
"You're damn right it is, Doolin. Faster'n anybody!"
I didn't know what his gabbling about "thinking his gun into his hand" meant--at least not then, I didn't--but I sure wasn't minded to question him on it. He looked wild-eyed enough right now to start taking bites out of the nearest tree.
He spat again and looked me up and down. "You know, you can go to hell, Joe Doolin. You're a lousy, God damn, white-livered son of a bitch." He grinned coldly.
Not an insult, I knew now, but a deliberate taunt. I'd broken jaws for a lot less--I'm no runt, and I'm quick enough to hand back crap if some lands on me. But now I wasn't interested.
He saw I was mad, though, and stood waiting.
"You're fast enough, Buck," I said, "so I got no idea of trying you. You want to murder me, I guess I can't stop you--but I ain't drawing. No, sir, that's for sure."
"And a coward to boot," he jeered.
"Maybe," I said. "Put yourself in my place, and ask yourself why in hell I should kill myself?"
"Yellow!" he snarled, looking at me with his bulging eyes full of meanness and confidence.
My shoulders got tight, and it ran down along my gun arm. I never took that from a man before.
"I won't draw," I said. "Reckon I'll move on instead, if you'll let me."
And I picked up my reins, moving my hands real careful-like, and turned my horse around and started down the slope. I could feel his eyes on me, and I was half-waiting for a bullet in the back. But it didn't come. Instead Buck Tarrant called, "Doolin!"
I turned my head. "Yeah?"
He was standing there in the same position. Somehow he reminded me of a crazy, runt wolf--his eyes were almost yellowish, and when he talked he moved his lips too much, mouthing his words, and his big crooked teeth flashed in the sun. I guess all the hankering for toughness in him was coming out--he was acting now like he'd always wanted to--cocky, unafraid, mean--because now he wore a bigger gun than anybody. It showed all over him, like poison coming out of his skin.
"Doolin," he called. "I'll be in town around three this afternoon. Tell Ben Randolph for me that he's a son of a bitch. Tell him he's a dunghead sheriff. Tell him he'd better look me up when I get there, or else get outa town and stay out. You got that?"
"I got it, Buck."
"Call me Mr. Tarrant, you Irish bastard."
"Okay ... Mr. Tarrant," I said, and reached the bottom of the slope and turned my horse along the road through the Pass. About a hundred yards farther on, I hipped around in the saddle and looked back. He was practising again--the crouch, the fantastic draw, the shot.
I rode on toward town, to tell Ben Randolph he'd either have to run or die.
* * * * *
Ben was a lanky, slab-sided Texan who'd come up north on a drive ten years before and liked the Arizona climate and stayed. He was a good sheriff--tough enough to handle most men, and smart enough to handle the rest. Fourteen years of it had kept him lean and fast.
When I told him about Buck, I could see he didn't know whether he was tough or smart or fast enough to get out of this one.
He leaned back in his chair and started to light his pipe, and then stared at the match until it burned his fingers without touching it to the tobacco.
"You sure, Joe?" he said.
"Ben, I saw it four times. At first I just couldn't believe my eyes--but I tell you, he's fast. He's faster'n you or me or Hickock or anybody. God knows where he got it, but he's got the speed."
"But," Ben Randolph said, lighting another match, "it just don't happen that way." His voice was almost mildly complaining. "Not overnight. Gunspeed's something you work on--it comes slow, mighty slow. You know that. How in hell could Buck Tarrant turn into a fire-eating gunslinger in a few days?" He paused and puffed. "You sure, Joe?" he asked again, through a cloud of smoke.
"Yes."
"And he wants me."
"That's what he said."
Ben Randolph sighed. "He's a bad kid, Joe--just a bad kid. If his father hadn't died, I reckon he might have turned out better. But his mother ain't big enough to wallop his butt the way it needs."
"You took his gun away from him a couple times, didn't you, Ben?"
"Yeah. And ran him outa town too, when he got too pestiferous. Told him to get the hell home and help his ma."
"Guess that's why he wants you."
"That. And because I'm sheriff. I'm the biggest gun around here, and he don't want to start at the bottom, not him. He's gonna show the world right away."
"He can do it, Ben."
He sighed again. "I know. If what you say's true, he can sure show me anyhow. Still, I got to take him up on it. You know that. I can't leave town."
I looked at his hand lying on his leg--the fingers were trembling. He curled them into a fist, and the fist trembled.
"You ought to, Ben," I said.
"Of course I ought to," he said, a little savagely. "But I can't. Why, what'd happen to this town if I was to cut and run? Is there anyone else who could handle him? Hell, no."
"A crazy galoot like that," I said slowly, "if he gets too damn nasty, is bound to get kilt." I hesitated. "Even in the back, if he's too good to take from the front."
"Sure," Ben Randolph said. "Sooner or later. But what about meantime?... how many people will he have to kill before somebody gets angry or nervy enough to kill him? That's my job, Joe--to take care of this kind of thing. Those people he'd kill are depending on me to get between him and them. Don't you see?"
* * * * *
I got up. "Sure, Ben, I see. I just wish you didn't."
He let out another mouthful of smoke. "You got any idea what he meant about thinking his gun into his hand?"
"Not the slightest. Some crazy explanation he made up to account for his sudden speed, I reckon."
Another puff. "You figure I'm a dead man, Joe, huh?"
"It looks kind of that way."
"Yeah, it kind of does, don't it?"
At four that afternoon Buck Tarrant came riding into town like he owned it. He sat his battered old saddle like a rajah on an elephant, and he held his right hand low beside his hip in an exaggerated gunman's stance. With his floppy hat over at a cocky angle, and his big eyes and scrawny frame, he'd have looked funny as hell trying to look like a tough hombre--except that he was tough now, and everybody in town knew it because I'd warned them. Otherwise somebody might have jibed him, and the way things were now, that could lead to a sudden grave.
Nobody said a word all along the street as he rode to the hitchrail in front of the Once Again and dismounted. There wasn't many people around to say anything--most everybody was inside, and all you could see of them was a shadow of movement behind a window there, the flutter of a curtain there.
Only a few men sat in chairs along the boardwalks under the porches, or leaned against the porchposts, and they just sort of stared around, looking at Buck for a second and then looking off again if he turned toward them.
I was standing near to where Buck hitched up. He swaggered up the steps of the saloon, his right hand poised, his bulging eyes full of hell.
"You tell him?" he asked.
I nodded. "He'll look you up, like you said."
Buck laughed shortly. "I'll be waiting. I don't like that lanky bastard. I reckon I got some scores to settle with him." He looked at me, and his face twisted into what he thought was a tough snarl. Funny--you could see he really wasn't tough down inside. There wasn't any hard core of confidence and strength. His toughness was in his holster, and all the rest of him was acting to match up to it.
"You know," he said, "I don't like you either, Irish. Maybe I oughta kill you. Hell, why not?"
Now, the only reason I'd stayed out of doors that afternoon was I figured Buck had already had one chance to kill me and hadn't done it, so I must be safe. That's what I figured--he had nothing against me, so I was safe. And I had an idea that maybe, when the showdown came, I might be able to help out Ben Randolph somehow--if anything on God's Earth could help him.
Now, though, I wished to hell I hadn't stayed outside. I wished I was behind one of them windows, looking out at somebody else get told by Buck Tarrant that maybe he oughta kill him.
"But I won't," Buck said, grinning nastily. "Because you done me a favor. You run off and told the sheriff just like I told you--just like the goddam white-livered Irish sheepherder you are. Ain't that so?"
I nodded, my jaw set so hard with anger that the flesh felt stretched.
He waited for me to move against him. When I didn't, he laughed and swaggered to the door of the saloon. "Come on, Irish," he said over his shoulder. "I'll buy you a drink of the best."
I followed him in, and he went over to the bar, walking heavy, and looked old Menner right in the eye and said, "Give me a bottle of the best stuff you got in the house."
* * * * *
Menner looked at the kid he'd kicked out of his place a dozen times, and his face was white. He reached behind him and got a bottle and put it on the bar.
"Two glasses," said Buck Tarrant.
Menner carefully put two glasses on the bar.
"Clean glasses."
Menner polished two other glasses on his apron and set them down.
"You don't want no money for this likker, do you, Menner?" Buck asked.
"No, sir."
"You'd just take it home and spend it on that fat heifer of a wife you got, and on them two little halfwit brats, wouldn't you?"
Menner nodded.
"Hell, they really ain't worth the trouble, are they?"
"No, sir."
Buck snickered and poured two shots and handed me one. He looked around the saloon and saw that it was almost empty--just Menner behind the bar, and a drunk asleep with his head on his arms at a table near the back, and a little gent in fancy town clothes fingering his drink at a table near the front window and not even looking at us.
"Where is everybody?" he asked Menner.
"Why, sir, I reckon they're home, most of them," Menner said. "It being a hot day and all--"
"Bet it'll get hotter," Buck said, hard.
"Yes, sir."
"I guess they didn't want to really feel the heat, huh?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, it's going to get so hot, you old bastard, that everybody'll feel it. You know that?"
"If you say so, sir."
"It might even get hot for you. Right now even. What do you think of that, huh?"
"I--I--"
"You thrun me outa here a couple times, remember?"
"Y-yes ... but I--"
"Look at this!" Buck said--and his gun was in his hand, and he didn't seem to have moved at all, not an inch. I was looking right at him when he did it--his hand was on the bar, resting beside his shotglass, and then suddenly his gun was in it and pointing right at old Menner's belly.
"You know," Buck said, grinning at how Menner's fear was crawling all over his face, "I can put a bullet right where I want to. Wanta see me do it?"
His gun crashed, and flame leaped across the bar, and the mirror behind the bar had a spiderweb of cracks radiating from a round black hole.
Menner stood there, blood leaking down his neck from a split earlobe.
Buck's gun went off again, and the other earlobe was a red tatter.
And Buck's gun was back in its holster with the same speed it had come out--I just couldn't see his hand move.
"That's enough for now," he told Menner. "This is right good likker, and I guess I got to have somebody around to push it across the bar for me, and you're as good as anybody to do jackass jobs like that."
* * * * *
He didn't ever look at Menner again. The old man leaned back against the shelf behind the bar, trembling, two trickles of red running down his neck and staining his shirt collar--I could see he wanted to touch the places where he'd been shot, to see how bad they were or just to rub at the pain, but he was afraid to raise a hand. He just stood there, looking sick.
Buck was staring at the little man in town clothes, over by the window. The little man had reared back at the shots, and now he was sitting up in his chair, his eyes straight on Buck. The table in front of him was wet where he'd spilled his drink when he'd jumped.
Buck looked at the little guy's fancy clothes and small mustache and grinned. "Come on," he said to me, and picked up his drink and started across the floor. "Find out who the dude is."
He pulled out a chair and sat down--and I saw he was careful to sit facing the front door, and also where he could see out the window.
I pulled out another chair and sat.
"Good shooting, huh?" Buck asked the little guy.
"Yes," said the little guy. "Very fine shooting. I confess, it quite startled me."
Buck laughed harshly. "Startled the old guy too...." He raised his voice. "Ain't that right, Menner? Wasn't you startled?"
"Yes, sir," came Menner's pain-filled voice from the bar.
Buck looked back at the little man--let his insolent gaze travel up and down the fancy waistcoat, the string tie, the sharp face with its mustache and narrow mouth and black eyes. He looked longest at the eyes, because they didn't seem to be scared.
He looked at the little guy, and the little guy looked at Buck, and finally Buck looked away. He tried to look wary as he did it, as if he was just fixing to make sure that nobody was around to sneak-shoot him--but you could see he'd been stared down.
When he looked back at the little guy, he was scowling. "Who're you, mister?" he said. "I never seen you before."
"My name is Jacob Pratt, sir. I'm just traveling through to San Francisco. I'm waiting for the evening stage."
"Drummer?"
"Excuse me?"
For a second Buck's face got ugly. "You heard me, mister. You a drummer?"
"I heard you, young man, but I don't quite understand. Do you mean, am I a musician? A performer upon the drums?"
"No, you goddam fool--I mean, what're you selling? Snake-bite medicine? Likker? Soap?"
"Why--I'm not selling anything. I'm a professor, sir."
"Well, I'll be damned." Buck looked at him a little more carefully. "A perfessor, huh? Of what?"
"Of psychology, sir."
"What's that?"
"It's the study of man's behavior--of the reasons why we act as we do."
Buck laughed again, and it was more of a snarl. "Well, perfessor, you just stick around here then, and I'll show you some real reasons for people acting as they do! From now on, I'm the big reason in this town ... they'll jump when I yell frog, or else!"
His hand was flat on the table in front of him--and suddenly his Peacemaker was in it, pointing at the professor's fourth vest button. "See what I mean huh?"
The little man blinked. "Indeed I do," he said, and stared at the gun as if hypnotized. Funny, though--he still didn't seem scared--just a lot interested.
* * * * *
Sitting there and just listening, I thought about something else funny--how they were both just about of a size, Buck and the professor, and so strong in different ways: with the professor, you felt he was strong inside--a man who knew a lot, about things and about himself--while with Buck it was all on the outside, on the surface: he was just a milksop kid with a deadly sting.
Buck was still looking at the professor, as carefully as he had before. He seemed to hesitate for a second, his mouth twisting. Then he said, "You're an eddicated man, ain't you? I mean, you studied a lot. Ain't that right?"
"Yes, I suppose it is."
"Well...." Again Buck seemed to hesitate. The gun in his hand lowered until the end of the barrel rested on the table. "Look," he said slowly, "maybe you can tell me how in hell...."
When he didn't go on, the professor said, "Yes?"
"Nothing."
"You were going to say--?"
Buck looked at him, his bulging eyes narrowed, the gunman's smirk on his lips again. "Are you telling me what's true and what ain't," he said softly, "with my gun on you?"
"Does the gun change anything?"
Buck tapped the heavy barrel on the table. "I say it changes a hell of a lot of things." Tap went the barrel. "You wanta argue?"
"Not with the gun," the professor said calmly. "It always wins. I'll talk with you, however, if you'll talk with your mouth instead of with the gun."
* * * * *
By this time I was filled with admiration for the professor's guts, and fear that he'd get a bullet in them ... I was all set to duck, in case Buck should lose his temper and start throwing lead.
But suddenly Buck's gun was back in his holster. I saw the professor blink again in astonishment.
"You know," Buck said, grinning loosely, "you got a lotta nerve, professor. Maybe you can tell me what I wanta know."
He didn't look at the little man while he talked--he was glancing around, being "wary" again. And grinning that grin at the same time. You could see he was off-balance--he was acting like everything was going on just like he wanted it; but actually the professor had beaten him again, words against the gun, eyes against eyes.
The professor's dark eyes were level on Buck's right now. "What is it you want to know?"
"This--" Buck said, and his gun was in his hand again, and it was the first time when he did it that his face stayed sober and kind of stupid-looking, his normal expression, instead of getting wild and dangerous. "How--do you know how do I do it?"
"Well," the professor said, "suppose you give me your answer first, if you have one. It might be the right one."
* * * * *
"I--" Buck shook his head--"Well, it's like I think the gun into my hand. It happened the first time this morning. I was standing out in the Pass where I always practise drawing, and I was wishing I could draw faster'n anybody who ever lived--I was wishing I could just get my gun outa leather in no time atall. And--" the gun was back in his holster in the blink of an eye--"that's how it happened. My gun was in my hand. Just like that. I didn't even reach for it--I was just getting set to draw, and had my hand out in front of me ... and my gun was in my hand before I knew what'd happened. God, I was so surprised I almost fell over!"
"I see," said the professor slowly. "You think it into your hand?"
"Yeah, kind of."
"Would you do it now, please?" And the professor leaned forward so he could see Buck's holster, eyes intent.
Buck's gun appeared in his hand.
The professor let out a long breath. "Now think it back into its holster."
It was there.
"You did not move your arm either time," said the professor.
"That's right," said Buck.
"The gun was just suddenly in your hand instead of in your holster. And then it was back in the holster."
"Right."
"Telekinesis," said the professor, almost reverently.
"Telewhat?"
"Telekinesis--the moving of material objects by mental force." The professor leaned back and studied the holstered gun. "It must be that. I hardly dared think if at first--the first time you did it. But the thought did occur to me. And now I'm virtually certain!"
"How do you say it?"
"T-e-l-e-k-i-n-e-s-i-s."
"Well, how do I do it?"
"I can't answer that. Nobody knows. It's been the subject of many experiments, and there are many reported happenings--but I've never heard of any instance even remotely as impressive as this." The professor leaned across the table again. "Can you do it with other things, young man?"
"What other things?"
"That bottle on the bar, for example."
"Never tried."
"Try."
Buck stared at the bottle.
It wavered. Just a little. Rocked, and settled back.
Buck stared harder, eyes bulging.
The bottle shivered. That was all.
"Hell," Buck said. "I can't seem to--to get ahold of it with my mind, like I can with my gun."
"Try moving this glass on the table," the professor said, "It's smaller, and closer."
* * * * *
Buck stared at the glass. It moved a fraction of an inch across the tabletop. No more.
Buck snarled like a dog and swatted the glass with his hand, knocking it halfway across the room.
"Possibly," the professor said, after a moment, "you can do it with your gun because you want to so very badly. The strength of your desire releases--or creates--whatever psychic forces are necessary to perform the act." He paused, looking thoughtful. "Young man, suppose you try to transport your gun to--say, to the top of the bar."
"Why?" Buck asked suspiciously.
"I want to see whether distance is a factor where the gun is concerned. Whether you can place the gun that far away from you, or whether the power operates only when you want your gun in your hand."
"No," Buck said in an ugly voice. "Damn if I will. I'd maybe get my gun over, there and not be able to get it back, and then you'd jump me--the two of you. I ain't minded to experiment around too much, thank you."
"All right," the professor said, as if he didn't care. "The suggestion was purely in the scientific spirit--"
"Sure," said Buck. "Sure. Just don't get any more scientific, or I'll experiment on how many holes you can get in you before you die."
The professor sat back in his chair and looked Buck right in the eye. After a second, Buck looked away, scowling.
Me, I hadn't said a word the whole while, and I wasn't talking now.
"Wonder where that goddam yellow-bellied sheriff is?" Buck said. He looked out the window, then glanced sharply at me. "He said he'd come, huh?"
"Yeah." When I was asked, I'd talk.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
The professor said, "Young man, you wouldn't care to come with me to San Francisco, would you? I and my colleagues would be very grateful for the opportunity to investigate this strange gift of yours--we would even be willing to pay you for your time and--"
Buck laughed. "Why, hell, I reckon I got bigger ideas'n that, mister! Real big ideas. There's no man alive I can't beat with a gun! I'm going to take Billy the Kid ... Hickock ... all of them! I'm going to get myself a rep bigger'n all theirs put together. Why, when I walk into a saloon, they'll hand me likker. I walk into a bank, they'll give me the place. No lawman from Canada to Mexico will even stay in the same town with me! Hell, what could you give me, you goddam little dude?"
The professor shrugged. "Nothing that would satisfy you."
"That's right." Suddenly Buck stiffened, looking out the window. He got up, his bulging blue eyes staring down at us. "Randolph's coming down the street! You two just stay put, and maybe--just maybe--I'll let you live. Professor, I wanta talk to you some more about this telekinesis stuff. Maybe I can get even faster than I am, or control my bullets better at long range. So you be here, get that?"
* * * * *
He turned and walked out the door.
The professor said, "He's not sane."
"Nutty as a locoed steer," I said. "Been that way for a long time. An ugly shrimp who hates everything--and now he's in the saddle holding the reins, and some people are due to get rode down." I looked curiously at him. "Look, professor--this telekinesis stuff--is all that on the level?"
"Absolutely."
"He just thinks his gun into his hand?"
"Exactly."
"Faster than anyone could ever draw it?"
"Inconceivably faster. The time element is almost non-existent."
I got up, feeling worse than I'd ever felt in my life. "Come on," I said. "Let's see what happens."
As if there was any doubt about what was bound to happen.
We stepped out onto the porch and over to the rail. Behind us, I heard Menner come out too. I looked over my shoulder. He'd wrapped a towel around his head. Blood was leaking through it. He was looking at Buck, hating him clear through.
* * * * *
The street was deserted except for Buck standing about twenty feet away, and, at the far end, Sheriff Ben Randolph coming slowly toward him, putting one foot ahead of the other in the dust.
A few men were standing on porches, pressed back against the walls, mostly near doors. Nobody was sitting now--they were ready to groundhog if lead started flying wild.
"God damn it," I said in a low, savage voice. "Ben's too good a man to get kilt this way. By a punk kid with some crazy psychowhosis way of handling a gun."
I felt the professor's level eyes on me, and turned to look at him.
"Why," he said, "doesn't a group of you get together and face him down? Ten guns against his one. He'd have to surrender."
"No, he wouldn't," I said. "That ain't the way it works. He'd just dare any of us to be the first to try and stop him--and none of us would take him up on it. A group like that don't mean anything--it'd be each man against Buck Tarrant, and none of us good enough."
"I see," the professor said softly.
"God...." I clenched my fists so hard they hurt. "I wish we could think his gun right back into the holster or something!"
Ben and Buck were about forty feet apart now. Ben was coming on steadily, his hand over his gunbutt. He was a good man with a gun, Ben--nobody around these parts had dared tackle him for a long time. But he was out-classed now, and he knew it. I guess he was just hoping that Buck's first shot or two wouldn't kill him, and that he could place a good one himself before Buck let loose any more.
But Buck was a damn good shot. He just wouldn't miss.
The professor was staring at Buck with a strange look in his eyes.
"He should be stopped," he said.
"Stop him, then," I said sourly.
"After all," he mused, "if the ability to perform telekinesis lies dormant in all of us, and is released by strong faith and desire to accomplish something that can be accomplished only by that means--then our desire to stop him might be able to counter his desire to--"
"Damn you and your big words," I said bitterly.
"It was your idea," the professor said, still looking at Buck. "What you said about thinking his gun back into its holster--after all, we are two to his one--"
I turned around and stared at him, really hearing him for the first time. "Yeah, that's right--I said that! My God ... do you think we could do it?"
"We can try," he said. "We know it can be done, and evidently that is nine-tenths of the battle. He can do it, so we should be able to. We must want him not to more than he wants to."
* * * * *
"Lord," I said, "I want him not to, all right...."
Ben and Buck were about twenty feet apart now, and Ben stopped.
His voice was tired when he said, "Any time, Buck."
"You're a hell of a sheriff," Buck sneered. "You're a no-good bastard."
"Cuss me out," Ben said. "Don't hurt me none. I'll be ready when you start talking with guns."
"I'm ready now, beanpole," Buck grinned. "You draw first, huh?"
"Think of his gun!" the professor said in a fierce whisper. "Try to grab it with your mind--break his aim--pull it away from him--you know it can be done! Think, think--"
Ben Randolph had never in anyone's knowledge drawn first against a man. But now he did, and I guess nobody could blame him.
He slapped leather, his face already dead--and Buck's Peacemaker was in his hand--
And me and the professor were standing like statues on the porch of the Once Again, thinking at that gun, glaring at it, fists clenched, our breath rasping in our throats.
The gun appeared in Buck's hand, and wobbled just as he slipped hammer. The bullet sprayed dust at Ben's feet.
Ben's gun was halfway out.
Buck's gunbarrel pointed down at the ground, and he was trying to lift it so hard his hand got white. He drove a bullet into the dust at his own feet, and started to whine.
Ben's gun was up and aiming.
Buck shot himself in the foot.
Then Ben shot him once in the right elbow, once in the right shoulder. Buck screamed and dropped his gun and threw out his arms, and Ben, who was a thorough man, put a bullet through his right hand, and another one on top of it.
Buck sat in the dust and flapped blood all around, and bawled when we came to get him.
* * * * *
The professor and I told Ben Randolph what had happened, and nobody else. I think he believed us.
Buck spent two weeks in the town jail, and then a year in the state pen for pulling on Randolph, and nobody's seen him now for six years. Don't know what happened to him, or care much. I reckon he's working as a cowhand someplace--anyway, he sends his mother money now and then, so he must have tamed down some and growed up some too.
While he was in the town jail, the professor talked to him a lot--the professor delayed his trip just to do it.
One night he told me, "Tarrant can't do anything like that again. Not at all, even with his left hand. The gunfight destroyed his faith in his ability to do it--or most of it, anyway. And I finished the job, I guess, asking all my questions. I guess you can't think too much about that sort of thing."
The professor went on to San Francisco, where he's doing some interesting experiments. Or trying to. Because he has the memory of what happened that day--but, like Buck Tarrant, not the ability to do anything like that any more. He wrote me a couple times, and it seems that ever since that time he's been absolutely unable to do any telekinesis. He's tried a thousand times and can't even move a feather.
So he figures it was really me alone who saved Ben's life and stopped Buck in his tracks.
I wonder. Maybe the professor just knows too much not to be some skeptical, even with what he saw. Maybe the way he looks at things and tries to find reasons for them gets in the way of his faith.
Anyway, he wants me to come to San Francisco and get experimented on. Maybe someday I will. Might be fun, if I can find time off from my job.
I got a lot of faith, you see. What I see, I believe. And when Ben retired last year, I took over his job as sheriff--because I'm the fastest man with a gun in these parts. Or, actually, in the world. Probably if I wasn't the peaceable type, I'd be famous or something.
CONTROL GROUP
by Roger Dee
"Any problem posed by one group of human beings can be resolved by any other group." That's what the Handbook said. But did that include primitive humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
The cool green disk of Alphard Six on the screen was infinitely welcome after the arid desolation and stinking swamplands of the inner planets, an airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew, would have set the Marco Four down at once but for the greater caution of Stryker, nominally captain of the group, and of Gibson, engineer, and linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had--as was usual and proper--no voice in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed world shall be deemed safe without proper--"
Farrell, as Stryker had expected, interrupted with characteristic impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six isn't an unreclaimed world--it was never colonized before the Hymenop invasion back in 3025, so why should it be inhabited now?"
Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable chess game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered knight in one blunt brown hand.
"No point in taking chances," Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face unmoved, when Farrell included him in his scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six light-years from Sol, at the old limits of Terran expansion, and there's no knowing what we may turn up here. Alphard's was one of the first systems the Bees took over. It must have been one of the last to be abandoned when they pulled back to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the day," Farrell said acidly, "when we'll stumble across a functioning dome of live, buzzing Hymenops. Damn it, Gib, the Bees pulled out a hundred years ago, before you and I were born--neither of us ever saw a Hymenop, and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker said. "I fought them for the better part of the century they were here, and I learned there's no predicting nor understanding them. We never knew why they came nor why they gave up and left. How can we know whether they'd leave a rear-guard or booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on Farrell's shoulder, understanding the younger man's eagerness and knowing that their close-knit team would have been the more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He nearly added as usual. "We're on rest leave at the moment, yes, but our mission is still to find Terran colonies enslaved and abandoned by the Bees, not to risk our necks and a valuable Reorientations ship by landing blind on an unobserved planet. We're too close already. Cut in your shields and find a reconnaissance spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched coordinates on the Ringwave board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored the bluish enveloping haze of her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified on the instant. The speeding streamlined shape that had flashed up unobserved from below swerved sharply and exploded in a cataclysmic blaze of atomic fire that rocked the ship wildly and flung the three men to the floor in a jangling roar of alarms.
* * * * *
"So the Handbook tacticians knew what they were about," Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach, and grinned when the navigator bristled defensively. "Some of their enjoinders seem a little stuffy and obvious at times, but they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be baited Stryker turned to Gibson, who was busily assessing the damage done to the ship's more fragile equipment, and to Xavier, who searched the planet's surface with the ship's magnoscanner. The Marco Four, Ringwave generators humming gently, hung at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard Six's single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the Zero Interval Transfer computer. I can realign that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit Transfer again."
* * * * *
Stryker looked dubious. "What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit is repaired? Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough," he said. "And its nature reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough to use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with." Worry made comical creases in his fat, good-humored face. "We'll have to find out who they are and why they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops," Gibson said promptly. "First, because the Bees pinned their faith on Ringwave energy fields, as we did, rather than on missiles. Second, because there's no dome on Six."
"There were three empty domes on Five, which is a desert planet," Farrell pointed out. "Why didn't they settle Six? It's a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the Bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'--we've been over that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed world," Farrell said with the faint malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. "Alphard Six was surveyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a colony in the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said. "Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment--the motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point--and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then there's only one choice remaining--they're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration. We always assumed that we'd find other races out here someday, and that they'd be as different from us in form and motivation as the Hymenops. Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not probable, Lee. The same objection that rules out the Bees applies to any trans-Alphardian culture--they'd have to be beyond the atomic fission stage, else they'd never have attempted interstellar flight. The Ringwave with its Zero Interval Transfer principle and instantaneous communications applications is the only answer to long-range travel, and if they'd had that they wouldn't have bothered with atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost angrily. "If they're not Hymenops or humans or aliens, then what in God's name are they?"
* * * * *
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell said, quoting a passage whose aptness had somehow seen it through a dozen reorganizations of insular tongue and a final translation to universal Terran. "If they're none of those three, we've only one conclusion left. There's no one down there at all--we're victims of the first joint hallucination in psychiatric history."
Stryker threw up his hands in surrender. "We can't identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the cat this time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said at once. "The ZIT computer can wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. "No, the ZIT comes first. We may have to run for it, and we can't set up a Transfer jump without the computer. It's got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years--the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors--would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work on the last location," he said. "It's high time I took my turn--and God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay inship and listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the Marco Four.
"Good enough. Though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hours to you improvising enharmonic variations on the Lament for Old Terra with your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally," he said. "Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion, and drop Arthur off in the helihopper for a low-level check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said. And to Xavier, who had not moved from his post at the magnoscanner: "How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned down their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear--and as inflectionless--as a 'cello note. "The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There are twenty-seven small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square. In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately ten times the bulk of the Marco Four."
They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human," Farrell said. Relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness. "Which means that they're Terran, and can be dealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is that hulk spaceworthy, Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. "Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight. Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graph derived from a composite section of detector meters. "The power transmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metallic cables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuous atomic fission."
* * * * *
Farrell, himself appalled by the information, still found himself able to chuckle at Stryker's bellow of consternation.
"Continuous fission? Good God, only madmen would deliberately run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with cheerful malice. "Why say mad men? Maybe they're humanoid aliens who thrive on hard radiation and look on the danger of being blown to hell in the middle of the night as a satisfactory risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson said positively. "Their architecture is Terran, and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive, though; those batteries of tubes at either end--"
"Are thrust reaction jets," Stryker finished in an awed voice. "Primitive isn't the word, Gib--the thing is prehistoric! Rocket propulsion hasn't been used in spacecraft since--how long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information with mechanical infallibility. "Since the year 2100 when the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle was discovered. That principle has served men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief at the anomalous craft on the screen. Primitive, as Stryker had said, was not the word for it: clumsily ovoid, studded with torpedo domes and turrets and bristling at either end with propulsion tubes, it lay at the center of its square like a rusted relic of a past largely destroyed and all but forgotten. What a magnificent disregard its builders must have had, he thought, for their lives and the genetic purity of their posterity! The sullen atomic fires banked in that oxidizing hulk--
Stryker said plaintively, "If you're right, Gib, then we're more in the dark than ever. How could a Terran-built ship eleven hundred years old get here?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's contemplation of alternatives, seemed hardly to hear him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson said. "If it's a Terran artifact, we can discover the reason for its presence. If not--"
"Any problem posed by one group of human beings," Stryker quoted his Handbook, "can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the same through identical heredity."
"If it's an imitation, and this is another Hymenop experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished. "Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here."
* * * * *
He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six was surveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of the sort here then. It couldn't have been built during the two and a quarter centuries since; it's obviously much older than that. It was flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how, we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on Terra during the Twenty-second Century," Gibson said calmly. "The atomic wars during that period destroyed practically all historical records along with the technology of the time, but I've read well-authenticated reports of atomic-driven ships leaving Terra before then for the nearer stars. The human race climbed out of its pit again during the Twenty-third Century and developed the technology that gave us the Ringwave. Certainly no atomic-powered ships were built after the wars--our records are complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the inference. "I've read any number of fanciful romances on the theme, Gib, but it won't stand up in practice. No shipboard society could last through a thousand-year space voyage. It's a physical and psychological impossibility. There's got to be some other explanation."
* * * * *
Gibson shrugged. "We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this one now," Farrell said flatly. "It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive-generation program, and a final penetration of Hymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the Bees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000--Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember--and suspended animation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said reluctantly. "An atomic-powered ship couldn't have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant project couldn't have lasted through forty generations, speculative fiction to the contrary--the later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from their ancestors. They'd have adapted to shipboard life as the norm. They'd have atrophied physically, perhaps even have mutated--"
"And they'd never have fought past the Bees during the Hymenop invasion and occupation," Farrell finished triumphantly. "The Bees had better detection equipment than we had. They'd have picked this ship up long before it reached Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in 3000," Gibson said, "and it is now. Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the two hundred years of Hymenop occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly. "But why should the Bees let them through? The three domes on Five are over two hundred years old, which means that the Bees were here before the ship came. Why didn't they blast it or enslave its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the possibilities," Gibson reminded him. "We haven't even established yet that these people were never under Hymenop control. Precedent won't hold always, and there's no predicting nor evaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood the Hymenops because there's no common ground of logic between us. Why try to interpret their intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. "Next you'll say this is an ancient Terran expedition that actually succeeded! There's only one way to answer the questions we've raised, and that's to go down and see for ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
* * * * *
But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alone in the helihopper with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river and Xavier's scouter disappearing bulletlike into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs--what if they've created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form?
Suppose, he thought--and derided himself for thinking it--one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry: "I'd better pull Xav back. It may be something lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement in the engineer's voice. "I think they're trying to communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet," Farrell reported. "The one nearest the city, I think. There's something odd going on down--"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared. The helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and a stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness.
* * * * *
He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position clear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastating unorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker and Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better--they could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when they tried as a matter of course to rescue them the Marco would be struck down in turn by the same weapon.
The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes and finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche," he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to be taught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfill before the venture of which they were a part could be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was awed by the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more alarmed than before--for what technical marvels might not an isolated group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of application?
Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter was patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in the first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought and defeated the Bees on their own invaded ground.
He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where great crude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric current into arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when they passed by another open port and Farrell, glancing out over the lowered rampway, saw that his fears for Stryker and Gibson had been well grounded.
The Marco Four, ports open, lay grounded outside.
* * * * *
Farrell could not have said, later, whether his next move was planned or reflexive. The whole desperate issue seemed to hang suspended for a breathless moment upon a hair-fine edge of decision, and in that instant he made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride he sprang out and through the port and down the steep plane of the ramp. The rough stone pavement of the square drummed underfoot; sore muscles tore at him, and weakness was like a weight about his neck. He expected momentarily to be blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his guide ringing unintelligibly in his ears. The port yawned; he plunged inside and stabbed at controls without waiting to seat himself. The ports swung shut. The ship darted up under his manipulation and arrowed into space with an acceleration that sprung his knees and made his vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain and with the success of his coup that he all but fainted when Stryker, his scanty hair tousled and his fat face comical with bewilderment, stumbled out of his sleeping cubicle and bellowed at him.
"What the hell are you doing, Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him and took the controls, spiraling the Marco Four down. Men swarmed outside the ports when the Reclamations craft settled gently to the square again. Gibson and Xavier reached the ship first; Gibson came inside quickly, leaving the mechanical outside making patient explanations to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand on Farrell's arm. "It's all right, Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't understand. They didn't shoot you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These people are primitive enough to use metallic power lines to carry electricity to their hamlets, an anachronism you forgot last night. You piloted the helihopper into one of those lines, and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today. These Alphardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found again that it's really pathetic."
"Friendly? That torpedo--"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all," Stryker put in. Understanding of the error under which Farrell had labored erased his earlier irritation, and he chuckled commiseratingly. "They had one small boat left for emergency missions, and sent it up to contact us in the fear that we might overlook their settlement and move on. The boat was atomic powered, and our shield screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at the chart table, limp with reaction. He was suddenly exhausted, and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications problem early last night," Gibson said. "These people use an ancient system of electromagnetic wave propagation called frequency modulation, and once Lee and I rigged up a suitable transceiver the rest was simple. Both Xav and I recognized the old language; the natives reported your accident, and we came down at once."
"They really came from Terra? They lived through a thousand years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for Sirius in 2171," Gibson said. "But not with these people aboard, or their ancestors. That expedition perished after less than a light-year when its hydroponics system failed. The Hymenops found the ship derelict when they invaded us, and brought it to Alphard Six in what was probably their first experiment with human subjects. The ship's log shows clearly what happened to the original complement. The rest is deducible from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his temples and groaned. "The crash must have scrambled my wits. Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral colonies conquered by the Bees," Gibson said patiently. "The Hymenops were long-range planners, remember, and masters of hypnotic conditioning. They stocked the ship with a captive crew of Terrans conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the original crew, and grounded it here in disabled condition. They left for Alphard Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of colonists grew up accepting the fact that their ship had missed Sirius and made planetfall here--they still don't know where they really are--by luck. They never knew about the Hymenops, and they've struggled along with an inadequate technology in the hope that a later expedition would find them. They found the truth hard to take, but they're eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled invitingly. "An unusually fortunate ending to a Hymenop experiment," he said. "These people progressed normally because they've been let alone. Reorienting them will be a simple matter; they'll be properly spoiled colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees should go to such trouble to deceive these people. Why did they sit back and let them grow as they pleased, Gib? It doesn't make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson said. "The Bees set up this colony as a control unit to study the species they were invading, and they had to give their specimens a normal--if obsolete--background in order to determine their capabilities. The fact that their experiment didn't tell them what they wanted to know may have had a direct bearing on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's a reverse application, isn't it of the old saw about Terrans being incapable of understanding an alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised. "It's obvious enough, surely--hard as they tried, the Bees never understood us either."
THE END
THE EEL
By Miriam Allen DeFord
The punishment had to fit more than just the crime--it had to suit every world in the Galaxy!
He was intimately and unfavorably known everywhere in the Galaxy, but with special virulence on eight planets in three different solar systems. He was eagerly sought on each; they all wanted to try him and punish him--in each case, by their own laws and customs. This had been going on for 26 terrestrial years, which means from minus ten to plus 280 in some of the others. The only place that didn't want him was Earth, his native planet, where he was too smart to operate--but, of course, the Galactic Police were looking for him there too, to deliver him to the authorities of the other planets in accordance with the Interplanetary Constitution.
For all of those years, The Eel (which was his Earth monicker; elsewhere, he was known by names indicating equally squirmy and slimy life-forms) had been gayly going his way, known under a dozen different aliases, turning up suddenly here, there, everywhere, committing his gigantic depredations, and disappearing as quickly and silently when his latest enterprise had succeeded. He specialized in enormous, unprecedented thefts. It was said that he despised stealing anything under the value of 100 million terrestrial units, and most of his thefts were much larger than that.
He had no recognizable modus operandi, changing his methods with each new crime. He never left a clue. But, in bravado, he signed his name to every job: his monicker flattered him, and after each malefaction the victim--usually a government agency, a giant corporation, or one of the clan enterprises of the smaller planets--would receive a message consisting merely of the impudent depiction of a large wriggling eel.
They got him at last, of course. The Galactic Police, like the prehistoric Royal Canadian Mounted, have the reputation of always catching their man. (Sometimes they don't catch him till he's dead, but they catch him.) It took them 26 years, and it was a hard job, for The Eel always worked alone and never talked afterward.
They did it by the herculean labor of investigating the source of the fortune of every inhabitant of Earth, since all that was known was that The Eel was a terrestrial. Every computer in the Federation worked overtime analyzing the data fed into it. It wasn't entirely a thankless task, for, as a by-product, a lot of embezzlers, tax evaders and lesser robbers were turned up.
In the end, it narrowed down to one man who owned more than he could account for having. Even so, they almost lost him, for his takings were cached away under so many pseudonyms that it took several months just to establish that they all belonged to the same person. When that was settled, the police swooped. The Eel surrendered quietly; the one thing he had been surest of was never being apprehended, and he was so dumfounded he was unable to put up any resistance.
And then came the still greater question: which of the planets was to have him?
* * * * *
Xystil said it had the first right because his theft there had been the largest--a sum so huge, it could be expressed only by an algebraic index. Artha's argument was that his first recorded crime had been on that planet. Medoris wanted him because its only penalty for any felony is an immediate and rather horrible death, and that would guarantee getting rid of The Eel forever.
Ceres put in a claim on the ground that it was the only planet or moon in the Sol System in which he had operated, and since he was a terrestrial, it was a matter for local jurisdiction. Eb pleaded that it was the newest and poorest member of the Galactic Federation, and should have been protected in its inexperience against his thievishness.
Ha-Almirath argued that it had earned his custody because it was its Chief Ruler who had suggested to the police the method which had resulted in his arrest. Vavinour countered that it should be the chosen recipient, since the theft there had included desecration of the High Temple.
Little Agsk, which was only a probationary Galactic Associate, modestly said that if it were given The Eel, its prompt and exemplary punishment might qualify it for full membership, and it would be grateful for the chance.
A special meeting of the Galactic Council had to be called for the sole purpose of deciding who got The Eel.
Representatives of all the claimant planets made their representations. Each told in eloquent detail why his planet and his alone was entitled to custody of the arch-criminal, and what they would do to him when--not if--they got him. After they had all been heard, the councilors went into executive session, with press and public barred. An indiscreet councilor (it was O-Al of Phlagon of Altair, if you want to know) leaked later some of the rather indecorous proceedings.
The Earth councilor, he reported, had been granted a voice but no vote, since Earth was not an interested party as to the crime, but only as to the criminal. Every possible system of arbitration had been discussed--chronological, numerical in respect to the size of the theft, legalistic in respect to whether the culprit would be available to hand on to another victim when the first had got through punishing him.
In the welter of claims and counterclaims, one harassed councilor wearily suggested a lottery. Another in desperation recommended handing The Eel a list of prospective punishments on each of the eight planets and observing which one seemed to inspire him with most dread--which would then be the one selected. One even proposed poisoning him and announcing his sudden collapse and death.
The sessions went on day and night; the exhausted councilors separated for brief periods of sleep, then went at it again. A hung jury was unthinkable; something had to be decided. The news outlets of the entire Galaxy were beginning to issue sarcastic editorials about procrastination and coddling criminals, with hints about bribery and corruption, and remarks that perhaps what was needed was a few impeachments and a new general election.
So at last, in utter despair, they awarded The Eel to Agsk, as a sort of bonus and incentive. Whichever planet they named, the other seven were going to scream to high heaven, and Agsk was least likely to be able to retaliate against any expressions of indignation.
* * * * *
Agskians, as everyone knows, are fairly humanoid beings, primitives from the outer edge of the Galaxy. They were like college freshmen invited to a senior fraternity. This was their Big Chance to Make Good.
The Eel, taciturn as ever, was delivered to a delegation of six of them sent to meet him in one of their lumbering spaceships, a low countergrav machine such as Earth had outgrown several millennia before. They were so afraid of losing him that they put a metal belt around him with six chains attached to it, and fastened all six of themselves to him. Once on Agsk, he was placed in a specially made stone pit, surrounded by guards, and fed through the only opening.
In preparation for the influx of visitors to the trial, an anticipated greater assembly of off-planeters than little Agsk had ever seen, they evacuated their capital city temporarily, resettling all its citizens except those needed to serve and care for the guests, and remodeled the biggest houses for the accommodation of those who had peculiar space, shape, or other requirements.
Never since the Galactic Federation was founded had so many beings, human, humanoid, semi-humanoid and non-humanoid, gathered at the same time on any one member-planet. Every newstape, tridimens, audio and all other varieties of information services--even including the drum amplifiers of Medoris and the ray-variants of Eb--applied for and were granted a place in the courtroom. This, because no other edifice was large enough, was an immense stone amphitheater usually devoted to rather curious games with animals; since it rains on Agsk only for two specified hours on every one of their days, no roof was needed. At every seat, there was a translatophone, with interpreters ready in plastic cages to translate the Intergalactic in which the trial was conducted into even the clicks and hisses of Jorg and the eye-flashes of Omonro.
And in the midst of all this, the cause and purpose of it all, sat the legendary Eel.
Seen at last, he was hardly an impressive figure. Time had been going on and The Eel was in his fifties, bald and a trifle paunchy. He was completely ordinary in appearance, a circumstance which had, of course, enabled him to pass unobserved on so many planets; he looked like a salesman or a minor official, and had indeed been so taken by the unnoticing inhabitants of innumerable planets.
People had wondered, when word came of some new outrage by this master-thief, if perhaps he had disguised himself as a resident of the scene of each fresh crime, but now it was obvious that this had not been necessary. He had been too clever to pick any planet where visitors from Earth were not a common sight, and he had been too insignificant for anyone to pay attention to him.
* * * * *
The criminal code of Agsk is unique in the Galaxy, though there are rumors of something similar among a legendary extinct tribe on Earth called the Guanches. The high priest is also the chief executive (as well as the minister of education and head of the medical faculty), and he rules jointly with a priestess who also officiates as chief judge.
The Agskians have some strange ideas to a terrestrial eye--for example, suicide is an honor, and anyone of insufficient rank who commits it condemns his immediate family to punishment for his presumption. They are great family people, in general. Also, they never lie, and find it hard to realize that other beings do.
Murder, to them, is merely a matter for negotiation between the murderer and the relatives of the victim, provided it is open and without deceit. But grand larceny, since property is the foundation of the family, is punished in a way that shows that the Agskians, though technologically primitive, are psychologically very advanced.
They reason that death, because it comes inevitably to all, is the least of misfortunes. Lasting grief, remorse and guilt are the greatest. So they let the thief live and do not even imprison him.
Instead, they find out who it is that the criminal most loves. If they do not know who it is, they merely ask him, and since Agskians never lie, he always tells them. Then they seize that person, and kill him or her, slowly and painfully, before the thief's eyes.
And the agreement had been that The Eel was to be tried and punished by the laws and customs of the planet to which he was awarded.
The actual trial and conviction of The Eel were almost perfunctory. Without needing to resort to torture, his jailers had been presented, on a platter as it were, with a full confession--so far as the particular robbery he had committed on Agsk was concerned. There is a provision for defense in the Agskian code, but it was unneeded because The Eel had pleaded guilty.
But he knew very well he would not be executed by the Agskians; he would instead be set free (presumably with a broken heart) to be handed over to the next claimant--and that, the Council had decided, would be Medoris. Since Medoris always kills its criminals, that would end the whole controversy.
So the Eel was quite aware that his conviction by Agsk would be only the preliminary to an exquisitely painful and lingering demise at the two-clawed hands of the Medorans. His business was somehow to get out from under.
Naturally, the resources of the Galactic Police had been at the full disposal of the officials of Agsk.
The files had been opened, and the Agskians had before them The Eel's history back to the day of his birth. He himself had been questioned, encelographed, hypnotized, dormitized, injected, psychographed, subjected to all the means of eliciting information devised by all eight planets--for the other seven, once their first resentment was over, had reconciled themselves and cooperated whole-heartedly with Agsk.
Medoris especially had been of the greatest help. The Medorans could hardly wait.
* * * * *
In the spate of news of the trial that inundated every portion of the Galaxy, there began to be discovered a note of sympathy for this one little creature arrayed against the mightiest powers of the Galaxy. Poor people who wished they had his nerve, and romantic people who dreamed of adventures they would never dare perform, began to say that The Eel wasn't so bad, after all; he became a symbol of the rebellious individual thumbing his nose at entrenched authority. Students of Earth prehistory will recognize such symbols in the mythical Robin Hood and Al Capone.
These were the people who were glad to put up when bets began to be made. At first the odds were ten to one against The Eel; then, as time dragged by, they dropped until it was even money.
Agsk itself began to be worried. It was one thing to make a big, expensive splurge to impress the Galaxy and to hasten its acceptance into full membership in the Federation, but nobody had expected the show to last more than a few days. If it kept on much longer, Agsk would be bankrupt.
For the trial had foundered on one insoluble problem: the only way The Eel could ever be punished by their laws was to kill the person he most loved--and nobody could discover that he had ever loved anybody.
His mother? His father? He had been an undutiful and unaffectionate son, and his parents were long since dead in any case. He had never had a brother, a sister, a wife or a child. No probing could find any woman with whom he had ever been in love. He had never had an intimate friend.
He did nothing to help, naturally. He simply sat in his chains and smiled and waited. He was perfectly willing to be escorted from the court every evening, relieved of his fetters and placed in his pit. It was a much pleasanter existence than being executed inch by inch by the Medorans. For all he cared, the Agskians could go on spending their planetary income until he finally died of old age.
The priestess-judge and her co-adjutors wore themselves out in discussions far into the night. They lost up to 15 pounds apiece, which on Agsk, where the average weight of adults is about 40, was serious. It began to look as if The Eel's judges would predecease him.
Whom did The Eel love? They went into minutiae and subterfuges. He had never had a pet to which he was devoted. He had never even loved a house which could be razed. He could not be said to have loved the immense fortune he had stolen, for he had concealed his wealth and used little of it, and in any event it had all been confiscated and, so far as possible, restored proportionately to those he had robbed.
What he had loved most, doubtless, was his prowess in stealing unimaginable sums and getting away with it--but there is no way of "killing" a criminal technique.
* * * * *
Almost a year had passed. Agsk was beginning to wish The Eel had never been caught, or that they had never been awarded the glory of trying him.
At last the priestess-judge, in utter despair, took off her judge's robes, put on the cassock and surplice of her sacred calling, and laid the problem before the most unapproachable and august of the gods of Agsk.
The trial was suspended while she lay for three days in a trance on the high altar. She emerged weak and tottering, her skin light blue instead of its healthy purple, but her head high and her mouth curved in triumph.
At sight of her, renewed excitement surged through the audience. News-gatherers, who had been finding it difficult of late to get anything to report, rushed to their instruments.
"Remove the defendant's chains and set him free," the priestess-judge ordered in ringing tones. "The Great God of the Unspeakable Name has revealed to me whom the defendant most loves. As soon as he is freed, seize him and slay him. For the only being he loves is--himself."
There was an instant's silence, and then a roar. The Medorans howled in frustration.
But The Eel, still guarded but unchained, stood up and laughed aloud.
"Your Great God is a fool!" he said blasphemously. "I deny that I love myself. I care nothing for myself at all."
The priestess-judge sighed. "Since this is your sworn denial, it must be true," she said. "So then we cannot kill you. Instead, we grant that you do indeed love no one. Therefore you are a creature so far outside our comprehension that you cannot come under our laws, no matter how you have broken them. We shall notify the Federation that we abandon our jurisdiction and hand you over to our sister-planet which is next in line to judge you."
Then all the viewers on tridimens on countless planets saw something that nobody had ever thought to see--The Eel's armor of self-confidence cracked and terror poured through the gap.
He dropped to his knees and cried: "Wait! Wait! I confess that I blasphemed your god, but without realizing that I did!"
"You mean," pressed the priestess-judge, "you acknowledge that you yourself are the only being dear to you?"
"No, not that, either. Until now, I have never known love. But now it has come upon me like a nova and I must speak the truth." He paused, still on his knees, and looked piteously at the priestess-judge. "Are--are you bound by your law to--to believe me and to kill, instead of me, this--this being I adore?"
"We are so bound," she stated.
"Then," said The Eel, smiling and confident again, rising to his feet, "before all the Galaxy, I must declare the object of my sudden but everlasting passion. Great lady, it is you!"
* * * * *
The Eel is still in his pit, which has been made most comfortable by his sympathizers, while the Council of the Galactic Federation seeks feverishly and vainly, year after year, to find some legal way out of the impasse.
Agsk, however, requests all Federation citizens to submit solutions, the grand prize for a workable answer being a lifetime term as president of the planet. A secondary contest (prize: lifetime ambassadorship to the Galactic Federation) is offered for a legal way around the statute barring criminals (specifically The Eel) from entering the primary contest.
BADGE OF INFAMY
by Lester del Rey
The computer seemed to work as it should. The speed was within acceptable limits. He gave up trying to see the ground and was forced to trust the machinery designed for amateur pilots. The flare bloomed, and he yanked down on the little lever.
It could have been worse. They hit the ground, bounced twice, and turned over. The ship was a mess when Feldman freed himself from the elastic straps of the seat. Chris had shrieked as they hit, but she was unbuckling herself now.
He threw her her spacesuit and one of the emergency bottles of oxygen from the rack. "Hurry up with that. We've sprung a leak and the pressure's dropping."
I
Pariah
The air of the city's cheapest flophouse was thick with the smells of harsh antiseptic and unwashed bodies. The early Christmas snowstorm had driven in every bum who could steal or beg the price of admission, and the long rows of cots were filled with fully clothed figures. Those who could afford the extra dime were huddled under thin, grimy blankets.
The pariah who had been Dr. Daniel Feldman enjoyed no such luxury. He tossed fitfully on a bare cot, bringing his face into the dim light. It had been a handsome face, but now the black stubble of beard lay over gaunt features and sunken cheeks. He looked ten years older than his scant thirty-two, and there were the beginnings of a snarl at the corners of his mouth. Clothes that had once been expensive were wrinkled and covered with grime that no amount of cleaning could remove. His tall, thin body was awkwardly curled up in a vain effort to conserve heat and one of his hands instinctively clutched at his tiny bag of possessions.
He stirred again, and suddenly jerked upright with a protest already forming on his lips. The ugly surroundings registered on his eyes, and he stared suspiciously at the other cots. But there was no sign that anyone had been trying to rob him of his bindle or the precious bag of cheap tobacco.
He started to relax back onto the couch when a sound caught his attention, even over the snoring of the others. It was a low wail, the sound of a man who can no longer control himself.
Feldman swung to the cot on his left as the moan hacked off. The man there was well fed and clean-shaven, but his face was gray with sickness. He was writhing and clutching his stomach, arching his back against the misery inside him.
"Space-stomach?" Feldman diagnosed.
He had no need of the weak answering nod. He'd treated such cases several times in the past. The disease was usually caused by the absence of gravity out in space, but it could be brought on later from abuse of the weakened internal organs, such as the intake of too much bad liquor. The man must have been frequenting the wrong space-front bars.
Now he was obviously dying. Violent peristaltic contractions seemed to be tearing the intestines out of him, and the paroxysms were coming faster. His eyes darted to Feldman's tobacco sack and there was animal appeal in them.
Feldman hesitated, then reluctantly rolled a smoke. He held the cigarette while the spaceman took a long, gasping drag on it. He smoked the remainder himself, letting the harsh tobacco burn against his lungs and sicken his empty stomach. Then he shrugged and threaded his way through the narrow aisles toward the attendant.
"Better get a doctor," he said bitterly, when the young punk looked up at him. "You've got a man dying of space-stomach on 214."
The sneer on the kid's face deepened. "Yeah? We don't pay for doctors every time some wino wants to throw up. Forget it and get back where you belong, bo."
"You'll have a corpse on your hands in an hour," Feldman insisted. "I know space-stomach, damn it."
The kid turned back to his lottery sheet. "Go treat yourself if you wanta play doctor. Go on, scram--before I toss you out in the snow!"
One of Feldman's white-knuckled hands reached for the attendant. Then he caught himself. He started to turn back, hesitated, and finally faced the kid again. "I'm not fooling. And I was a doctor," he stated. "My name is Daniel Feldman."
The attendant nodded absently, until the words finally penetrated. He looked up, studied Feldman with surprised curiosity and growing contempt, and reached for the phone. "Gimme Medical Directory," he muttered.
Feldman felt the kid's eyes on his back as he stumbled through the aisles to his cot again. He slumped down, rolling another cigarette in hands that shook. The sick man was approaching delirium now, and the moans were mixed with weak whining sounds of fear. Other men had wakened and were watching, but nobody made a move to help.
The retching and writhing of the sick man had begun to weaken, but it was still not too late to save him. Hot water and skillful massage could interrupt the paroxysms. In fifteen minutes, Feldman could have stopped the attack completely.
He found his feet on the floor and his hands already reaching out. Savagely he pulled himself back. Sure, he could save the man--and wind up in the gas chamber! There'd be no mercy for his second offense against Lobby laws. If the spaceman lived, Feldman might get off with a flogging--that was standard punishment for a pariah who stepped out of line. But with his luck, there would be a heart arrest and another juicy story for the papers.
Idealism! The Medical Lobby made a lot out of the word. But it wasn't for him. A pariah had no business thinking of others.
As Feldman sat there staring, the spaceman grew quieter. Sometimes, even at this stage, massage could help. It was harder without liberal supplies of hot water, but the massage was the really important treatment. It was the trembling of Feldman's hands that stopped him. He no longer had the strength or the certainty to make the massage effective.
He was glaring at his hands in self-disgust when the legal doctor arrived. The man was old and tired. Probably he had been another idealist who had wound up defeated, content to leave things up to the established procedures of the Medical Lobby. He looked it as he bent over the dying man.
The doctor turned back at last to the attendant. "Too late. The best I can do is ease his pain. The call should have been made half an hour earlier."
He had obviously never handled space-stomach before. He administered a hypo that probably held narconal. Feldman watched, his guts tightening sympathetically for the shock that would be to the sick man. But at least it would shorten his sufferings. The final seizure lasted only a minute or so.
"Hopeless," the doctor said. His eyes were clouded for a moment, and then he shrugged. "Well, I'll make out a death certificate. Anyone here know his name?"
His eyes swung about the cots until they came to rest on Feldman. He frowned, and a twisted smile curved his lips.
"Feldman, isn't it? You still look something like your pictures. Do you know the deceased?"
Feldman shook his head bitterly. "No. I don't know his name. I don't even know why he wasn't cyanotic at the end, if it was space-stomach. Do you, doctor?"
The old man threw a startled glance at the corpse. Then he shrugged and nodded to the attendant. "Well, go through his things. If he still has a space ticket, I can get his name from that."
The kid began pawing through the bag that had fallen from the cot. He dragged out a pair of shoes, half a bottle of cheap rum, a wallet and a bronze space ticket. He wasn't quick enough with the wallet, and the doctor took it from him.
"Medical Lobby authorization. If he has any money, it covers my fee and the rest goes to his own Lobby." There were several bills, all of large denominations. He turned the ticket over and began filling in the death certificate. "Arthur Billings. Space Lobby. Crewman. Cause of death, idiopathic gastroenteritis and delirium tremens."
There had been no evidence of delirium tremens, but apparently the doctor felt he had scored a point. He tossed the space ticket toward the shoes, closed his bag, and prepared to leave.
"Hey, doc!" The attendant's voice was indignant. "Hey, what about my reporting fee?"
The doctor stopped. He glanced at the kid, then toward Feldman, his face a mixture of speculation and dislike. He took a dollar bill from the wallet. "That's right," he admitted. "The fee for reporting a solvent case. Medical Lobby rules apply--even to a man who breaks them."
The kid's hand was out, but the doctor dropped the dollar onto Feldman's cot. "There's your fee, pariah." He left, forcing the protesting attendant to precede him.
Feldman reached for the bill. It was blood money for letting a man die--but it meant cigarettes and food--or shelter for another night, if he could get a mission meal. He no longer could afford pride. Grimly, he pocketed the bill, staring at the face of the dead man. It looked back sightlessly, now showing a faint speckling of tiny dots. They caught Feldman's eyes, and he bent closer. There should be no black dots on the skin of a man who died of space-stomach. And there should have been cyanosis....
He swore and bent down to find the wrecks of his shoes. He couldn't worry about anything now but getting away from here before the attendant made trouble. His eyes rested on the shoes of the dead man--sturdy boots that would last for another year. They could do the corpse no good; someone else would steal them if he didn't. But he hesitated, cursing himself.
The right boot fitted better than he could have expected, but something got in the way as he tried to put the left one on. His fingers found the bronze ticket. He turned it over, considering it. He wasn't ready to fraud his identity for what he'd heard of life on the spaceships, yet. But he shoved it into his pocket and finished lacing the boots.
Outside, the snow was still falling, but it had turned to slush, and the sidewalk was soggy underfoot. There was going to be no work shoveling snow, he realized. This would melt before the day was over. Feldman hunched the suitcoat up, shivering as the cold bit into him. The boots felt good, though; if he'd had socks, they would have been completely comfortable.
He passed a cheap restaurant, and the smell of the synthetics set his stomach churning. It had been two days since his last real meal, and the dollar burned in his pocket. But he had to wait. There was a fair chance this early that he could scavenge something edible.
He shuffled on. After a while, the cold bothered him less, and he passed through the hunger spell. He rolled another smoke and sucked at it, hardly thinking. It was better that way.
It was much later when the big caduceus set into the sidewalk snapped him back to awareness of where he'd traveled. His undirected feet had led him much too far uptown, following old habits. This was the Medical Lobby building, where he'd spent more than enough time, including three weeks in custody before they stripped him of all rank and status.
His eyes wandered to the ornate entrance where he'd first emerged as a pariah. He'd meant to walk down those steps as if he were still a man. But each step had drained his resolution, until he'd finally covered his face and slunk off, knowing himself for what the world had branded him.
He stood there now, staring at the smug young medical politicians and the tired old general practitioners filing in and out. One of the latter halted, fumbled in his pocket and drew out a quarter.
"Merry Christmas!" he said dully.
Feldman fingered the coin. Then he saw a gray Medical policeman watching him, and he knew it was time to move on. Sooner or later, someone would recognize him here.
He clutched the quarter and turned to look for a coffee shop that sold the synthetics to which his metabolism had been switched. No shop would serve him here, but he could buy coffee and a piece of cake to take out.
A flurry of motion registered from the corner of his eye, and he glanced back.
"Taxi! Taxi!"
The girl rushing down the steps had a clear soprano voice, cultured and commanding. The gray Medical uniform seemed molded to her shapely figure and her red hair glistened in the lights of the street. Her snub nose and determined mouth weren't the current fashion, but nobody stopped to think of fashions when they saw her. She didn't have to be the daughter of the president of Medical Lobby to rule.
It was Chris--Chris Feldman once, and now Chris Ryan again.
Feldman swung toward a cab. For a moment, his attitude was automatic and assured, and the cab stopped before the driver noticed his clothes. He picked up the bag Chris dropped and swung it onto the front seat. She was fumbling in her change purse as he turned back to shut the door.
"Thank you, my good man," she said. She could be gracious, even to a pariah, when his homage suited her. She dropped two quarters into his hand, raising her eyes.
Recognition flowed into them, followed by icy shock. She yanked the cab door shut and shouted something to the driver. The cab took off with a rush that left Feldman in a backwash of slush and mud.
He glanced down at the coins in his hand. It was his lucky day, he thought bitterly.
He moved across the street and away, not bothering about the squeal of brakes and the honking horns. He looked back only once, toward the glowing sign that topped the building. Your health is our business! Then the great symbol of the health business faded behind him, and he stumbled on, sucking incessantly at the cigarettes he rolled. One hand clutched the bronze badge belonging to the dead man and his stolen boots drove onward through the melting snow.
It was Christmas in the year 2100 on the protectorate of Earth.
II
Lobby
Feldman had set his legs the problem of heading for the great spaceport and escape from Earth, and he let them take him without further guidance. His mind was wrapped up in a whirl of the past--his past and that of the whole planet. Both pasts had in common the growth and sudden ruin of idealism.
Idealism! Throughout history, some men had sought the ideal, and most had called it freedom. Only fools expected absolute freedom, but wise men dreamed up many systems of relative freedom, including democracy. They had tried that in America, as the last fling of the dream. It had been a good attempt, too.
The men who drew the Constitution had been pretty practical dreamers. They came to their task after a bitter war and a worse period of wild chaos, and they had learned where idealism stopped and idiocy began. They set up a republic with all the elements of democracy that they considered safe. It had worked well enough to make America the number one power of the world. But the men who followed the framers of the new plan were a different sort, without the knowledge of practical limits.
The privileges their ancestors had earned in blood and care became automatic rights. Practical men tried to explain that there were no such rights--that each generation had to pay for its rights with responsibility. That kind of talk didn't get far. People wanted to hear about rights, not about duties.
They took the phrase that all men were created equal and left out the implied kicker that equality was in the sight of God and before the law. They wanted an equality with the greatest men without giving up their drive toward mediocrity, and they meant to have it. In a way, they got it.
They got the vote extended to everyone. The man on subsidy or public dole could vote to demand more. The man who read of nothing beyond sex crimes could vote on the great political issues of the world. No ability was needed for his vote. In fact, he was assured that voting alone was enough to make him a fine and noble citizen. He loved that, if he bothered to vote at all that year. He became a great man by listing his unthought, hungry desire for someone to take care of him without responsibility. So he went out and voted for the man who promised him most, or who looked most like what his limited dreams felt to be a father image or son image or hero image. He never bothered later to see how the men he'd elected had handled the jobs he had given them.
Someone had to look, of course, and someone did. Organized special interests stepped in where the mob had failed. Lobbies grew up. There had always been pressure groups, but now they developed into a third arm of the government.
The old Farm Lobby was unbeatable. The big farmers shaped the laws they wanted. They convinced the little farmers it was for the good of all, and they made the story stick well enough to swing the farm vote. They made the laws when it came to food and crops.
The last of the great lobbies was Space, probably. It was an accident that grew up so fast it never even knew it wasn't a real part of the government. It developed during a period of chaos when another country called Russia got the first hunk of metal above the atmosphere and when the representatives who had been picked for everything but their grasp of science and government went into panic over a myth of national prestige.
The space effort was turned over to the aircraft industry, which had never been able to manage itself successfully except under the stimulus of war or a threat of war. The failing airplane industry became the space combine overnight, and nobody kept track of how big it was, except a few sharp operators.
They worked out a system of subcontracts that spread the profits so wide that hardly a company of any size in the country wasn't getting a share. Thus a lot of patriotic, noble voters got their pay from companies in the lobby block and could be panicked by the lobby at the first mention of recession.
So Space Lobby took over completely in its own field. It developed enough pressure to get whatever appropriations it wanted, even over Presidential veto. It created the only space experts, which meant that the men placed in government agencies to regulate it came from its own ranks.
The other lobbies learned a lot from Space.
There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical autonomy and ethics. It also tried to prevent government control of treatment and payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know where to stop. But its history was a long series of retreats.
It fought what it called socialized medicine. But the people wanted their troubles handled free--which meant by government spending, since that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to cost anything. It lost, and eventually the government paid most medical costs, with doctors working on a fixed fee. Then quantity of treatment paid, rather than quality. Competence no longer mattered so much. The Lobby lost, but didn't know it--because the lowered standards of competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.
It took a world-wide plague to turn the tide. The plague began in old China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world. It might have been a laboratory mutation, but nobody could ever prove it.
It wiped out two billion people, depopulated Africa and most of Asia, and wrecked Europe, leaving only America comparatively safe to take over. An obscure scientist in one of the laboratories run by the Medical Lobby found a cure before the first waves of the epidemic hit America. Rutherford Ryan, then head of the Lobby, made sure that Medical Lobby got all the credit.
By the time the world recovered, America ran it and the Medical Lobby was untouchable. Ryan made a deal with Space Lobby, and the two effectively ran the world. None of the smaller lobbies could buck them, and neither could the government.
There was still a president and a congress, as there had been a Senate under the Roman Caesars. But the two Lobbies ran themselves as they chose. The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it always did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and practical self-rule. A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had belonged to his feudal landlord.
It was a safe world now. Maybe progress had been halted at about the level of 1980, but so long as the citizens didn't break the rules of their lobbies, they had very little to worry about. For that, for security and the right not to think, most people were willing to leave well enough alone.
Some rules seemed harsh, of course, such as the law that all operations had to be performed in Lobby hospitals. But that could be justified; it was the only safe kind of surgery and the only way to make sure there was no unsupervised experimentation, such as that which supposedly caused the plague. The rule was now an absolute ethic of medicine. It also made for better fees.
Feldman's father had stuck by the rule but had questioned it. Feldman learned not to question in medical school. He scored second in Medical Ethics only to Christina Ryan.
He had never figured why she singled him out for her attentions, but he gloried in both those attentions and the results. He became automatically a rising young man, the favorite of the daughter of the Lobby president. He went through internship without a sign of trouble. Chris humored him in his desire to spend three years of practice in a poor section loaded with disease, and her father approved; such selfless dedication was the perfect image projection for a future son-in-law. In return, he agreed to follow that period by becoming an administrator. A doctor's doctor, as they put it.
They were married in April and his office was ready in May, complete with a staff of eighty. The publicity releases had gone out, and the Public Relations Lobby that handled news and education was paid to begin the greatest build-up any young genius ever had.
They celebrated that, with a little party of some four hundred people and reporters at Ryan's lodge in Canada. It was to be a gala weekend.
It was then that Baxter shot himself.
Baxter had been Feldman's closest friend in the Lobby. He'd come along to handle press relations and had gotten romantic about the countryside, never having been out of a city before. He hired a guide and went hunting, eighty miles beyond the last outpost of civilization. Somehow, he got his hand on a gun, though only guides were supposed to touch them, managed to overcome its safety devices, and then pulled the trigger with the gun pointed the wrong way.
Chris, Feldman and Harnett from Public Relations had accompanied him on the trip. They were sitting in a nearby car while Feldman enjoyed the scenery, Chris made further plans, and Harnett gathered material. There was also a photographer and writer, but they hadn't been introduced by name.
Feldman reached Baxter first. The man was moaning and scared, and he was bleeding profusely. Only a miracle had saved him from instant death. The bullet had struck a rib, been deflected and robbed of some of its energy, and had barely reached the heart. But it had pierced the pericardium, as best Feldman could guess, and it could be fatal at any moment.
He'd reached for a probe without thinking. Chris knocked his hand aside.
She was right, of course. He couldn't operate outside a hospital. But they had no phone in the lodge where the guide lived and no way to summon an ambulance. They'd have to drive Baxter back in the car, which would almost certainly result in his death.
When Feldman seemed uncertain, Harnett had given his warning in a low but vehement voice. "You touch him, Dan, and I'll spread it in every one of our media. I'll have to. It's the only way to retain public confidence. There'd be a leak, with all the guides and others here, and we can't afford that. I like you--you have color. But touch that wound and I'll crucify you."
Chris added her own threats. She'd spent years making him the outlet for all her ambitions, denied because women were still only second-rate members of Medical Lobby. She couldn't let it go now. And she was probably genuinely shocked.
Baxter groaned again and started to bleed more profusely.
There wasn't much equipment. Feldman operated with a pocketknife sterilized in a bottle of expensive Scotch and only anodyne tablets in place of anesthesia. He got the bullet out and sewed up the wound with a bit of surgical thread he'd been using to tie up a torn good-luck emblem. The photographer and writer recorded the whole thing. Chris swore harshly and beat her fists against the bole of a tree. But Baxter lived. He recovered completely, and was shocked at the heinous thing that had been done to him.
They crucified Feldman.
III
Spaceman
Most crewmen lived rough, ugly lives--and usually, short ones. Passengers and officers on the big tubs were given the equivalent of gravity in spinning compartments, but the crews rode "free". The lucky crewmen lived through their accidents, got space-stomach now and then, and recovered. Nobody cared about the others.
Feldman's ticket was work-stamped for the Navaho, and nobody questioned his identity. He suffered through the agony of acceleration on the shuttle up to the orbital station, then was sick as acceleration stopped. But he was able to control himself enough to follow other crewmen down a hall of the station toward the Navaho. The big ships never touched a planet, always docking at the stations.
A checker met the crew and reached for their badges. He barely glanced at them, punched a mark for each on his checkoff sheet, and handed them back. "Deckmen forward, tubemen to the rear," he ordered. "Navaho blasts in fifteen minutes. Hey, you! You're tubes."
Feldman grunted. He should have expected it. Tubemen had the lowest lot of all the crew. Between the killing work, the heat of the tubes, and occasional doses of radiation, their lives weren't worth the metal value of their tickets.
He began pulling himself clumsily along a shaft, dodging freight the loaders were tossing from hand to hand. A bag hit his head, drawing blood, and another caught him in the groin.
"Watch it, bo," a loader yelled at him. "You dent that bag and they'll brig you. Cantcha see it's got a special courtesy stripe?"
It had a brilliant green stripe, he saw. It also had a name, printed in block letters that shouted their identity before he could read the words. Dr. Christina Ryan, Southport, Mars.
And he'd had to choose this time to leave Earth!
Suddenly he was glad he was assigned to the tubes. It was the one place on the ship where he'd be least likely to run into her. As a doctor and a courtesy passenger, she'd have complete run of the ship, but she'd hardly bother with the dangerous and unpleasant tube section.
He dragged his way back, beginning to sweat with the effort. The Navaho was an old ship. A lot of the handholds were missing, and he had to throw himself along by erratic leaps. He was gaining proficiency, but not enough to handle himself if the ship blasted off. Time was growing short when he reached the aft bunkroom where the other tubemen were waiting.
"Ben," one husky introduced himself. "Tube chief. Know how to work this?"
Feldman could see that they were assembling a small still. He'd heard of the phenomenal quantities of beer spacemen drank, and now he realized what really happened to it. Hard liquor was supposed to be forbidden, but they made their own. "I can work it," he decided. "I'm--uh--Dan."
"Okay, Dan." Ben glanced at the clock. "Hit the sacks, boys."
By the time Feldman could settle into the sacklike hammock, the Navaho began to shake faintly, and weight piled up. It was mild compared to that on the shuttle, since the big ships couldn't take high acceleration. Space had been conquered for more than a century, but the ships were still flimsy tubs that took months to reach Mars, using immense amounts of fuel. Only the valuable plant hormones from Mars made commerce possible at the ridiculously high freight rate.
Three hours later he began to find out why spacemen didn't seem to fear dying or turning pariah. The tube quarters had grown insufferably hot during the long blast, but the main tube-room was blistering as Ben led the men into it. The chief handed out spacesuits and motioned for Dan.
"Greenhorn, aincha? Okay, I'll take you with me. We go out in the tubes and pull the lining. I pry up the stuff, you carry it back here and stack it."
They sealed off the tube-room, pumped out the air, and went into the steaming, mildly radioactive tubes, just big enough for a man on hands and knees. Beyond the tube mouth was empty space, waiting for the man who slipped. Ben began ripping out the eroded blocks with a special tool. Feldman carried them back and stacked them along with others. A plasma furnace melted them down into new blocks. The work grew progressively worse as the distance to the tube-room increased. The tube mouth yawned closer and closer. There were no handholds there--only the friction of a man's body in the tube.
Life settled into a dull routine of labor, sleep, and the brief relief of the crude white mule from the still.
They were six weeks out and almost finished with the tube cleaning when Number Two tube blew. Bits of the remaining radioactive fuel must have collected slowly until they reached blow-point. Feldman in Number One would have gone sailing out into space, but Ben reacted at once. As the ship leaped slightly, Feldman brought up sharply against the chief's braced body. For a second their fate hung in the balance. Then it was over, and Ben shoved him back, grinning faintly.
He jerked his thumb and touched helmets briefly. "There they go, Dan."
The two men who had been working in Number Two were charred lumps, drifting out into space.
No further comment was made on it, except that they'd have to work harder from now on, since they were shorthanded.
That rest period Feldman came down with a mild attack of space-stomach--which meant no more drinking for him--and was off work for a day. Then the pace picked up. The tubes were cleared and they began laying the new lining for the landing blasts. There was no time for thought after that. Mars' orbital station lay close when the work was finished.
Ben slapped Feldman on the back. "Ya ain't bad for a greenie, Dan. We all get six-day passes on Mars. Hit the sack now so you won't waste time sleeping then. We'll hear it when the ship berths."
Feldman didn't hear it, but the others did. He felt Ben shaking his shoulder, trying to drag him out of the sack. "Grab your junk, Dan."
Ben picked up Feldman's nearly empty bag and tossed it toward him, before his eyes were fully open. He grabbed for it and missed. He grabbed again, with Ben's laughter in his ears. The bag hit the wall and fell open, spilling its contents.
Feldman began gathering it up, but the chief was no longer laughing. A big hand grabbed up the space ticket suddenly, and there was no friendliness now on Ben's face.
"Art Billing's card!" Ben told the other tubemen. "Five trips I made with Art. He was saving his money, going to buy a farm on Mars. Five trips and one more to go before he had enough. Now you show up with his ticket!"
The tubemen moved forward toward Feldman. There was no indecision. To them, apparently, trial had been held and sentence passed.
"Wait a minute," Feldman began. "Billings died of--"
A fist snaked past his raised hand and connected with his jaw. He bounced off a wall. A wrench sailed toward him, glanced off his arm, and ripped at his muscles. Another heavy fist struck.
Abruptly, Ben's voice cut through their yells. "Hold it!" He shoved through the group, tossing men backwards. "Stow it! We can take care of him later. Right now, this is captain's business. You fools want to lose your leave?" He indicated two of the others. "You two bring him along--and keep him quiet!"
The two grabbed Feldman's arms and dragged him along as the chief began pulling his way forward through the tubes up towards the control section of the ship. Feldman took a quick glance at their faces and made no effort to resist; they obviously would have enjoyed any chance to subdue him.
They were stopped twice by minor officers, then sent on. They finally found the captain near the exit lock, apparently assisting the passengers to leave. Most of them went on into the shuttle, but Chris Ryan remained behind as the captain listened to Ben's report and inspected the false ticket.
Finally the captain turned to Feldman. "You. What's your name?"
Chris' eyes were squarely on Feldman, cold and furious. "He was Doctor Daniel Feldman, Captain Marker," she stated.
Feldman stood paralyzed. He'd been unwilling to face Chris. He wanted to avoid all the past. But the idea that she would denounce him had never entered his head. There was no Medical rule involved. She knew that as a pariah he was forbidden to board a passenger ship, of course. But she'd been his wife once!
Marker bowed slightly to her. "Thank you, Dr. Ryan. I should take this criminal back to Earth in chains, I suppose. But he's hardly worth the freightage. You men. Want to take him down to Mars and ground him there?"
Ben grinned and touched his forelock. "Thank you, sir. We'd enjoy that."
"Good. His pay reverts to the ship's fund. That's all, men."
Feldman started to protest, but a fist lashed savagely against his mouth.
He made no other protests as they dragged him into the crew shuttle that took off for Southport. He avoided their eyes and sat hunched over. It was Ben who finally broke the silence.
"What happened to Art's money? He had a pile on him."
"Go to hell!"
"Give, I said!" Ben twisted his arm back toward his shoulder, applying increasing pressure.
"A doctor took it for his fee when Billings died of space-stomach. Damn you, I couldn't help him!"
Ben looked at the others. "Med Lobby fee, eh? All the market will take. Umm. It could be, maybe." He shrugged. "Okay, reasonable doubt. We won't kill you, bo. Not quite, we won't."
The shuttle landed and Ben handed out the little helmets and aspirators that made life possible in Mars' thin air. Outside, the tubemen took turns holding Feldman and beating him while the passengers disembarked from their shuttle. As he slumped into unconsciousness, he had a picture of Chris Ryan's frozen face as she moved steadily toward the port station.
IV
Martian
It was night when Feldman came to, and the temperature was dropping rapidly. He struggled to sit up through a fog of pain. Somewhere in his bag, he should have an anodyne tablet that would kill any ache. He finally found the pill and swallowed it, fumbling with the aspirator lip opening.
The aspirator meant life to him now, he suddenly realized. He twisted to stare at the tiny charge-indicator for the battery. It showed half-charge. Then he saw that someone had attached another battery beside it. He puzzled briefly over it, but his immediate concern was for shelter.
Apparently he was still where he had been knocked out. There was a light coming from the little station, and he headed toward that, fumbling for the few quarters that represented his entire fortune.
Maybe it would have been better if the tubemen had killed him. Batteries were an absolute necessity here, food and shelter would be expensive, and he had no skills to earn his way. At most, he had only a day or so left. But meantime, he had to find warmth before the cold killed him.
The tiny restaurant in the station was still open, and the air was warm inside. He pulled off the aspirator, shutting off the battery.
The counterman didn't even glance up as he entered. Feldman gazed at the printed menu and flinched.
"Soup," he ordered. It was the cheapest item he could find.
The counterman stared at him, obviously spotting his Earth origin. "You adjusted to synthetics?"
Feldman nodded. Earth operated on a mixed diet, with synthetics for all who couldn't afford the natural foods there. But Mars was all synthetic. Many of the chemicals in food could exist in either of two forms, or isomers; they were chemically alike, but differently crystallized. Sometimes either form was digestible, but frequently the body could use only the isomer to which it was adjusted.
Martian plants produced different isomers from those on Earth. Since the synthetic foods turned out to be Mars-normal, that was probably the more natural form. Research designed to let the early colonists live off native food here had turned up an enzyme that enabled the body to handle either isomer. In a few weeks of eating Martian or synthetic food, the body adapted; without more enzyme, it lost its power to handle Earth-normal food.
The cheapness of synthetics and the discovery that many diseases common to Earth would not attack Mars-normal bodies led to the wide use of synthetics on Earth. No pariah could have been expected to afford Earth-normal.
Feldman finished the soup, and found a cigarette that was smokable. "Any objections if I sit in the waiting room?"
He'd expected a rejection, but the counterman only shrugged. The waiting room was almost dark and the air was chilly, but there was normal pressure. He found a bench and slumped onto it, lighting his cigarette. He'd miss the smokes--but probably not for long. He finished the cigarette reluctantly and sat huddled on the bench, waiting for morning.
The airlock opened later, and feet sounded on the boards of the waiting-room floor, but he didn't look up until a thin beam of light hit him. Then he sighed and nodded. The shoes, made of some odd fiber, didn't look like those of a cop, but this was Mars. He could see only a hulking shadow behind the light.
"You the man who was a medical doctor?" The voice was dry and old.
"Yeah," Feldman answered. "Once."
"Good. Thought that space crewman was just lying drunk at first. Come along, Doc."
"Why?" It didn't matter, but if they wanted him to move on, they'd have to push a little harder.
The light swung up to show the other. He was the shade of old leather with a bleached patch of sandy hair and the deepest gray eyes Feldman had ever seen. It was a face that could have belonged to a country storekeeper in New England, with the same hint of dry humor. The man was dressed in padded levis and a leather jacket of unguessable age. His aspirator seemed worn and patched, and one big hand fumbled with it.
"Because we're friends, Doc," the voice drawled at him. "Because you might as well come with us as sit here. Maybe we have a job for you."
Feldman shrugged and stood up. If the man was a Lobby policeman, he was different from the usual kind. Nothing could be worse than the present prospects.
They went out through the doors of the waiting room toward a rattletrap vehicle. It looked something like a cross between a schoolboy's jalopy and a scaled-down army tank of former times. The treads were caterpillar style, and the stubby body was completely enclosed. A tiny airlock stuck out from the rear.
Two men were inside, both bearded. The old man grinned at them. "Mark, Lou, meet Doc Feldman. Sit, Doc. I'm Jake Mullens, and you might say we were farmers."
The motor started with a wheeze. The tractor swung about and began heading away from Southport toward the desert dunes. It shook and rattled, but it seemed to make good time.
"I don't know anything about farming," Feldman protested.
Jake shrugged. "No, of course not. Couple of our friends heard about you where a spaceman was getting drunk and tipped us off. We know who you are. Here, try a bracky?"
Feldman took what seemed to be a cigarette and studied it doubtfully. It was coarse and fibrous inside, with a thin, hard shell that seemed to be a natural growth, as if it had been chopped from some vine. He lighted it, not knowing what to expect. Then he coughed as the bitter, rancid smoke burned at his throat. He started to throw it down, and hesitated. Jake was smoking one, and it had killed the craving for tobacco almost instantly.
"Some like 'em, most don't," Jake said. "They won't hurt you. Look--see that? Old Martian ruins. Built by some race a million years ago. Only half a dozen on Mars."
It was only a clump of weathered stone buildings in the light from the tractor, and Feldman had seen better in the stereo shots. It was interesting only because it connected with the legendary Martian race, like the canals that showed from space but could not be seen on the surface of the planet.
Feldman waited for the other to go on, but Jake was silent. Finally, he ground out the butt of the weed. "Okay, Jake. What do you want with me?"
"Consultation, maybe. Ever hear of herb doctors? I'm one of them."
Feldman knew that the Lobby permitted some leniency here, due to the scarcity of real medical help. There was only one decent hospital at Northport, on the opposite side of the planet.
Jake sighed and reached for another bracky weed. "Yeah, I'm pretty good with herbs. But I got a sick village on my hands and I can't handle it. We can't all mortgage our work to pay for a trip to Northport. Southport's all messed up while the new she-doctor gets her metabolism changed. Maybe the old guy there would have helped, but he died a couple months ago. So it looks like you're our only hope."
"Then you have no hope," Feldman told him sickly. "I'm a pariah, Jake. I can't do a thing for you."
"We heard about your argument with the Lobby. News reaches Mars. But these are mighty sick people, Doc."
Feldman shook his head. "Better take me back. I'm not allowed to practice medicine. The charge would be first-degree murder if anything happened."
Lou leaned forward. "Shall I talk to him, Jake?"
The old man grimaced. "Time enough. Let him see what we got first."
Sand howled against the windshield and the tractor bumped and surged along. Feldman took another of the weeds and tried to estimate their course. But he had no idea where they were when the tractor finally stopped. There was a village of small huts that seemed to be merely entrances to living quarters dug under the surface. They led him into one and through a tunnel into a large room filled with simple cots and the unhappy sounds of sick people.
Two women were disconsolately trying to attend to the half-dozen sick--four children and two adults. Their faces brightened as they saw Jake, then fell. "Eb and Tilda died," they reported.
Feldman looked at the two figures under the sheets and whistled. The same black specks he had seen on the face of Billings covered the skins of the two old people who had died.
"Funny," Jake said slowly. "They didn't quite act like the others and they sure died mighty fast. Darn it, I had it figured for that stuff in the book. Infantile paralysis. How about it, Doc? Sort of like a cold, stiff sore neck."
It was clearly polio--one of the diseases that could attack Mars-normal flesh. Feldman nodded at the symptoms, staring at the sick kids. He shrugged, finally. "There's a cure for it, but I don't have the serum. Neither do you, or you wouldn't have brought me here. I couldn't help if I wanted to."
"That old book didn't list a cure," Jake told him. "But it said the kids didn't have to be crippled. There was something about a Kenny treatment. Doc, does the stuff really cripple for life?"
Feldman saw one of the boys flinch. He dropped his eyes, remembering the Lobby's efficient spy service on Earth and wondering what it was like here. But he knew the outcome.
"Damn you, Jake!"
Jake chuckled. "Thought you would. We sure appreciate it. Just tell us what to do, Doc."
Feldman began writing down his requirements, trying to remember the details of the treatment. Exercise, hot compresses, massage. It was coming back to him. He'd have to do it himself, of course, to get the feel of it. He couldn't explain it well enough. But he couldn't turn his back on the kids, either.
"Maybe I can help," he said doubtfully as he moved toward a cot.
"No, Doc." Jake's voice wasn't amused any longer, and he held the younger man back. "You're doing us a favor, and I'll be darned if I'll let you stick your neck out too far. You can't treat 'em yourself. Mars is tougher than Earth. You should live under Space Lobby and Medical Lobby here a while. Oh, maybe they don't mind a few fools like me being herb doctors, but they'd sure hate to have a man who can do real medicine outside their hands. You let me do it, or get in the tractor and I'll have Lou drive you back. Once you start in here, there'll be no stopping. Believe me."
Feldman looked at him, seeing the colonials around him for the first time as people. It had been a long time since he'd been treated as a fellow human by anyone.
Jake was right, he knew. Once he put his hand to the bandage, eventually there'd be no turning back from the scalpel. These people needed medical help too desperately. Eventually, the news would spread, and the Lobby police would come for him. Chris couldn't afford to shield him. In fact, he was sure now that she'd hunt him night and day.
"Don't be a fool, Jake," he ordered brusquely. He handed his list to one of the women. "You'll have to learn to do what I do," he told the people there. "You'll have to work like fools for weeks. But there won't be many crippled children. I can promise that much!"
He blinked sharply at the sudden hope in their eyes. But his mind went on wondering how long it would be before the inevitable would catch up with him. With luck, maybe a few months. But he hadn't been blessed with any superabundance of luck. It would probably be less time than he thought.
V
Surgery
Doc Feldman's luck was better than he had expected. For an Earth year, he was a doctor again, moving about from village to village as he was needed and doing what he could.
The village had been isolated during the early colonization when Mars made a feeble attempt to break free of Space Lobby. Their supplies had been cut off and they had been forced to do for themselves. Now they were largely self-sufficient. They grew native plants and extracted hormones in crude little chemical plants. The hormones were traded to the big chemical plants for a pittance to buy what had to come from Earth. Other jury-rigged affairs synthesized much of their food. But mostly they learned to get along on what Mars provided.
Doc Feldman learned from them. Money was no longer part of his life. He ate with whatever family needed him and slipped into the life around him.
He was learning Martian medicine and finding that his Earth courses were mostly useless. No wonder the villagers distrusted Lobby doctors. Doc had his own little laboratory where he had managed to start making Mars-normal penicillin--a primitive antibiotic, but better than nothing.
Jake had come to remind him that it was his first anniversary, and now they were smoking bracky together.
"Sheer luck, Jake," Doc repeated. "You Martians are tough. But some day someone is going to die under my care, with the little equipment I have. Then--"
Jake nodded slowly. "Maybe, Doc. And maybe some day Mars will break free of the Lobbies. You'd better pray for that."
"I've been--" Doc stopped, realizing what he'd started to say. The old man chuckled.
"You've been talking rebellion for months, Doc. I hear rumors. Whenever you get mad, you want us to secede. But you don't really mean it yet. You can't picture any government but the one you're used to."
Doc grinned. Jake had a point, but it was not as strong as it would have been a few months before. The towns under the Lobby were cheap imitations of Earth, but here, divorced to a large extent from the lobbies, the villages were making Mars their own. Their ways might be strange; but they worked.
Jake shifted his body in the weak sunlight. "Newton village forgot to report a death on time. I hear Ryan is sweating them out, trying to prove it was your fault."
There was no evidence against him yet, Doc was sure. But Chris was out to prove something, and to get a reputation as a top-flight administrator. It must have hurt when they shipped her here as head of the lesser hemisphere of Mars. She'd expected to use Feldman as a front while she became the actual ruler of the whole Lobby. Now she wanted to strike back.
"She's using blackmail," he said, and some of his old bitterness was in his voice. "Anyone taking treatment from an herb doctor in this section is cut off from Medical Lobby service. Damn it, Jake, that could mean letting people die!"
"Yeah." Jake sighed softly. "It could mean letting people begin to think about getting rid of the Lobby, too. Well, I gotta help harvest the bracky. Take it easy on operating for a while, will you, Doc?"
"All right, Jake. But stop keeping the serious cases a secret. Two men died last month because you wouldn't call me for surgery. I've broken all my oaths already. It doesn't matter anymore."
"It matters, boy. We've been lucky, but some day one case will go to the hospital and they'll find your former work. Then they'll really be after you. The less you do the better."
Doc watched Jake slump off, then turned down into the little root cellar and back toward the room concealed behind it, where his crude laboratory lay. For the moment, he was free to work on the mystery of the black spots.
He kept running into them--always on the body of someone who died of something that seemed like a normal disease. Without a microscope, he was almost helpless, but he had taken specimens and tried to culture them. Some of his cultures had grown, though they might be nothing but unknown Martian fungi or bacteria. Mars was dry and almost devoid of air, but plants and a few smaller insects had survived and adapted. It wasn't by any means lifeless.
Without a microscope, he could do little but depend on his files of cases. But today there was new evidence. A villager had filched an Earth Medical Journal from the tractor driven by Chris Ryan and forwarded it to him. He found the black specks mentioned in a single paragraph, under skin diseases. Investigation of the diet was being made, since all cases were among people eating synthetics.
There was another article on aberrant cases--a few strange little misbehaviors in classical syndromes. He studied that, wondering. It had to be the same thing. Diet didn't account for the fact that the specks appeared only when the patient was near death.
Nor did it account for the hard lump at the base of the neck which he found in every case he could check. That might be coincidence, but he doubted it.
Whatever it was, it aggravated any other disease the patient had and made seemingly simple diseases turn out to be completely and rapidly fatal. Once syphilis had been called "The Great Imitator". This gave promise of being worse.
He shook his head, cursing his lack of equipment. Each month more people were dying with these specks--and he was helpless.
The concealed door broke open suddenly and a boy thrust his head in. "Doc, there's a man here from Einstein. Says his wife's dying."
The man was already coming into the room.
"She's powerful sick, Doc. Had a bellyache, fever, began throwing up. Pains under her belly, like she's had before. But this time it's awful."
Doc shot a few questions at him, frowning at what he heard. Then he began packing the few things that might help. There should be no appendicitis on Mars. The bugs responsible for that shouldn't have adapted to Mars-normal. But more and more infections found ways to cross the border. Gangrene had been able to get by without change, it seemed. So far, none of the contagious infections except polio and the common cold had made the jump.
This sounded like an advanced case, perhaps already involving peritonitis.
So far, he'd been lucky with penicillin, but each time he used it with grave doubts of its action on the Mars-adapted patients. If the appendix had burst, however, it was the only possible treatment.
He riffled through his stores; There was ether enough, fortunately. The villagers had made that for him out of Martian plants, using their complicated fermentation processes. He yelled for Jake, and the boy brought the old man back a moment later.
"Jake, I'll need more of that narcotic stuff. I don't want the woman writhing and tearing her stitches after the ether wears off."
"Can't get it, Doc." Jake's eyes seemed to cloud as he said it. "Distilling plant broke down. Doc, I don't like this case. That woman's been to the hospital three times. I hear she just got out recently. This might be a plant, or they figure they can't help her."
"They're afraid to try anything on Mars-normal flesh. They can't be proved wrong if they do nothing." Doc finished packing his bag and got ready to go out. "Jake, either I'm a doctor or I'm not. I can't worry when a woman may be dying."
For a second, Jake's expression was stubborn. Then the little crow's feet around his eyes deepened and the dry chuckle was back in his voice. "Right, Dr. Feldman." He flipped up his thumb and went off at a shuffling run toward the tractor. Lou and the man from Einstein followed Doc into the machine.
It was a silent ride, except for Doc's questions about the sick woman. Her husband, George Lynn, was evasive and probably ignorant. He admitted that Harriet had been to the dispensary and small infirmary that Southport called a hospital.
It was the only place in the entire Southern hemisphere where an operation could be performed legally. Most cases had to go to Northport, but Chris had been trying to expand. Apparently, she was determined to make Southport into another major center before she was called back to Earth.
Doc wondered why the villagers went there. They had no medical insurance with the Lobby; they couldn't afford it. Most villagers didn't have the cash, either. They were forced to mortgage their future work and that of their families to the drug plants that were run by the Lobby.
"And they just turned your wife away?" Doc asked. He couldn't quite believe that of Chris.
"Well, I dunno. She wouldn't talk much. Twice she went and they gave her something. Cost every cent I could borrow. Then this last time, they kept her a couple days before they let me come and get her. But now she's a lot worse."
Jake spun about, suddenly tense. "How'd you pay them last time, George?"
"Why, they didn't ask. I told her she could put up six months from me and the kids, but nobody said nothing about it. Just gave her back to me." He frowned slowly, his dull voice uncertain. "They told me they'd done all they could, not to bring her back. That's why she was so strong on getting Doc."
"I don't like it," Jake said flatly. "It stinks. They always charge. George, did they suggest she get in touch with Doc here?"
"Maybe they did, maybe not. Harriet did all the talking with them. I just do what she tells me, and she said to get Doc."
Jake swore. "It smells like a trap. Are you sure she's sick, George?"
"I felt her head and she sure had a fever." George Lynn was torn between his loyalties. "You know me, Doc. You fixed me up that time I had the red pip. I wouldn't pull nothing on you."
Doc had a feeling that Jake was probably right, but he vetoed the suggestion that they stop to look for spies. He had no time for that. If the woman was really sick, he had to get to her at once, and even that might be too late.
He remembered the woman, sickly from other treatment. He'd been forced to remove her inflamed tonsils a few months before. She'd whined and complained because he couldn't spend all his time attending her. She was a nag, a shrew, and a totally selfish woman. But that was her husband's worry, not his.
He dashed into the little house when they reached Einstein, and his first glance confirmed what George Lynn had said. The woman was sick, all right. She was running a high fever. Much too high.
She began whining and protesting at his having taken so long, but the pain soon forced her to stop.
"There may still be a chance," Doc told her husband brusquely. He threw the cleanest sheet onto a table and shoved it under the single light. "Keep out of the way--in the other room, if you can all pile in there. This isn't exactly aseptic, anyhow. You can boil a lot of water, if you want to help."
It would give them something to do and he could use the water to clean up. There was no time to wait for it, however. He had to sterilize with alcohol and carbolic acid, and hope. He bent over the woman, ripping her thin gown across to make room for the operation.
Then he swore.
Across her abdomen was the unhealed wound of a previous operation. They'd worked on her at Southport. They must have removed the appendix and then been shocked by the signs of infection. They weren't supposed to release a sick patient, but there was an easy out for them; they could remove her from the danger of spreading an unknown infection. Some doctors must have doped her up on sedatives and painkillers and sent her home, knowing that she would call him. For that matter, they might have noticed her unrecorded tonsillectomy and considered her fair bait.
He grabbed the ether and slapped a cone over her nose. She tried to protest; she never cooperated in anything. But the fumes of the ether he dipped onto the packing of the cone soon overcame that.
It was peritonitis, of course. The only thing to do was to go in and scrape and clean as best he could. It was a rotten job to have to do, and he should have had help. But he gritted his teeth and began. He couldn't trust anyone else to hold the instruments, even.
He cleaned the infection as best he could, knowing there was almost no chance. He used all the penicillin he dared. Then he began sewing up the incision. It was all he could do, except for dressing the wound with a sterile bandage. He reached for one, and stopped.
While he'd been working, the woman had died, far more quietly than she had ever lived.
It was probably the only gracious act of her life. But it was damning to Doc. They couldn't hide her death, and any investigation would show that someone had worked on her. To the Lobby, he would be the one who had murdered her.
Jake was waiting in the tractor. He took one look at Doc's face and made no inquiries.
They were more than a mile away when Jake pointed back. Small in the distance, but distinct against the sands, a gray Medical Corps tractor was coming. Either they'd had a spy in the village or they'd guessed the rate of her infection very closely. They must have hoped to catch Doc in the act, and they'd barely missed.
It wouldn't matter. Their pictures and what testimony they could force from the village should be enough to hang Doc.
VI
Research
There had been a council the night following the death of Harriet Lynn. Somehow the word had spread through the villages and the chiefs had assembled in Jake's village. But they had brought no solution, and in the long run had been forced to accept Doc's decision.
"I'm not going to retire and hide," he'd told them, surprised at his own decision, but grimly determined. "You need me and I need you. I'll move every day in hopes the Lobby police won't find me, but I won't quit."
Now he was packing the things he most needed and getting ready to move. The small bottles in which he was trying to grow his cultures would need warmth. He shoved them into an inner pocket, and began surveying what must be left.
He was heading for his tractor when another battered machine drove up. It had a girl of about fourteen, with tears streaming down her face. She held out a pleading hand, and her voice was scared. "It's--it's mama!"
"Where?"
"Leibnitz."
Leibnitz was near enough. Doc started his tractor, motioning for the girl to lead the way. The little dwelling she led him to was at the edge of the village, looking more poverty-stricken than most.
Chris Ryan, and three of the Medical Lobby police were inside, waiting. The girl's mother was tied to the bed, with a collection of medical instruments laid out, but apparently the threat had been enough. No actual injury had been inflicted. Probably none had been intended seriously.
"I knew you'd answer that kind of call," Chris said coldly.
He grinned sickly. They'd wasted no time. "I hear it's more than you'll do, Chris. Congratulations! My patient died. You're lucky."
"She was certainly dead when my men took her picture. The print shows the death grimace clearly."
"Pretty. Frame it and keep it to comfort you when you feel lonely," he snapped.
She struck him across the mouth with the handle of her gun. Then she twisted out through the door quickly, heading for the tractor that had been camouflaged to look like those used by the villagers. The three police led him behind her.
A shout went up, and people began to rush onto the village street. But they were too late. By the time they reached Southport, Doc could see a trail of battered tractors behind, but there was nothing more the people could do. Chris had her evidence and her prisoner.
* * * * *
Judge Ben Wilson might have been Jake's brother. He was older and grayer, but the same expression lay on his face. He must have been the family black sheep, since his father had been president of Space Lobby. Instead of inheriting the position, Wilson had remained on Mars, safely out of the family's way.
He dropped the paper he was reading to frown at Chris. "This the fellow?"
She began formal charges, but he cut them off. "Your lawyer already had all that drawn up. I've been expecting you, Doctor. Doctor! Hnnf! You'd do a lot better home somewhere raising a flock of babies. Well, young fellow--so you're Feldman. Okay, your trial comes up day after tomorrow. Be a shame to lock you in Southport jail, a man of your importance. We'll just keep you here in the pending-trial room. It's a lot more comfortable."
Chris had been boiling slowly, and now she seemed to blow her safety valve. "Judge Wilson, your methods are your own business in local affairs. But this involves Earth Medical Lobby. I demand--"
"Tch, tch!" The judge stared at her reprovingly. "Young woman, you don't demand anything. This is Mars. If Space Lobby can stand me, I guess our friends over at Medical will have to. Or should I hold trial right now and find Feldman innocent for lack of evidence?"
"You wouldn't!" Chris cried. Then her face sobered suddenly. "I apologize. Medical is pleased to leave things in your hands, of course."
Wilson smiled. "Court's closed for today. Doc, I'll show you your cell. It's right next to my study, so I'm heading there anyhow."
He began shucking his robe while Chris went out with the police, her voice sharp and continual.
The cell was both reasonably escape-proof and comfortable, Doc saw, and he tried to thank the judge.
But the old man waved it aside. "Forget it. I just like to see that little termagant taken down. But don't count on my being soft. My methods may be a bit unusual--I always did like the courtroom scenes in the old books by that fellow Smith--but Space Lobby never had any reason to reverse my decisions. Anything you need?"
"Sure," Doc told him, grinning in spite of his bitterness. "A good biology lab and an electron microscope."
"Umm. How about a good optical mike and some stains? Just got them in on the last shipment. Figure they were meant for you anyhow, since Jake Mullens asked me to order them."
He went out and came back with the box almost at once. He snorted at Doc's incredulous thanks and moved off, his bedroom slippers slapping against the hard floor.
Doc stared after him. If he were a friend of Jake, willing to invent some excuse to get a microscope here ... but it didn't matter. Friend or foe, his death sentence would be equally fatal. And there were other things to be thought of now. The little microscope was an excellent one, though only a monocular.
Doc's hands trembled as he drew his cultures out and began making up a slide. The sun offered the best source of light near the window, and he adjusted the instrument. Something began to come into view, but too faintly to be really visible.
He remembered the stains, trying to recall his biology courses. More by luck than skill, his fourth try gave him results.
Under two thousand powers, he could just see details. There were dozens of cells in his impure culture, but only one seemed unfamiliar. It was a long, worm-like thing, sharpened at both ends, with the three separate nuclei that were typical of Martian life forms. Nearby were a host of little rodlike squiggles just too small to see clearly.
Martian life! No Martian bug had ever proved harmful to men. Yet this was no mutated cell or virus from Earth; it was a new disease, completely different from all others. It was one where all Earth's centuries of experience with bacteria would be valueless--the first Martian disease. Unless this was simply some accidental contamination of his culture, not common to the other samples. He worked on until the light was too faint before putting the microscope aside.
By the time the trial commenced, however, he was sure of the cause of the disease. It was Martian. Crude as his cultures were, they had proved that.
The little courtroom was filled, mostly from the villages. Lou was there, along with others he had come to know. Then the sight of Jake caught Doc's eyes. The darned fool had no business there; he could get too closely mixed into the whole mess.
"Court's in session," Wilson announced. "Doc, you represented by counsel?"
Jake's voice answered. "Your Honor, I represent the defendant. I think you'll find my credentials in order."
Chris started to protest, but Wilson grinned. "Never lost your standing in spite of that little fracas thirty years ago, so far as I know. But the police thought you were a witness when you came walking in. Figured you were giving up."
"I never said so," Jake answered.
Chris was squirming angrily, but the florid man acting as counsel for Medical Lobby shook his head, bending over to whisper in her ear. He straightened. "No objection to counsel for the defense. We recognize his credentials."
"You're a fool, Matthews," the judge told him. "Jake was smarter than half the rest of Legal Lobby before he went native. Still can tie your tail to a can. Okay, let's start things. I'm too old to dawdle."
Doc lost track of most of what happened. This was totally unlike anything on Earth, though it might have been in keeping with the general casualness of the villages. Maybe the ritualistic routine of the Lobbies was driving those who could resist to the opposite extreme.
Chris was the final witness. Matthews drew comment of Feldman's former crime from her, and Jake made no protest, though Wilson seemed to expect one. Then she began sewing his shroud. There wasn't a fact that managed to emerge without slanting, though technically correct. Jake sat quietly, smiling faintly, and making no protests.
He got up lazily to cross-examine Chris. "Dr. Ryan, when Daniel Feldman was examined by the Captain of the Navaho after arriving at Mars station, did you identify him then as having been Dr. Daniel Feldman?"
She glanced at Matthews, who seemed puzzled but unconcerned. "That's correct," she admitted. "But--"
"And you later saw him delivered to the surface of Mars. Is that also correct?" When she assented, Jake hesitated. Then he frowned. "What did you do then? Did you report him or send anyone to look after him or anything like that?"
"Certainly not," she answered. "He was no--"
"You did absolutely nothing about him after you identified him and saw him delivered here? You're quite sure of that?"
"I did nothing."
Jake stood quietly for a moment, then shrugged. "No more questions."
Matthews finished things in a plea for the salvation of all humanity from the danger of such men as Daniel Feldman. He was looking smug, as was Chris.
Wilson turned to Jake. "Has the defense anything to say?"
"A few things, Your Honor." Jake stood up, suddenly looking certain and pleased. "We are happy to admit everything factual the Lobby had testified. Daniel Feldman performed a surgical operation on Harriet Lynn in the village of Einstein. But when has it been illegal for a member of the Medical profession to perform an operation, even with small chance of success, within an accepted area for such operation? There has been no evidence adduced that any crime or act of even unethical conduct was committed."
That brought Chris and Matthews to their feet. Wilson was relaxed again, looking as if he'd swallowed a whole cage of canaries. He banged his gavel down.
Jake picked up two ragged and dog-eared volumes from his table. "Case of Harding vs. Southport, 2043, establishes that a Lobby is responsible for any member on Mars. It is also responsible for informing the authorities of any criminal conduct on the part of its members or any former member known to it. Failure to report shall be considered an admission that the Lobby recognizes the member as one in good standing and accepts responsibility for that member's conduct.
"At the time Daniel Feldman arrived, Dr. Christina Ryan was the highest appointed representative of Medical Lobby in Southport, with full authority. She identified Feldman as having been a doctor, without stipulating any change in status. She made no further report to any authority concerning Daniel Feldman's presence here. It seems obvious that Medical Lobby at Southport thereby accepted Daniel Feldman as a doctor in good standing for whose conduct the Lobby accepted full responsibility."
Wilson studied the book Jake held out, and nodded. "Seems pretty clear-cut to me," he agreed, passing the book on to Matthews. "There's still the charge that Dr. Feldman operated outside a hospital."
"No reason he shouldn't," Jake said. He handed over the other volume. "This is the charter for Medical Lobby on Mars. Medical Lobby agrees to perform all necessary surgical and medical services for the planet, though at the signing of this charter there was no hospital on Mars. Necessarily, Medical Lobby agreed to perform surgery outside of any hospital, then. But to make it plainer, there's a later paragraph--page 181--that defines each hospital zone as extending not less than three nor more than one hundred miles. Einstein is about one hundred and ten miles from the nearest hospital at Southport, so Einstein comes under the original charter provisions. Dr. Feldman was forced by charter provisions to protect the good name of his Lobby by undertaking any necessary surgery in Einstein."
He waited until Matthews had scanned that book, then took it back and began packing a big bag. Doc saw that his possessions and the microscope were already in the bag. The old man paid no attention to the arguments of Matthews before the bench.
Abruptly Wilson pounded his gavel. "This court finds that Dr. Daniel Feldman is qualified to practice all the arts and skills of the medical profession on Mars and that he acted ethically in the performance of his duties in the case of the deceased Harriet Lynn," he ruled. "The costs of the case shall be billed to Medical Lobby of Southport."
He took off his robe and moved rapidly toward his private quarters. Court was closed.
Doc got up shakily, not daring to believe fully what he had heard. He started toward Jake, trying to avoid bumping into Chris. But she would not be avoided. She stood in front of him, screaming accusations and threats that reminded him of the only fight they'd ever had during their brief marriage.
When she ran down, he finally met her eyes. "You're a helluva doctor," he told her harshly. "You spend all your time fighting me when there's a plague out there that may be worse than any disease we've ever known. Take a look at what lies under the black specks on your corpses. You'll find the first Martian disease. And maybe if you begin working on that now, you can learn to be a real doctor in time to do something about it. But I doubt it."
She fell back from him then. "Research! You've been doing unauthorized research!"
"Prove it," he suggested. "But you'd be a lot smarter to try some yourself, and to hell with your precious rules."
He followed Jake out to the tractor.
Surprisingly, the old man was sweating now. He shook his head at Doc's look, and his grin was uncertain.
"Matthews is an incompetent," he said. "They could have had you, Doc. That charter is so sloppy a man can prove anything by it, and building a hospital here did bring in Earth rules. Wilson went out on a limb in letting you go. But I guess we got away with it. Let's get out of here."
Doc climbed into the tractor more soberly. They had escaped this time. But there would be another time, and he was pretty sure that would be Chris' round. He had no intention of giving up his research.
VII
Plague
Dr. Feldman leaned back from his microscope and lighted another bracky weed. He glanced about the room and sighed wearily. Maybe he'd been better off when he had no friends and couldn't risk the safety of others in an effort to do research that was the highest crime on two worlds.
The evidence of his work was hidden thirty feet beyond his former laboratory in Jake's village, with a tunnel that led from another root-cellar. The theory was the old one that the best place to avoid discovery was where you had already been discovered. If their spies had identified his former hangout, they'd never expect to have him set up research nearby. It was a nice theory, but he wasn't sure of it.
Jake looked up from a cot where he'd been watching the improvised culture incubator. "Stop tearing yourself to bits, Doc. We know the danger and we're still darned glad to have you here working on this."
"I'm trying to put myself together into a whole man," Doc told him. "But I seem to come out wholly a fool."
"Yeah, sure. Sometimes it takes a fool to get things done; wise men wait too long for the right time. How's the bug hunt?"
Doc grunted in disgust and swung back to the microscope. Then he gave up as his tired eyes refused to focus. "Why don't you people revolt?"
"They tried it twice. But they were just a bunch of pariahs shipped here to live in peonage. They couldn't do much. The first time Earth cut off shipments and starved them. Next time the villages had the answer to that but the cities had to fight for Earth or starve, so they whipped us. And there's always the threat that Earth could send over unmanned war rockets loaded with fissionables."
"So it's hopeless?"
"So nothing! The Lobbies are poisoning themselves, like cutting off Medical service until they cut themselves out of a job. It's just a matter of time. Go back to the bugs, Doc."
Doc sighed and reached for his notes. "I wish I knew more Martian history. I've been wondering whether this bug may not have been what killed off the old Martians. Something had to do it, the way they disappeared. I wish I knew enough to make an investigation of those ruins out there."
"Durwood!" Jake had propped himself on an elbow, staring at Doc in surprise.
Doc scowled. "Clive Durwood, you mean? The archeologist who dug up what little we know about the ruins?"
"Yeah, before he went back to Earth and started living off his lectures. He came here again three years ago and dropped dead in Edison on the way to some other ruins. Heart failure, they called it, though it was more like the two old farmers who ran themselves to death last month. I saw him when they buried him. His face looked funny, and I think he had those little specks, though I may remember wrong." He grimaced. "Mars is tough, Doc; it has to be. Some of the plant seeds Durwood found in the ruins grew! Maybe your bugs waited a million years till we came along."
"What about the farmers? Did they meet Durwood?"
Jake nodded. "Must have. He lived in their village most of the time."
Doc went through his notes. He'd asked for reports on all deaths, and he finally found the account. The two old men had been nervous and fidgety for weeks. They were twins, living by themselves, and nobody paid much attention. Then one morning both were seen running wildly in circles. The village managed to tie them up, but they died of exhaustion shortly after.
It wasn't a pretty picture. The disease might have an incubation period of nearly fifteen years, judging by the length of time it had taken to hit Durwood. It must spread from person to person during an early contagious stage, leaving widening circles behind Durwood and those first infected. When matured, any other sickness would set it off, with few symptoms of its own. But without help, it still killed its victims, apparently driving them madly toward frenzied physical effort.
He studied the culture on a slide again. He'd tried Koch's method to get a pure strain, splattering the bugs onto a native starchy root and plucking off individual colonies. About twenty specimens had been treated with every chemical he could find. So far he'd found a few things that seemed to stop their growth, but nothing that killed them, except stuff far too harsh to use in living tissue.
He had nearly forty cases of deaths that showed symptoms now, and he went back over them, looking for anything in common that went back ten to twenty years before death. There were no rashes nor blisters. A few had had apparent colds, but such were too common to mean anything.
Only one thing appeared, about fourteen years before their deaths. The people interviewed about the victims might be vague about most things, but they remembered the time when "Jim had the jumping headache."
"Jake," Doc called, "what's jumping headache? Most people seem to have it some time or other, but I haven't run across a case of it."
"Sure you have, Doc. Mamie Brander's little girl a few weeks ago. Feels like your pulse is going to rip your skull off, right here. Can't eat because chewing drives you crazy. Back of your head, neck and shoulders swell up for about a week. Then it goes away."
Then it goes away--for fourteen years, until it comes back to kill!
Doc stared at his charts in sudden horror. It was a new disease--thought to be some virus, but not considered dangerous. Selznik's migraine, according to medical usage; you treated it with hot pads and anodyne, and it went away easily enough.
He'd seen hundreds of such cases on Earth. There must be millions who had been hit by it. The patent-medicine branch of the Lobby had even brought out something called Nograine to use for self-treatment.
"Something important?" Jake wanted to know.
Feldman nodded. "How much weight do you swing in other villages, Jake?"
"People sort of do me favors when I ask," Jake admitted. "Like swiping those medical journals from Northport for you, or like Molly Badger getting that job as maid to spy on Chris Ryan. Name it and I'll do my best."
Doc had a vague idea of village politics, but he had more important things to think of. Most of his foul mood had disappeared with the clue he'd stumbled on, and his chief worry now was to clinch the facts.
Feldman considered the problem. "I want a report on every case of jumping headache in every village--who had it, when, and how old they were. This place first, but every village you can reach. And I'll want someone to take a letter to Chris Ryan."
Jake frowned at that, but went out to issue instructions. Doc sat down at a battered old typewriter. Writing Chris might do no good, but some warning had to be gotten through to Earth, where the vast resources of Medical Lobby could be thrown into the task of finding the cause and cure of the disease. The connection with Selznik's migraine had to be reported. If something could blast the Lobby into action, it wouldn't matter quite so much what they did to him. He wasn't foolish enough to expect gratitude from them, but he was getting used to the idea that his days were numbered. The plague was more important than what happened to him.
The letter had been dispatched by the time Jake returned. "Here's the dope for this village. Everybody accounted for except you."
"Never had it, Jake." Feldman went down the list. "Most of it fourteen years ago. That fits. About the only exceptions are the kids who seem to get it between the ages of two and three. Eighty-seven out of ninety-one!"
He stared at the figures sickly. Most of the village not only had the plague but must be near the end of the incubation period. It looked as if most of the village would be dead before another year passed.
"Bad?" Jake asked.
"The first symptom of Martian fever."
The old man whistled, the lines around his eyes tightening. "Must be me," he decided. "I'm the guy who must have brought it here, then. I used to spend a lot of time with Durwood at his diggings!"
There was a constant commotion all that day and the next as runners went out to the villages and came back with reports. The variation from village to village was only slight. Most of Mars seemed to have advanced cases of Martian fever.
Without animals for investigation and study, real research was difficult. Doc also needed an electron microscope. He was reasonably sure that the disease must travel through the nerves, but he had found no proof beyond the hard lump at the base of the neck. There it was a fair-sized organism. Elsewhere he could find nothing, until the black specks developed.
His eyes ached from trying to see more than was visible in the microscope. The tantalizing suggestions of filaments around the nuclei might be the form of plague that was contagious. They might even be the true form of the bug, with the bigger cell only a transition stage. There were a number of diseases that involved complicated changes in the organisms that caused them. But he couldn't be sure.
He finally buried his head in his hands, trying to do by pure thought what he couldn't do in any other way. And even there, he lacked training. He was a doctor, not a xenobiologist. Research training had been taboo in school, except for a favored few.
The reports continued to come in, confirming the danger. They seemed to have the worst plague on their hands in all human history; and nobody who could do anything about it even knew of it.
"Molly reports that your letter got some results," Jake reported. "Chris Ryan brought home one of the electron microscopes and a bunch of equipment from the hospital pathology room. Think she'll get anywhere?"
Doc doubted it. Damn it, he hadn't meant for her to try it, though she might have authority for routine experiments. But it was like her to refuse to pass on the word without trying to prove her own suspicion of him first.
He tried to comfort himself with the fact that some men were immune, or seemed so; about three out of a hundred showed no signs. If that immunity was hereditary, it might save the race. If not....
Jake came in at twilight with a grim face. "More news from Molly. The Lobby is starting out to comb every village with a fault-finder, starting here. And this hole will show up like a sore thumb. Better start packing. We gotta be out of here in less than an hour!"
VIII
Fool
Three days later, Doc saw his first runner.
The tractor was churning through the sand just before sundown, heading toward another one-night stand at a new village. Lou was driving, while Doc and Jake brooded silently in the back, paying no attention to the colors that were blazoned over the dunes. The cat-and-mouse game was getting to Doc. There was no real assurance that the village they were approaching might not be the target the Lobby had chosen for the next investigation.
Lou braked the tractor to a sudden halt, and pointed.
A figure was running frantically over one of the low dunes with the little red sun behind him. He seemed headed toward them, but as he drew nearer they could see that he had no definite direction. He simply ran, pumping his legs frantically as if all the devils of hell were after him. His body swayed from side to side in exhaustion, but his arms and legs pumped on.
"Stop him!" Jake ordered, and Lou swung the tractor. It halted squarely in the runner's path, and the figure struck against it and toppled.
The legs went on pumping, digging into the dirt and gravel, but the man was too far gone to rise. Jake and Lou shoved him through the doors into the tractor and Doc yanked off his aspirator.
The man was giving vent to a kind of ululating cry, weakened now almost to a whine that rose and fell with the motion of his legs. Sweat had once streaked his haggard face, but it was dry and blanched to a pasty gray.
Doc injected enough narcotic to quiet a maddened bull. It had no effect, except to upset the rhythm of the arms and legs. It took five more minutes for the man to die.
The specks were larger this time--the size of periods in twelve-point type. The lump at the base of the skull was as big as a small hen's egg.
"From Edison, like the others so far. Jack Kooley," Jake answered Doc's question. "Durwood spent a lot of time here on his first expedition, so it's getting the worst of it."
Doc pulled the aspirator mask back over the man's face and they carried him out and laid him on a low dune. They couldn't risk returning the corpse to its people.
This was only the primary circle of infection, direct from Durwood. The second circle could be ten times as large, as the infection spread from one to a few to many. So far it was localized. But it wouldn't stay that way.
Doc climbed slowly out of the tractor, lugging his small supplies of equipment, while Jake made arrangements for them to spend the night in a deserted house. But the figure of the runner and his own failures to find more about the disease kept haunting Doc. He began setting up his equipment grimly.
"Better get some sleep," Jake suggested. "You're a mite more tired than you think. Anyhow, I thought you told me you couldn't do any more with what you've got."
Feldman looked at the supplies he had spread out, and shook his head wearily. He'd been over every chemical and combination a dozen times, without results that showed in the limited magnification of the optical mike.
He snapped the case shut and hit the rude table with the heel of his hand. "There are other supplies. Jake, do you have any signal to get in touch with Molly at the Ryan house?"
"Three raps on the rear left window. I'll get Lou."
"No!" Doc came to his feet, reaching for his jacket. "They're looking for three men now. It's safer if I go alone--and I'm the only one who knows what supplies are needed. With luck, I may even get the electron mike. Got a gun I can borrow?"
Jake found one somewhere, an old revolver with a few loads. He began protesting, but Doc overruled him sharply. Three men could no more fight off the police than one, if they were spotted. He swung toward the tractor.
"You'd better start spreading the word on everything we know. If people realize they're already safe or doomed it'll be better than having them going crazy to avoid contagion."
"Most of the villages know already," Jake told him. "And damn it, get back here, Doc. If you can't make it, turn tail quick, and we'll think of something else."
Southport seemed normal enough as Doc drove through its streets. The stereo house was open, and the little shops were brightly lighted. He stopped once to pull a copy of Southport's little newspaper from a dispenser. All was quiet on its front page, too.
As usual, though, the facts were buried inside. The editorial was pouring too much oil on the waters in its lauding of the role of Medical Lobby on Mars for no apparent reason. The death notices no longer listed the cause of death. Medical knew something was up, at least, and was worried.
He parked the tractor behind Chris' house and slipped to the proper window. Everything was seemingly quiet there. At his knock, the shade was drawn back, and he caught a brief glimpse of Molly looking out. A moment later she opened the rear lock to let him into the kitchen.
"Shh. She's still up, I think. What can I do, Doc?"
He tried to smile at her. "Hide me until it's safe to get into her laboratory. I've got to--"
The inner kitchen was kicked open and Chris stood beyond it, holding a cocked gun in her hand.
"It took longer than I expected, Dan," she said quietly. "But after your letter, I knew you'd swallow the bait. You bloody fool! Did you really believe I'd start doing research here just because of your imaginings?"
He slumped slowly back against the sink. "So this is a fool's errand, then? There never was any equipment here?"
"The equipment's here--in my office. I guessed your spies would report it, so it had to be here. But it won't help you now, pariah Feldman!"
He came from his braced position against the sink like a spring uncoiling. He expected her to shoot, but hoped the surprise would ruin her aim. Then it was too late, and his boot hit the gun savagely, knocking it from her hand. Life in the villages had hardened him surprisingly. She was comparatively helpless in his hands. A few minutes later, he had her bound securely with surgical tape Molly brought him. She raged furiously in the chair where he'd dumped her, then gave up.
"They'll get you, Daniel Feldman!" Surprisingly, there was no rage in her voice now. "You won't get away from us. The planet isn't big enough."
"I got away from your trial," he reminded her. "And I got away and lived when you left me without a chance on the ground of the spaceport."
She laughed harshly. "You got away then? You fool, who do you think gave you the extra battery so you could live long enough to be helped at the spaceport? Who hired a fool like Matthews so you wouldn't get the death sentence you deserved? Who let you get away as an herb doctor for months before you set yourself up as God and a traitor to mankind again?"
It shook him, as it was probably intended to do. How had she known about the extra battery? He'd always assumed that Ben had returned to give it to him. But in that case, Chris couldn't know of it. Then he hardened himself again. In the old days, she'd always had one trump card he couldn't beat and hadn't expected. But too much was involved for games now.
"Any police around, Molly?" he asked.
Molly came back a minute later to report that everything looked clear and to show him where the equipment had been set up in Chris' office. It was all there, including the electron mike--a beautiful little portable model. There was even a small incubator with its own heat source into which he immediately transferred the little bottles he'd been keeping warm against his skin. Most of the equipment had never been unpacked, which made loading it onto his tractor ridiculously easy.
"Better come with me now, Molly," he suggested at last. Then he turned to Chris, who was watching him with almost no expression. "You can wriggle your chair to the phone in half an hour, I guess. Knock the phone off and yell for help. It's better than you deserve, unless you really did leave me that battery."
"You won't get away with it," she told him again, calmly this time.
"No," he admitted. "Probably not. But maybe the human race will, if I have time to find an answer to the plague you won't see under your nose. But you won't get away with it, either. In the long run, your kind never do."
Molly was sniffling as they drove away. It had probably been the best life she'd known, Doc supposed. Chris could be kind to menials. But now Molly's work was done, and she'd have to disappear into the villages. He let her off at the first village and drove on alone. He was itching to get to the microscope now, hardly able to wait through the long journey back to Jake. His impatience grew with each mile.
Finally he gave up. He swung the tractor into a small gulley between sand dunes, left the motor idling and pulled down the shades the villagers used for blackout traveling. There was power enough for the mike here, and the cab was big enough for what he had to do.
He mounted the mike on the tractor seat and began laying out the collection of smears and cultures he had brought. It had been years since he'd made a film for the electron mike, but he found it all came back to him as he worked.
His hands were sweating with tension as he inserted the first film into the chamber. He had the magnetic "lenses" set for twenty thousand power, but a quick glance showed it was too weak. He raised the power to fifty thousand.
The filaments were there, clear and distinct.
He turned on the little tape recorder that had been part of Chris' equipment and set the microphone where he could dictate into it without stopping to make clumsy notes. He readjusted the focus carefully, carrying on a running commentary.
Then he gasped. Each of the little filaments carried three tiny darker sections; each was a cell, complete in itself, with the typical Martian triple nucleus.
He put a film with a tiny section of the nerve tissue from a corpse into the chamber next, and again a quick glance at the screen was enough. The filaments were there, thickly crowded among nerve cells. They did travel along the nerves to reach the base of the brain before the larger lump could form.
A specimen from one of the black specks was even more interesting. The filaments were there, but some were changed or changing into tiny, round cells, also with the triple dark spots of nuclei. Those must be the final form that was released to infect others. Probably at first these multiplied directly in epithelial tissue, so that there was a rapid contagion of infection. Eventually, they must form the filaments that invaded the nerves and caused the brief bodily reaction that was Selznik's migraine. Then the body adapted to them and they began to incubate slowly, developing into the large cells he had first seen. When "ripe", the big cells broke apart into millions of the tiny round ones that went back to the nerve endings, causing the black spots and killing the host.
He knew his enemy now, at least.
He reached for the controls, increasing the magnification. He would lose resolution, but he might find something more at the extreme limits of the mike.
Something wet and cold gushed into his face. He jerked back, trying to wipe it off, but it was already evaporating, and there was a thick, acrid odor in the cab. He grabbed for his aspirator, then tried to reach the airlock. But paralysis was already spreading through him, and he toppled to the floor before he could escape.
When he came to, it was morning outside, and Chris was waiting inside the cab with two big Lobby policemen. A hypo in her hand must have been what revived him.
She touched the electron microscope with something like affection. "The Lobby technicians did a good job on this, don't you think, Dan? I warned you, but you wouldn't listen. And now we've even got your own taped words to prove you were doing forbidden research. Fool!"
She shook her head pityingly as the tractor began moving with two others toward Southport.
"You and your phony diseases. A little skin disorder, Selznik's migraine, and a few cases of psychosis to make a new disease. Do you think Medical Lobby can't check on such simple things? Or didn't you expect us to hear of your open talk of revolt and realize you were planning to create some new germ to wipe out the Earth forces. Maybe those runners of yours were real, mass murderer!"
She drew out another hypo and shoved the needle into his arm. Necrosynth--enough to keep him unconscious for twenty-four hours. He started to curse her, but the drug acted before he could complete the thought.
IX
Judgment
Doc woke to see sunlight shining through a heavily barred window that must be in the official Southport jail. He waited a few minutes for his head to clear and then sat up; necrosynth left no hangover, at least.
The sound of steps outside was followed by the squeak of a key in the lock. "Fifteen minutes, Judge Wilson," a voice said.
"Thank you, officer." Wilson came into the cell, carrying a tray of breakfast and a copy of the Northport Gazette. He began unloading bracky weeds from his pocket while Doc attacked the breakfast.
"They tossed the book at you, Doc," he said. "You haven't got a chance, and there's nothing the villages can do. Trial's set for tomorrow at Northport, and it's in closed session. We can't get you off this time."
Doc nodded. "Thanks for coming, even if there's nothing you can do. I've been living on borrowed time for a year, anyhow, so I have no right to kick. But who's 'we'?"
"The villages. I've been part of their organization for years." The old man sighed heavily. "You might say a revolution has been going on since I can remember, though most villagers don't know it. We've just been waiting our time. Now we've stopped waiting and the rifles will be coming out--rifles made in village shops. The villages are going to rebel, even if we're all dead of plague in a month."
Doc Feldman nodded and reached for the bracky. He knew that this was their way of trying to make him feel his work hadn't been for nothing, and he was grateful for Wilson's visit. "It was a good year for me. Damned good. But time's running short. I'd better brief you on the latest on the plague."
Wilson began making notes until Doc was finished. Finally he got up as steps sounded from the hall. "Anything else?"
"Just a guess. A lot of Earth germs can't live in Mars-normal flesh; maybe this can't live in Earth-normal. Tell them so long for me."
"So long, Doc." He shook hands briefly and was waiting at the door when the guard opened it.
An hour later, the Lobby police took Feldman to the Northport shuttle rocket. They had some trouble on the way; a runner cut down the street, with the crowds frantically rushing out of his way. Terror was reaching the cities already.
Doc flashed a look at Chris. "Mob hysteria. Like flying saucers and wriggly tops, I suppose?" he asked, before the guard could stop him.
They locked his legs, but left his hands free in the rocket. He unfolded the paper Wilson had brought and buried his face in it. Then he swore. They were explaining the runners as a case of mob hysteria!
Northport was calmer. Apparently they had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after the villages.
It snapped back into focus, however, when they led him into the trial room of the Medical Lobby building. It was a smaller version of his trial on Earth. Fear washed in by association. The complete lack of humanity in the procedure was something from a half-remembered and horrible past.
The presiding officer asked the routine question: "Is the prisoner represented by counsel?"
Blane, the dapper little prosecutor, arose quickly. "The prisoner is a pariah, Sir Magistrate."
"Very well. The court will accept the protective function for the prisoner. You may proceed."
I'll be judge, I'll be jury. And prosecution and defense. It made for a lot less trouble. Of course, if Space Lobby had asserted interest, it would have gone to a supposedly neutral court. But as usual, Space was happy to leave it in the hands of Medical.
The tape was played as evidence. Doc frowned. The words were his, but there had been a lot of editing that subtly changed the import of his notes.
"I protest," he challenged. "It's not an accurate version."
The Lobby magistrate turned a wooden face to him. "Does the prisoner have a different version to introduce?"
"No, but--"
"The evidence is accepted. One of the prisoner's six protests will be charged against him."
Blane smiled smoothly and held up a small package. "We wish to introduce this drug as evidence that the prisoner is a confirmed addict, morally irresponsible under addiction. This is a package of so-called bracky weed, a vile and noxious substance found in his possession."
"It has alkaloids no more harmful than nicotine," Feldman stated sharply.
"Do you contend that you find the taste pleasing?" Blane asked.
"It's bitter, but I've gotten used to it."
"I've tasted it," the magistrate said. "Evidence accepted. Two deductions, one for irregularity of presentation."
Doc shrugged and sat back. He'd tested his rights and found what he expected. It was hard to see now how he had ever accepted such procedure. Jake must be right; they'd been in power too long, and were making the mistake of taking the velvet glove off the iron fist and flailing about for the sheer pleasure of power.
It dragged on, while he became a greater and greater monster on the record. But finally it was over, and the magistrate turned to Feldman. "You may present your defense."
"I ask complete freedom of expression," Doc said formally.
The magistrate nodded. "This is a closed court. Permission granted. The recording will be scrambled."
The last bit ruined most of the purpose Doc had in mind. But it was too late to change. He could only hope that some one of the Medical men present would remember something of what he said.
"I have nothing to say for myself," he began. "It would be useless. But I had to do what I did. There's a plague outside. I've studied that plague, and I have knowledge which must be used against it...."
He sat down in three minutes. It had been useless.
Blane arose, with a smile still plastered on his face. "We, of course, recognize the existence of a new contagion, but I believe we have established that this is one disseminated by the prisoner himself, and probably not directly contagious. There have been many cases of fanatics ready to destroy humanity to eliminate those they hate. Now, surely, the prisoner has himself left no question of his attitude. He asserts he has knowledge and skill greater than the entire Medical Research staff. He has attempted to intimidate us by threats. He is clearly psychopathic, and dangerously so. The prosecution rests."
The guards took Doc into the anteroom, where he was supposed to hear nothing that went on. But their curiosity was stronger than their discretion, and the door remained a trifle ajar.
The magistrate began the discussion. "The case seems firm enough. It's fortunate Dr. Ryan acted so quickly, with some of the people getting nervous. Perhaps it might be wise to publicize our verdict."
"My thought exactly," Blane agreed. "If we show Feldman is responsible and that Medical is eliminating the source of the infection, it may have a stabilizing effect."
"Let's hope so. The sentence will have to be death, of course. We can't let such a rebellious psychopath live. But this needs something more, it seems. You've prepared a recommendation, I suppose."
"There was the case of Albrecht Delier," Blane suggested. "Something like that should have good publicity impact."
It struck Doc that they sounded as if they believed themselves--as the witch-burners had believed in witches. He was sweating when the guards led him before the bench.
The magistrate rolled a pen slowly across his fingers as his eyes raked Feldman. "Pariah Daniel Feldman, you have been found guilty on all counts. Furthermore, your guilt must be shared by that entire section of Mars known as the villages. Therefore the entire section shall be banned and forbidden any and all services of the Medical Lobby for a period of one year."
"Sir Magistrate!" One of the members of Southport Hospital staff was on his feet. "Sir Magistrate, we can't cut them off completely."
"We must, Dr. Harkness. I appreciate the fine humanitarian tradition of our Lobby which lies behind your protest, but at such a time as this the good of the body politic requires drastic measures. Why not see me after court, and we can discuss it then?"
He turned back to Feldman, and his face was severe.
"The same education which has produced such fine young men as Dr. Harkness was wasted on you and perverted to endanger the whole race. No punishment can equal your crimes, but there is one previously invoked for a particularly horrible case, and it seems fitting that you should be the fourth so sentenced.
"Daniel Feldman, you are sentenced to be taken in to space beyond planetary limits, together with all material used by you in the furtherance of your criminal acts. There you shall be placed into a spacesuit containing sufficient oxygen for one hour of life, and no more. You and your contaminated possessions shall then be released into space, to drift there through all eternity as a warning to other men.
"This sentence shall be executed at the earliest possible moment, and Dr. Christina Ryan is hereby commissioned to observe such execution. And may God have mercy on your soul!"
X
Execution
The hours of waiting were blurred for Doc. There were periods when fear clogged his throat and left him gasping with the need to scream and beat his cell walls. There were also times when it didn't seem to matter, and when his only thoughts were for the villages and the plague.
They brought him the papers, where he was painted as a monster beside whom Jack the Ripper and Albrecht Delier were gentle amateurs. They were trying to focus all fear and resentment on him. Maybe it was working. There were screaming crowds outside the jail, and the noise of their hatred was strong enough to carry through even the atmosphere of Mars. But there were also signs that the Lobby was worried, as if afraid that some attempt might still be made to rescue him.
He'd looked forward to the trip to the airport as a way of judging public reaction. But apparently the Lobby had no desire to test that. The guards led him up to the roof of the jail, where a rocket was waiting. The landing space was too small for one of the station shuttles, but a little Northport-Southport shuttle was parked there after what must have been a difficult set-down. The guards tested Doc's manacles and forced him into the shuttle.
Inside, Chris was waiting, carrying an official automatic. There was also a young pilot, looking nervous and unhappy. He was muttering under his breath as the guards locked Doc's legs to a seat and left.
"All right," Chris ordered. "Up ship!"
"I tell you we're overweight with you. I wasn't counting on three for the trip," the pilot protested. "The only thing that will get this into orbit with the station is faith. I'm loaded with every drop of fuel she'll hold and it still isn't enough."
"That's your problem," Chris told him firmly. "You've got your orders, and so have I. Up ship!"
If she had her own worries about the shuttle, she didn't show it. Chris had never been afraid to do what she felt she should. The pilot stared at her doubtfully and finally turned back to his controls, still muttering.
The shuttle lifted sluggishly, but there was no great difficulty. Doc could see that there was even some fuel remaining when they slipped into the tube at the orbital station. Chris went out, and other guards came in to free him.
"So long, Dr. Feldman," the pilot called softly as they led him out. Then the guards shoved him through the airlock into the station. Fifteen minutes later he was locked into one of the cabins of the Iroquois, with all his possessions stacked beside him.
He grinned wryly. As an honest worker on the Navaho he'd been treated like an animal. Now, as a human fiend, he was installed in a luxury cabin of the finest ship of the fleet, with constant spin to give a feeling of weight and more room than the entire tube crew had known.
He roamed the cabin until he found a little collapsible table. He set the electron microscope up on that and plugged it in. It seemed a shame that good equipment should be wasted along with his life. He wondered if they would really throw it out into space with him. Probably they would.
He pushed a button on the call board over the table and asked for the steward. There was a long wait, as if the procedure were being checked with some authority, but finally he received a surly acknowledgement. "Steward. Whatcha want?"
"How's the chance of getting some food?"
"You're on first-class."
They could afford it, Doc decided. He wouldn't cost them much, considering the distance he was going. "Bring me two complete dinners--one Earth-normal and one Mars-normal."
"Okay, Feldman. But if you think you can suicide that way, you're wrong. You may be sick, but you'll be alive when they dump you."
A sharp click interrupted him. "That's enough, Steward. Captain Everts speaking. Dr. Feldman, you have my apologies. Until you reach your destination, you are my passenger and entitled to every consideration of any other passenger except freedom of movement through the ship. I am always available for legitimate complaints."
Feldman shook his head. He'd heard of such men. But he'd thought the species extinct.
The steward brought his food in a thoroughly chastened manner. He managed to find space for it and came to attention. "Is that all--sir?"
For a moment, as the smell of real steak reached him, Doc regretted the fact that his metabolism had been switched. Then he shrugged. A little wouldn't hurt him, though there was no proper nourishment in it. He squeezed some of the gravy and bits of meat into one of his bottles, sticking to his purpose; then he fell to on the rest. But after a few bites, it was queerly unsatisfactory. The seemingly unappealing Mars-normal ragout suited his current tastes better, after all.
Once the steward had cleared away the dishes, Doc went to work. It was better than wasting his time in dread. He might even be able to leave some notes behind.
A gong sounded, and a red light warned him that acceleration was due. He finished with his bottles, put them into the incubator, and piled into his bunk, swallowing one of the tablets of morphetal the ship furnished.
Acceleration had ended, and a simple breakfast was waiting when he awoke. There was also a red flashing light over the call board. He flipped the switch while reaching for the coffee.
"Captain Everts," the speaker said. "May I join you in your cabin?"
"Come ahead," Feldman invited. He cut off the switch and glanced at the clock on the wall. There were less than eleven hours left to him.
Everts was a trim man of forty, erect but not rigid. There was neither friendliness nor hostility in his glance. His words were courteous as Doc motioned toward the tray of breakfast. "I've already eaten, thank you."
He accepted a chair. His voice was apologetic when he began. "This is a personal matter which I perhaps have no right to bring up. But my wife is greatly worried about this plague. I violate no confidence in telling you there is considerable unease, even on Earth, according to messages I have received. The ship physician believes Mrs. Everts may have the plague, but isn't sure of the symptoms. I understand you are quite expert."
Doc wondered about the physician. Apparently there was another man who placed his patients above anything else, though he was probably meticulous about obeying all actual rules. There was no law against listening to a pariah, at least.
"When did she have Selznik's migraine?" he asked.
"About thirteen years ago. We went through it together, shortly after having our metabolism switched during the food shortage of '88."
Doc felt carefully at the base of the Captain's skull; the swelling was there. He asked a few questions, but there could be no doubt.
"Both of you must have it, Captain, though it won't mature for another year. I'm sorry."
"There's no hope, then?"
Doc studied the man. But Everts wasn't the sort to dicker even for his life. "Nothing that I've found, Captain. I have a clue, but I'm still working on it. Perhaps if I could leave a few notes for your physician--"
It was Everts' turn to shake his head. "I'm sorry, Dr. Feldman. I have orders to burn out your cabin when you leave. But thank you." He got to his feet and left as quietly and erectly as he had entered.
Doc tore up his notes bitterly. He paced his cabin slowly, reading out the hours while his eyes lingered on the little bottle of cultures. At times the fear grew in him, but he mastered it. There was half an hour left when he began opening the little bottles and making his films.
He was still not finished when steps echoed down the hall, but he was reasonably sure of his results. The bug could not grow in Earth-normal tissue.
Three men entered the room. One of them, dressed in a spacesuit, held out another suit to him. The other two began gathering up everything in the cabin and stowing it neatly into a sack designed to protect freight for a limited time in a vacuum.
Doc forced his hands to steadiness with foolish pride and began climbing into the suit. He reached for the helmet, but the man shook his head, pointing to the oxygen gauge. There would be exactly one hour's supply of oxygen when he was thrown out and it still lacked five minutes of the deadline.
They marched him down the hallway, to meet Everts coming toward them. There were still three minutes left when they reached the airlock, with its inner door already open. The spacesuited man climbed into it and began strapping down so that the rush of air would not sweep him outward when the other seal was released.
Doc had saved one bracky weed. Now he raised it to his lips, fumbling for a light.
Everts stepped forward and flipped a lighter. Doc inhaled deeply. Fear was thick in every muscle, and he needed the smoke desperately. Then he caught himself.
"Better change your metabolism back to Earth-normal, Captain Everts," he said, and his voice was so normal that he hardly recognized it.
Everts' eyes widened briefly. The man bowed faintly. "Thank you, Dr. Feldman."
It was ridiculous, impossible, and yet there was a curious relief at the formality of it. It was like something from a play, too unreal to affect his life.
Everts nodded to the man holding the helmet. Doc dropped his bracky weed and felt the helmet snap down. A hiss of oxygen reached him and the suit ballooned out. There was no gravity; the two men handed him up easily to the one in the airlock while the inner seal began to close.
There was still ten seconds to go, according to the big chronometer that had been installed in the lock. The spaceman used it in tying the sack of possessions firmly to Doc's suit.
A red light went on. The man caught Doc and held him against the outer seal. The red light blinked. Four seconds ... three ... two....
There was a sudden heavy thudding sound, and the Iroquois seemed to jerk sideways slightly. The spaceman's face swung around in surprise.
The red light blinked and stayed on. Zero!
The outer seal snapped open and the spaceman heaved. Air exploded outwards, and Doc went with it. He was alone in space, gliding away from the ship, with oxygen hissing softly through the valve and ticking away his life.
XI
Convert
Feldman fought for control of himself, forced himself to think, to hold onto his sanity. It was sheer stupidity, since nothing could have been more merciful than to lose this reality. But the will to be himself was stronger than logic. And bit by bit, he forced the fear and horror away from him until he could examine his situation.
He was spinning slowly, so that stars ahead of him seemed to crawl across his view. The ship was retreating from him already hundreds of yards away. Mars was a shrunken pill far away.
Then something blinked to one side. He turned his head to stare.
A little ship was less than three hundred yards away. He recognized it as a life raft. Now his spin brought him around to face it, and he saw it was parallelling his course. The ejection of the life raft must have caused the thump he'd heard before he was cast adrift.
It meant someone was trying to save him. It meant life!
He flailed his arms and beat his legs together, senselessly trying to force himself closer, while trying to guess who could have taken the chance. No one he could think of could have booked passage on the Iroquois. There wasn't that much free money in the villages.
Something flashed a hot blue, and the little ship leaped forward. Whoever was handling it knew nothing about piloting. It picked up too much speed at too great an angle.
Again blue spurts came, but this time matters were even worse. Then there was a long wait before a third try was made. He estimated the course. It would miss him by a good hundred feet, but it was probably the best the amateur pilot could do. The ship drifted closer, but to one side. It would soon pass him completely.
A spacesuited figure suddenly appeared in the tiny airlock, holding a coil of rope. The rope shot out, well thrown. But it was too short. It would pass within ten feet--and might as well have been ten miles for all the good it would do him.
Every film he had seen on space seemed to form a mad jumble in his mind, but he seized on the first idea he could remember. He inhaled deeply and yanked the oxygen tank free. An automatic seal on the suit cut off the connection. He aimed the hissing bottle, fumbling for the manual valve.
It almost worked. It kicked him toward the rope slightly, but most of the energy was wasted in setting him into a wilder spin. He blinked, trying to spot the rope. It was within five feet now.
Again he waited, until he seemed to be in position. This time he threw the bottle away from it. It added spin to his vertical axis, but the rope came into view within arm's reach.
He grasped it, just as his lungs seemed about to burst. He couldn't hold on long enough to tie the rope....
His lungs gave up suddenly, collapsing and then sucking in greedily. Clean air rushed in, letting his head clear. He'd forgotten that the inflated suit held enough oxygen for several minutes.
His body struck the edge of the airlock and a hand jerked him inside. The outer seal was slammed shut and locked, and there was a hiss of air entering.
He threw back his helmet just as Chris Ryan jerked hers off.
Her voice shook almost hysterically. "Thank God. Dan, I almost gave up!"
"I liked the air out there better," he told her bitterly. "If you'll open the lock again, I'll leave. Or am I supposed to believe this is rescue and that you came along just to save me?"
"I came along to see you killed, as you know very well. Saving you wasn't in my orders."
He grunted and reached for the handle that would release the outer lock. "Better get back inside if you don't want to blow out with me."
"It's up to you, Dan," she told him, and there was all the sincerity in the world in her blue eyes. "I'm on your side now."
He began counting on his fingers. "Let's see. The spare battery, the delay in arresting me, the choice of Matthews--"
"It was all true." Anger began to grow in her eyes. "Dan Feldman, you get inside this raft! If you don't care about me, you might consider the people dying of the plague who need you!"
She'd played her trump, and it took the round. He followed her.
"All right," he said grudgingly. "Spill your story."
She held out a copy of a space radiogram, addressed to Mrs. D. E. Everts, and signed by one of the best doctors on the Lobby Board of Directors.
Regret confirm diagnosis. Topsecret. Repeat topsecret. Martian fever incubates fourteen years, believed highly fatal. No cure, research beginning immediately. Penalty violation topsecret, death all concerned.
"Mrs. Everts rates a topsecret break?" Doc commented dryly. "Come off it, Chris!"
"She's the daughter of Elmers of Space Lobby!" Chris answered. She pointed to the message, underlining words with her finger. "Fourteen years. You couldn't have caused it. Highly fatal. And people are being told it's only a skin disease. Research beginning. But you've already done most of the research. I can see that now. I can see a lot of things."
"You've got me beat then," he said. "I can't see how such a reformed young noblewoman calmly walked over and stole a life raft. I can't see how your brilliant mind concocted this whole scheme in almost no time. And to be honest, I can't even see why Medical Lobby decided to save me at the last minute and sent you to do the job. You didn't have to spy out knowledge from me. I've been trying all along to get it to your Research division."
She sighed and dropped onto a little seat.
"I can't prove my motives. You'll just have to believe me. But it wasn't hard to do what I've done. That shuttle pilot was found in a routine check, stowed away on the life raft. I was with Captain Everts when he was found, so I discovered how to get into the raft. And I heard his whole confession. He wasn't the real pilot. He'd come from the villages to save you. The whole scheme was his. I just used it, hoping I could reach you."
As always her story had a convincing element she shouldn't have known. The pilot's farewell, addressing him as Dr. Feldman, had been too low for her to hear, but it was something that fitted her story. It was probably a deliberate clue to give him hope, to assure him the villages were still trying. It shook his confidence.
"And your motive--your real motive?" he insisted.
She swore at him, then began ripping off the spacesuit. She turned her back, pulling a thin blouse down from her neck. He stared, then reached out to touch the lump there.
"So you've had Selznik's migraine and know you're carrying plague. And you've decided your precious Lobby won't save you?"
She dropped her eyes, then raised them to meet his defiantly. "I'm not just scared and selfish. Dad caught it, too, and it must be close to the time for him. He switched to Mars-normal when he was a liaison agent and never changed back. Dan, are we all going to have to die? Can't you save him?"
Feldman was out of his suit and at the control panel. There was a manual lever, which Chris must have used before. It might work out here where there was room to maneuver and nothing to hit. But trying to make a landing was going to be different.
"Dan?" she repeated.
He shrugged. "I don't know. They've started research too late and they'll be under so much pressure that the real brains won't have a chance. The topsecret stuff looks bad for research. Maybe there's a cure. It works in culture bottles, but it may fail in person. When I'm convinced I'm safe with you, I may tell you about it."
"Oh." Her voice was low. Then she sighed. "I suppose I can understand why you hate me, Dan."
"I don't hate you. I'm too mixed up. Tomorrow maybe, but not now. Shut up and let me see if I can figure out how to land this thing."
He found that the fuel tanks were nearly full, but that still didn't leave much margin. Mars must have been notified by Everts and be ready to pick the raft up. He had to reach the wastelands away from any of the shuttle ports. They had no aspirators, however, and they couldn't cover much territory in the spacesuits they would have to use. It meant he'd have to land close to a village where he was known.
He jockeyed the ship around by trial and error, studying the manual that was lying prominently on the control panel. According to the booklet, the ship was simple to operate. It was self-leveling in an atmosphere, and automatic flare computers were supposed to make it possible for an amateur to judge the rate of descent near the surface. It looked reassuring--and was probably written with that in mind.
Finally he reached for the control, hoping he'd figured his landing orbit reasonably well by simple logic. He smoothed it out in the following hours as he watched the markings on Mars. When they were near turnover point, he began cranking the little gyroscope to swing the ship. It saved fuel to turn without power, and he wasn't sure he could have turned accurately by blasting.
He was gaining some proficiency, however, he felt. But now he had to waste fuel and ruin his orbit again. There was no way to practice maneuvering without actually doing so.
In the end, he compromised, leaving a small margin for a bad landing that would require a second attempt, but with less practice than he wanted.
He had located Jake's village through the little telescope when he finally reached for the main blast control. The thin haze of Mars' atmosphere came rushing up, while the blast lashed out. Then they were in the outer fringes of the sky and the blast was beginning to show a corona that ruined visibility.
He turned to the flare computer and back to what he could see through the quartz viewport. He was going to land about half a mile from the village, as nearly as he could judge.
The computer seemed to work as it should. The speed was within acceptable limits. He gave up trying to see the ground and was forced to trust the machinery designed for amateur pilots. The flare bloomed, and he yanked down on the little lever.
It could have been worse. They hit the ground, bounced twice, and turned over. The ship was a mess when Feldman freed himself from the elastic straps of the seat. Chris had shrieked as they hit, but she was unbuckling herself now.
He threw her her spacesuit and one of the emergency bottles of oxygen from the rack. "Hurry up with that. We've sprung a leak and the pressure's dropping."
They were halfway to the village when a dozen tractors came racing up and Jake piled out of the lead one to drag the two in with him.
"Heard about it from the broadcasts and figured you might land around here. Good to see you, Doc." He started the tractor off at full speed, back to the wastelands, while Doc stared at the armed men who were riding the tractors.
Jake caught his look and nodded. "You're in enemy territory, Doc. There's a war going on!"
XII
War
Sometimes it seemed to Doc that war was nothing but an endurance race to see how many times they could run before they were bombed. He was just beginning to drop off to sleep after a long trip for the sixth consecutive day when the little alarm shrilled. He sighed and shook Chris awake.
"Again?" she protested. But she got up and began helping him pack.
Jake came in, his eyes weary, pulling on the old jacket with the big star on its sleeve. Doc hadn't been too surprised to learn that Jake was the actual leader of the rebels. "Shuttles spotted taking off this way. And I still can't find where the leak is. They haven't missed our location once this week. Here, give me that."
He took the electron mike that had been among Doc's' possessions, but Chris recaptured it. "I can manage," she told him, and headed out for the tractor where Lou was waiting.
Doc scowled after her. He and Jake had been watching her. She was too useful to Doc's research to be turned away, but they didn't trust her yet. So far, however, they had found nothing wrong with her conduct. Still....
He swung suddenly into Jake's tractor. "Just remembered something. How'd they find me that time I stopped in the tractor to use the mike? I was pretty well hidden, and no tracks last in the sand long enough for them to have followed. But they were there when I came to. Somehow, they must have put a radio tracer on me."
Jake waited while they lighted up, his eyes suddenly bright. "You mean something you got from her house was bugged? It figures."
"And I've still got all the stuff. Now they find wherever we set up headquarters, though they've always managed to miss my laboratory, even when they've hit the troops around us. Jake, I think it's the microscope." Doc managed to push enough junk off one of the seats to make a cramped bed, and stretched out. "Sure, we figured they sent her because they want to keep tabs on what I discover. They've finally gotten scared of the plague, and she's the perfect Judas goat. But they have to have some way to get in touch with her. I'll bet there's a tracer in the mike and a switch so she can modulate it or key it to send out Morse."
"Yeah," Jake nodded. "Well, she does her own dirty work. I might get to like her if she was on our side. Okay, Doc. If they've put things into the mike, I've got a boy who'll find and fix it so she won't guess it's been touched."
Doc relaxed. For the moment, there would be no power in the instrument, nor any excuse for her to use it. But she must have handled some secret arrangement during the work periods. She used the mike more than he did. The switch could be camouflaged easily enough. If anyone detected the signal, they'd probably only think it was some leak in the electrical circuit.
Far away, the shuttle rockets had appeared as tiny dots in the sky. They were standing on their tails a second later, just off the ground, letting the full force of their blasts bake the area where headquarters had been.
Jake watched grimly, driving by something close to instinct. Then he looked back. "Know anything about a Dr. Harkness?"
"Not much, except that he protested sealing off the villages. Why?"
"He and five other doctors were picked up, trying to get through to us. Claimed they wanted to give us medical help. We can use them, God knows. I guess I'll have to chance it."
They stopped at a halfway village and hid the tractors before looking for a place to rest. Doc found Chris curled up asleep against the microscope. He had a hard time getting her to leave it in the tractor, but she was too genuinely tired to put up any real argument.
Jake reported in the morning before they set out again. "You were right, Doc. It was a nice job of work. Must have taken the best guys in Southport to hide the circuit so well. But it's safe now. It just makes a kind of meaningless static nobody can trace. Maybe we can get you a permanent lab now."
Doc debated again having Chris left behind and decided against it. The Lobby was determined to let him find a cure for them if he could. That meant Chris would work herself to exhaustion trying to help. Let her think she was doing it for the Lobby! It was time she was on the receiving end of a double cross.
"It's a stinking way to run a war," he decided.
Jake chuckled without much humor. "It's the war you wanted, remember? They forced our hand, but it had to come sometime. Right now the Lobby's fighting to get their hands on your work before we can use it; they're just using holding tactics, which helps our side. And we're hoping you get the cure so we can win. With that, maybe we'll whip them."
It was a crazy war, with each side killing more of its own men than of the enemy. The runners were increasing, and Jake's army was learning to shoot the poor devils mercifully and go on. They knew, at least, that there was no current danger of infection. In the Lobby towns, more were dying of panic in their efforts to escape the runners.
Desert towns had joined the villages, reluctantly but inevitably, to give the rebels nearly three-quarters of the total population. But the Lobby forces and the few cities held most of the real fighting equipment and they were ready to wait until Earth could send out unmanned rockets, loaded with atomics, which could cut through space at ten times normal speed.
There were vague lines of battle, but time was the vital factor. The Lobbies waited to steal a cure for the plague and the villages waited until they could announce it and demand surrender as its price.
It looked as if both sides were doomed to disappointment, however. He and Chris had put in every spare minute between moving and the minimum of sleep in searching for something that would check the disease. It couldn't grow in an Earth-normal body, but it didn't die, either. And there wasn't enough normal food available to permit the switch-over for more than a handful of people. Even Earth was out of luck, since eighty percent of her population ate synthetics. There were ways to synthesize Earth-normal food, but they were still hopelessly inefficient.
Jake had ordered one of the villages to rebuild their plant for such a purpose, while another was producing the enzyme that would permit switching. But it looked hopeless for more than a few of the most valuable men.
"No progress?" Jake asked for the hundredth time.
Doc grinned wryly. "A lot, but no help. We've found a fine accelerator for the bug. We can speed up its incubation or even make someone already infected catch it all over again. But we can't slow it down or stop it."
The new laboratory was still being fitted when they arrived. It had been dug into one of the few real cliffs in this section of Mars. The power plant had been installed, complete with a steam plant that would operate off sunlight in the daytime through a series of heat valves that took in a lot of warm air and produced smaller amounts hot enough to boil water.
"I'll see you whenever I can," Jake said. "But mostly, you're going to be somewhat isolated so they won't trace you. Let them think they goofed with the shuttles and hit you and Chris. Anything you need?"
"Guinea pigs," Doc told him sarcastically. It was meant as a joke, though a highly bitter one. Jake nodded and left them.
Doc opened the cots as Chris came in, not bothering to unpack the equipment. "Hit the sack, Chris," he told her.
She looked at him doubtfully. "You almost said that the way you'd address a human being, Dan. You're slipping. One of these days you'll like me again."
"Maybe." He was too tired to argue. "I doubt it, though. Forget it and get some sleep."
She watched him silently until he got up to turn out the light. Then she sighed heavily. "Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"I never got a divorce. The publicity would have been bad. But anyway, we're still married."
"That's nice." He swung to face her briefly. "And they found the radio in the microscope. Better get to sleep, Chris."
"Oh." It was a quiet exclamation, barely audible. There was a sound that might have been a sniffle if it had come from anyone else. Then she rolled over. "All right, Dan. I still want to help you."
He cursed himself for a stupid fool for telling her. Fatigue was ruining what judgment he had. From now on, he'd have to watch her every minute. Or had she really seen the value of the research by now? She wasn't a fool. It should have registered on even her stubborn mind. But he was too sleepy to think about it.
She had breakfast ready in the morning. She made no comment on what had been said during the night. Instead, she began discussing a way to keep one of the organic antibiotics from splitting into simpler compounds when they tried to switch it over to Mars-normal. They were both hopelessly bad chemists and biologists, but there was no one else to do the work.
Chris worked harder than ever during the day.
Just after sundown, Jake came in with a heavy box. He dropped it onto the floor. "Mice!"
Doc ripped off the cover, exposing fine screening. There were at least six dozen mice inside!
"Harkness found them," Jake explained. "A hormone extraction plant used them for testing some of the products. Had them sent by regular shipments from Earth. Getting them cost a couple of men, but Harkness claims it's worth it. He's a good man on a raid. Here!"
He'd gone to the doorway again and came back with another box, this one crammed with bottles and boxes. "They had quite a laboratory, and Harkness picked out whatever he thought you could use."
Chris and Doc were going through it. The labels were engineering ones, but the chemical formulae were identification enough. There were dozens of chemicals they hadn't hoped to get.
"Anything else?" Doc finally asked as they began arranging the supplies.
"More runners. A lot more. We're still holding things down, but it's reaching a limit. Panic will start in the camps if this keeps on. But that's my worry. You stick to yours."
Several of the new chemicals showed promise in the tubes. But two of them proved fatal to the mice and the others were completely innocuous in the little animal's bodies, both to mouse and to germ. The plague was much hardier in contact with living cells than in the artificial environment of the culture jars.
They lost seven mice in two days, but that seemed unimportant; the females were already living up to their reputations, nearly all pregnant. Doc didn't know the gestation period, but he remembered that it was short.
"Funny they all started at the same time," he commented. "Must have been shipped out separately or else been kept apart while they were switched over to Mars-normal. Something interrupted their habits, anyhow."
A few nights later they learned what it was. There was a horrible squealing that woke him out of the depths of his sleep. Chris was already at the light switch. As light came on, they turned to the mouse box.
All the animals were charging about in their limited space, their little legs driving madly and their mouths open. What they lacked in size they made up in numbers, and the din was terrific.
But it didn't last. One by one, the mice began dropping to the floor of the cage. In fifteen minutes, they were all dead!
It was obviously the plague, contracted after having their metabolism switched. Women were sterile for some time after Selznik's migraine struck, and the same must have been true of the mice. They must have contracted the plague at about the same time and reached fertility together. Somehow, the plague incubation period had been shortened to fit their life span; the disease was nothing if not adaptive.
Chris prepared a slide in dull silence. The familiar cell was there when Doc looked through the microscope. He picked up one of the little creatures and cut it open, removing one of the foetuses.
"Make a film of that," he suggested.
She worked rapidly, scraping out the almost microscopic brain, dissolving out the fatty substance, and transferring the result to a film. This time, even at full magnification, there was no sign of the filaments that were always present in diseased flesh. The results were the same for the other samples they made.
"Something about the very young animal or a secretion from the mother's organs keeps the bug from working." Doc reached for a bracky weed and accepted a light from Chris without thinking of it. "Every kid I've heard about contracted the plague between the second and third year. None are born with it, none get it earlier. I've suspected this, but now here's confirmation."
Chris began preparing specimens, while Doc got busy with tubes of the culture. They'd have to test various fluids from the tiny bodies, but there were enough cultures prepared. Then, if the substance only inhibited growth, there would be a long, slow test; if it killed the bugs, they might know more quickly.
Jake came in before the final tests, but waited on them. Doc was studying a film in the microscope. He suddenly motioned excitedly for Chris.
"See the filaments? They're completely disintegrated. And there's one of the big cells broken open. We've got it! It's in the blood of the foetus. And it must be in the blood of newborn children, too!"
Jake looked at the slide, but his face was doubtful.
"Maybe you've got something, Doc. I hope so. And I hope you can use it." He shook his head wearily. "We need good news right now. A couple of big rockets just reached the station and they've been sending shuttles back and forth a mile a minute. Nobody can figure how they got here so fast or what they're for. But it doesn't look good for us!"
XIII
Susceptibility
Doc could feel the tension in the village where GHQ was temporarily located long before they were close enough for details to register. The people were gathered in clusters, staring at the sky where the station must be. A few were pacing up and down, gesticulating with tight sweeps of their arms.
One woman suddenly went into even more violent action. She leaped into the air and then took off at a rapid trot, then a run. Her hands were tearing at her clothes and her mouth seemed to be working violently. She was halfway to the top of the nearest dune before a rifle cracked. She dropped, to twitch once and lie still.
Almost with her death, another figure leaped from one of the houses, his face bare of the necessary aspirator. He took off at a violent run, but he was falling from lack of air before the bullet ended his struggles.
The people suddenly began to move apart, as if trying to get away from each other. For weeks they had faced the horror with courage; now it was finally too much for them.
Tension mounted as no news came from the cities. Doc noticed that it seemed to aggravate or speed up the disease. He saw three men shot in the next half-hour.
He was trying to calm them with word of a possible cure for the plague, but their reactions were as curiously dull as those of Jake had been. As he spoke, they faced him with set expressions. At his mention of the need for the blood of young children, they turned from him, sullenly silent.
Jake came over, nodding unhappily. "It's what I was afraid might happen, Doc. George Lynn! Tell Doc what's wrong."
Lynn was reluctant, but he finally stumbled out his explanation. "It ain't like you, Doc. Comes from that Lobby woman you got. It's her dirty idea. We've seen the Lobby doctors cutting open our kids, poisoning their blood, and bleeding them dry. That ain't gonna happen again, Doc. You tell her it ain't!"
Doc swore as he realized their ignorance. An unexplained vaccination looked like poisoning of the blood. But he couldn't understand the bleeding part until Jake filled him in.
"Northport infant's wing. Each department has its own blood bank and donation is compulsory. Southport started it a couple months ago, too."
The long arm of the Lobby had reached out again. Now if he ever got them to try the treatment, it would be only after long sessions of preparing them with the facts, and there was hardly enough time for the crucial work!
By afternoon, Judge Ben Wilson reached them. His voice shook with fatigue as he climbed up to address the crowd through a power megaphone. "Southport's going crazy." He had to pause for breath between each sentence. "Earth's pulling back all the important people. They're packing them into the ships. They're leaving only colonials with no Earth rights. Those ships left when they decided the plague was coming from here. They won't let anybody back until the plague is licked. There won't be an Earth technician on Mars tomorrow."
"No bombs?" someone called.
"No bombs. The ships must have started before you rebelled, maybe meant honestly to save their own kind. But now it's a military action, and don't think it won't mean trouble. The poor devils in the city bet on the wrong horse. Now they can't run their food factories or anything else for long. Not without technicians. They've got to whip you now. Up to this time, they've been fighting for the Lobbies. Now they'll fight you for their own bellies to get your supplies. And they've still got shuttle rockets and fuel for them. Now beat it. I gotta confer with Jake."
Doc started after the judge, but Dr. Harkness caught his arm and drew him aside. Chris followed.
"I've found another epidemic," Harkness told them. "Over at Marconi. It's kept me on the run all night, and now half the village is down with it. Starts like a common cold, runs a fair fever, and the skin breaks out all over with bright red dots...."
He went on describing it. Chris began asking him about what medical supplies he had brought with him, pilfered from Northport hospital. She seemed to know what it was, but refused to say until she saw the cases. Doc also preferred to wait. Sometimes things weren't as bad as they seemed, though usually they were worse.
Marconi was dead to all outward appearances, with nobody on the streets. It had been a village of great hopes a week before, since this was where they had decided to experiment with switching the people back to Earth-normal. They'd had the best chance of survival of anyone on Mars until this came up.
Three people lay on the beds in the first house Harkness led them to. The room was darkened, and a man was stumbling around, trying to tend the others, though the little spots showed on his skin. He grinned weakly. "Hi, Doc. I guess we're making a lot of trouble, ain't we?"
Chris gave Doc no chance to answer. "Just as I thought. Measles! Plain old-fashioned measles."
"Figured so," the sick man said. "Like my brother back on Earth."
The others looked doubtful, but Doc reassured them. Chris should know; she'd worked in a swanky hospital where the patients were mostly Earth-normal. Measles was one of the diseases which was foiled by the metabolism switch. Well, at least they wouldn't have to be quarantined here.
Chris finished treating the family with impersonal efficiency, discussing the symptoms loudly with Harkness. "It's a good thing it isn't serious!"
"No," Harkness answered bitterly. "Not serious. It's only killed five children and three adults so far!"
"It would, here," Doc agreed unhappily. He led Chris out of the room on the pretext of washing his hands. "It's serious enough to force us to abandon the whole idea of going back to Earth-normal. Measles today, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever and everything else tomorrow. These people have lived Mars-normal so long their natural immunity has been destroyed. On Earth where the disease was everywhere, kids used to pick up some immunity with constant exposure, even without what might be called a case of the disease. Here, the blood has no reason to build antibodies. They can be killed by things people used to laugh at. How the disease got here, I don't know. But it's here. So we'll have to give up the idea of switching back to Earth-normal."
He gathered up one of the kits and started toward the other houses. "And Lord knows how long it will take to get the blood for the other treatment, even if it works."
They worked as a team for a while, with Harkness frowning as he watched Chris. Finally the young doctor stopped Chris outside the fifth house. "These are my patients, Dr. Ryan. I left the Lobby because I didn't believe colonials were mere livestock. I still feel the same. I appreciate your help in diagnosis and methods of treatment. But I can't let you handle my patients this way."
"Dan!" She swung around with eyes glazing. "Dan, are you going to stand for that?"
"I think you'd better wait in the tractor, Chris."
He was lucky enough to catch the kit she threw at him before its precious contents spilled. But it wasn't luck that guided his hand to the back of her skirt hard enough to leave it stinging.
Her face froze and she stormed out. A moment later they heard the tractor start off.
But Doc had no time to think of her. He and Harkness split up and began covering the streets, house by house, while he passed on the word to abandon the metabolism switch and go back to Mars-normal.
Jake sent two other doctors to relieve them late in the evening. Things were somewhat quieter at GHQ as Doc reported the events at Marconi.
"Where's Dr. Ryan?" Jake asked at last.
Doc exchanged glances with Harkness. "She isn't in the lab?"
"Wasn't there an hour ago."
Doc cursed himself for letting her go. With the knowledge that the radio in the mike was disabled, she'd obviously grabbed the first chance to report back. And with her had gone news of the only cure they had found.
Jake took it as philosophically as he could, though it was a heavy blow to his hopes. They spent half the night looking for her tractor, on the chance that she might have gotten lost or broken down, but there was no sign of it.
She was waiting in the laboratory when he returned at dawn. Her face was dirty and her uniform was a mess. But she was smiling. She got up to greet him, holding out two large bottles.
"Infant plasma--straight from Southport. And if you think I had it easy lying my way in and out of the hospital, you're a fool, Dan Feldman. If the man who took my place there hadn't been a native idiot, I never would have gotten away with it."
The things he had suspected could still be right, he realized. She could have reported everything to the Lobby. It was a better explanation than her vague account of bullying her way in and out. But she'd had a rough drive, and he wanted the plasma. Curiously, he was glad to have her back with him. He reached out a hand for the bottles.
She put the bottle on the table and grabbed up a short-bladed knife. "Not so fast," she cried. Her eyes were blazing now. "Dan Feldman, if you touch those bottles until you've crawled across the floor on your face and apologized for the way you treated me the last few days, I'll cut your damned heart out."
He shook his head, chuckling at the picture she made. There were times when he could almost see why he'd married her.
"All right, Chris," he gave in. "I'll be darned if I'll crawl, but you've earned an apology. Okay?"
She sighed uncertainly. Then she nodded and began changing for work.
XIV
Immunity
They worked through the day in what seemed to be armed truce. There was no coffee waiting for him when he awoke next, as he'd come to expect, but he didn't comment. He went to where she was already working, checking on the results of the plasma on the cultures.
The response had been slower than with the mouse blood, but now the bugs seemed to be dead. The filaments were destroyed, and there were no signs of the big cells. It seemed to be a cure, at least in the culture bottles.
"We'll need volunteers," he decided. "There should be animals, but we don't have any. At least this stuff isn't toxic. We need a natural immune and someone infected. Two of each, so one can be treated and the other used for a control. Makes four. Not enough to be sure, but it will have to do."
"Two," Chris corrected. "You're not infected, I am."
"Two others," he agreed. "I'll get them from Jake."
Most of GHQ was out on the street, but Doc found Jake inside the big schoolroom where he enjoyed his early morning bracky and coffee. The chief listened and agreed at once, turning to the others in the room.
"Who's had the jumping headache? Okay, Swanee. Who never had it?" He blinked in surprise as three men nodded out of the eight present. "I guess you go, Tom."
The two men stood up, tamping out their weeds, and went out with Doc.
Chris had everything set up. They matched coins to decide who would be treated. Doc noticed that Chris would get no plasma, while he was scheduled for everything. He watched her prepare the culture and add the accelerator that would speed development and make certain he and Tom were infected, then let her inject it.
That was all, except for the waiting. To keep conditions more closely alike, they were to stay there until the tests were finished, not even eating for fear of upsetting the conditions. Swanee dug out a pack of worn cards and began to deal while Doc dug out some large pills to use as chips.
It was an hour later when the pain began. Doc had just won the pot of fifty pills and opened his mouth for the expected gloating. He yelled as an explosion seemed to go off inside his head. Even closing his mouth was agony.
A moment later, Tom began to sweat. It got worse, spreading to the whole area of the back of the head and neck. Doc lay on the cot, envying Chris and Swanee who had already been infected naturally. He longed desperately for bracky, and had to keep reminding himself that no drugs must upset the tests. It was the longest day he had ever spent, and he began to doubt that he could get through it. He watched the little clock move from one minute to nine over to half a minute and hung breathless until it hit the nine. There was no question about whether the infection had taken. Now they could dull the agony.
Chris had the anodyne tablets already dissolved in water, and Swanee was passing out three lighted bracky weeds. It took a few minutes for the relief of the anodyne, and even that couldn't kill all the pain. But it didn't matter by comparison. He sucked the weed, mashed it out and began dealing the cards again.
They had a plentiful supply of the anodyne and used it liberally during the night. The test was a speeded-up simulation of the natural course of the disease, where painkiller would take time to get for most people here, but would then be used generously.
Precisely at nine in the morning, Chris began to inject Swanee and Doc with plasma.
Now there was no thought of cards. They waited, trying to talk, but with most of their attention on the clock. Doc had estimated that an hour should be enough to show results, but it was hard to remember that an hour was the guess as to the minimum time.
He winced as Chris took a tiny bit of flesh from his neck. She went to the other men, and then submitted to his work on herself. Then she began preparing the slides.
"Feldman," she read the name of the slide as she inserted it into the microscope. Then her breath caught sharply. "Only dead cells!"
It was the same for Swanee and Tom. Each had to look at his own slide and have it explained before the results could be believed. But at last Chris bent over her own slide. A minute later she glanced up, nodding. "What it should be. It checks."
Tom whooped and went out the door to notify Jake. There was only plasma for some two hundred injections, but that should yield sufficient proof. Once salvation was offered, there should be no trouble convincing the people that blood donations from their children were worthwhile.
Later, when the last of the plasma had been used, they could finally relax. Chris slipped off her smock and dropped onto the cot. A tired smile came onto her lips. "You're forgiven, Dan," she said. A moment later she was obviously asleep. Doc meant to join her, but it was too much effort. He leaned his head forward onto his arms, vaguely wondering why she was calling off the feud.
It was night outside when he awoke, and he was lying on the cot, though he still felt cramped and strained. He stirred, groaning, and finally realized that a hand was on his shoulder shaking him. He looked up to see Jake above him. Chris was busy with the coffee maker.
Jake slumped onto the cot beside Doc. "We took Southport," he announced.
That knocked the sleep out of Doc's system. "You what?"
"We took it, lock, stock and barrel. I figured the news of your cure would put guts into the men, and it did. But we'd probably have taken it anyhow. There wasn't anything to fight for there after Earth pulled out and the plague really hit. Wilson mistook last-minute panic for fighting spirit. The poor devils didn't have anything to fight about, once the Lobby stopped goading them."
Doc tried to assimilate the news. But once the surprise was gone, he found it meant very little. Maybe his revolutionary zeal had cooled, once the Lobby men had pulled out. "We'll need a lot more plasma than there is in Southport," he said.
"Not so much, maybe," Jake denied. "Doc, three of the men you injected were shot down as runners. Your plasma's no good."
"It takes time to work, Jake. I told you there might be a case or two that would be too close to the edge. Three is more than I expected; but it's not impossible."
"There was plenty of time. They blew after we got back from Southport." Jack dropped his hand on Doc's shoulder, and his face softened. "Harkness tested every man you injected. He finished half an hour ago. Five showed dead bugs. The rest of them weren't helped at all."
Doc fumbled for a weed, trying to think. But his thoughts refused to focus. "Five!"
"Five out of two hundred. That's about average. And what about Tom? He was jumping around after the test last night, telling how you'd cured him, how he'd seen the dead bugs; but he never had the jumping headache, and you never gave him the plasma! He's got dead bugs, though. Harkness tested him."
Doc let his realization of his own idiocy sink in until he could believe it. Jake was right. Tom had never been treated, yet Chris had reported dead bugs. They'd all been so ready to believe in miracles that no one had been able to think straight after the long wait.
"There was a bump on his neck--a small one," he said slowly. "Jake, he must have caught it, even if he seemed immune. If he was taking anodyne anyway for something--or unconscious--"
"He was up in Northport six years ago for a kidney operation," Jake admitted doubtfully. "We had to chip in to pay for it. But you still didn't treat him, and he's cured. Face it, Doc, that plasma is no good inside the body."
His hand tightened on Doc's shoulder again. "We're not blaming you. We don't judge a man here except by what he is. Maybe the stuff helps a little. We'll go on using it when we get it; tell everybody you were a mite optimistic, so they'll figure it's a gamble, but have a little hope left. And you keep trying. Something cured it in Tom. Now you find out what."
Doc watched him go out numbly, and turned to Chris.
"It can't be right," she said shakily. "You and Swanee were cured. Maybe it was the accelerator. It had to be something."
"You didn't have the accelerator," he accused.
"No, and I've still got live bugs. I was never supposed to be cured, so I expected to see just what I saw. How I missed the fact that Tom should have been like me, I don't know. Damn it, oh, damn it!"
He's never seen her cry before, except in fury. But she mastered it almost at once, shaking tears out of her eyes. "All right. Plasma works in a bottle but not in an adult body. Maybe something works in the body but not in a bottle."
"Maybe. And maybe some people are just naturally immune after it reaches a certain stage. Maybe we ran into coincidence."
But he didn't believe that, any more than she did. The answer had to be in the room. He'd taken a massive dose of the disease and been cured in a few hours.
Outside the room, the war went on, drawing toward a close. The supposed partial cure was good propaganda, if nothing else, and Jake was widening his territory steadily. There was only token resistance against him. He had the Southport shuttles now to cover huge areas in a hurry. But inside the room, the battle was less successful. It wasn't the accelerator. It wasn't the tablets of anodyne. They even tried sweeping the floor and using the dust without results.
Then another test in the room, made with four volunteers Jake selected, yielded complete cures after injections with plain salt water in place of plasma.
The plague speeded up again. About four people out of a hundred now seemed to have caught the disease and cured themselves. They accounted for what faith was left in Doc's plasma and gave some unfounded hope to the others.
Northport fell a week later, putting the whole planet in rebel hands.
Jake returned, wearier than ever. He'd proved to be one of the natural immunes, but the weight of the campaign that could only end in a defeat by the plague left him no room to rejoice in his personal fortune.
This time he looked completely defeated. And a moment later, Doc saw why as Jake flipped a flimsy sheet onto the table. It bore the seals of Space and Medical Lobbies.
Jake pointed upwards. "The war rockets are there, all right. We knew they'd come. Now all they want for calling them off is our surrender and your cure. If they don't get both, they'll blow the planet to bits. We have two days."
The rockets could be seen clearly with binoculars. There were more than enough to destroy all life on the planet. Maybe they'd be used eventually, anyhow, since the Lobbies wanted no more rebellion. But with a cure for the plague, he might have bought them off.
Chris stood beside him, looking as if it were a bitter pill for her, too. She'd risked herself in the hands of the enemy, had cooperated with him in everything she'd been taught to oppose, and had worked like a dog. Now the Lobbies seemed to forget her as a useless tool. They were falling back on a raw power play and forgetting any earlier schemes.
"Maybe they'd hold off for a while if I agreed to go to them and share all my ideas, specimens and notes," he said at last. "Do you think your Lobby would settle for that, Chris?"
"I don't know, Dan. I've stopped thinking their way." She seemed almost apologetic for the admission.
He dropped an arm over her shoulder and turned with her back to the laboratory. "Okay, then we've got to find a miracle. We've got two days ahead of us. At least we can try."
But he knew he was lying to himself. There wasn't anything he could think of to try.
XV
Decision
Two days was never enough time for a miracle. Doc decided as he packed his notes into a small bag and put it beside his bundle of personal belongings. He glanced around the room for the last time, and managed a grin at Jake's gloomy expression.
"Maybe I can bluff them, or maybe they'll string along for a while," he said. "Anyhow, now that they've agreed to take me and my notes in place of the cure we're fresh out of, I've got to be on that shuttle when it goes back to their men at orbital station."
Jake nodded. "I don't like selling friends down the river, Doc. But it wouldn't do you any more good to blow up with the planet, I reckon. They won't call off the war rockets when they do get you, of course. But maybe they won't use them, except as a threat to put the Lobbies back in, stronger than ever."
He stuck out one of his awkwardly shaped hands, clapped the aspirator over his face and hurried out. Doc picked up his bags and went toward the little tractor where Lou was waiting to drive him and Chris back toward Southport and the shuttle rocket that would be landing for them. They hadn't mentioned Chris in their demands, but her father must expect her to return.
After they had him, he'd be on his own. His best course was probably to insist on talking only to Ryan at Medical Lobby, and then being completely honest. The room here would be kept sealed, in case the Lobby wanted to investigate where he had failed. And his notes were honest, which was something that could usually be determined. Chris could testify to that, anyhow, since she'd kept a lot of them for him.
At best, there would be a chance for some compromise and perhaps some clue for them that might eventually end the plague. They had enough men to work on it, and billions in equipment. At worst, he should gain a little time.
"Cheer up, Chris," he told her as he climbed through the little airlock. "Maybe Harkness will turn up the cure before our negotiations break down. He has the whole of Northport Hospital to play with. They haven't tried to chase him out of there yet. After all, we almost found something with no equipment except wild imaginations."
She shook her head as the tractor began moving. "Shut up! I've got enough trouble without your coming down with logorrhea. Don't be a fool."
"Why change now?" he asked her. "Everything I've done has been because I am a fool. I guess my luck lasted longer than I could expect. And I'm still fool enough to think that the solution has to turn up eventually. We know it has to be in that room. Damn it, we must know it--if we could only think straight now."
She reached over and touched his hand, but made no comment. They had been over that statement of desperation too many times already. But it kept nagging at him--something in the room, something in the room! Something so common that nobody noticed it!
They passed a crowd chasing down a runner. Something in that room could have saved the unlucky man. It could have saved Mars, perhaps.
He growled for the hundredth time, cursing his fatigue-numbed mind. Too little sleep, too much coffee and bracky....
He reached for the package of weed, realizing that he would miss it on Earth, if he ever got there. Like everything here on the planet, he'd begun by detesting it and wound up finding it the thing he wanted to keep forever. He lighted the bracky and sat smoking, watching Lou drive. When the first was finished, he lighted another from the butt.
She put out a hand and took it away. "Please, Dan. I can stand the stuff, but I'll never like it, and the tractor's stuffy enough already. I've taken enough of it. And it keeps reminding me of our test--the three of you stinking up the place, puffing and blowing that out, while I couldn't even get a breath of air...."
She was getting logorrhea herself now and--
The answer finally hit him! He jerked around, making a grab for Lou's shoulder, motioning for the man to head back.
"Bracky--it has to be! Chris, that's it. Jake picked out the second group of men from his friends--and they are all cronies because they hang around so much in their so-called smoking room. The first time, it killed the bugs for all of us who smoked--and it didn't work for you because you never learned the habit."
Lou had the tractor turned and the rheostat all the way to the floor.
She was sitting up now, but she wasn't fully satisfied. "The percentage of immunes seems about right. But why do some of the smokers get the disease while some don't?"
"Why not? It depends on whether they pick up the habit before or after the disease gets started. Tom must have got his while he was in Northport. They wouldn't let him smoke there--if he had the habit before, for that matter."
She found no fault with that. He twisted it back and forth in his mind, trying to find a fault. There seemed to be none. The only trouble was that they couldn't send a message that bracky was the cure and hope that Earth would prove it true. No polite note of apology would do after that. They had to be sure. Too many other ideas had proved wrong already.
Jake saw them coming and came running toward the laboratory, but Lou stopped the tractor before it reached the building and let the older man in.
"Get me a dozen men who have the plague. I want the worst cases you have, and ones that Harkness tested himself," Doc ordered. "And then start praying that the cure we've got works fast."
Chris was at the electron mike at once, but one of her hands reached out for the weed. She began puffing valiantly, making sick faces. Now other men began coming in, their faces struggling to find hope, but not daring to believe yet. Jake followed them.
"We'll test at ten-minute intervals. That will be about two hours for the last from the group," Doc decided. One of the doctors Harkness had brought to the villages was busy cutting tiny sections from the lumps on the men's necks, while Chris ran them through the microscope to make sure the bugs were still alive. The regular optical mike was strong enough for that.
Doc handed each man a bracky weed, with instructions to keep smoking, no matter how sick it made him.
There were no results at the end of ten minutes when the first test was made. The second, at the end of twenty minutes, was still infected with live bugs. At the half-hour, Chris frowned.
"I can't be sure--take a look, Dan."
He bent over, moving the slide to examine another spot. "I think so. The next one should tell."
There was no doubt about the fourth test. The bugs were dead, without a single exception that they could find.
One by one, the men were tested and went storming out, shouting the news. For a minute, the gathering crowd was skeptical, remembering the other failures. Then, abruptly, men were screaming, crying and fighting for the precious bracky, like the legions of the damned grabbing for lottery tickets when the prize was a passport to paradise.
Jake swore as he moved toward the door. "We're low on bracky here. Have to get a supply from Edison, I guess, and cart it to the shuttle. Enough for a sample, and to make them want more. It'll be tough, but we'll get it there in time--by the time the shuttle should be picking you up. Doc, you've won our war! From now on, if Earth wants to keep her population up, we'll be a free planet!"
Chris turned slowly from the microscope, holding a slide in her hands. "My bugs," she said unbelievingly. "Dan, they're dead!"
Jake patted her shoulder. "That makes it perfect, girl. Now come on. We've got to start celebrating a victory!"
* * * * *
It was the general feeling of most of the heads of the villages when they met the next day in Southport, using the courtroom that had been presided over so long by Judge Ben Wilson. It was victory, and to the victor belonged the spoils. The bracky had gone out to Earth on a converted war rocket that could make the trip in less than two weeks, and one packet had been specially labeled for Captain Everts. But Earth had already confirmed the cure. The small amounts of the herb found in the botanical collections had been enough to satisfy all doubts.
Harkness, Chris and Doc had been fighting against the desire to rob Earth blind that filled most of the men here for hours now. Now they had the backing of Jake and Ben Wilson. And now finally they leaned back, sensing that the argument had been won.
Bargaining was all right in its place, but it had no place in affairs of life and death such as this. They had to see that Earth received all the bracky she needed. It was only right to charge a fair price for it, but they couldn't restrict it by withholding or overcharging. And they could still gain their ends without blackmail.
Martian alkaloids were tricky things, and bracky smoke contained a number of them. It would take Earth at least ten years to discover and synthesize the right one--and it would still probably cost more than it would to import the weed from Mars. As long as the source of that weed was here, and in the hands of the colonials, there would be no danger of Earth's bombing the planet.
Harkness got up to underscore a point Wilson had made. "The plague lived a million years, and it won't disappear now. The jumping headache, or Selznick's migraine, is unpleasant enough to make us reasonably sure that there will be a steady consumption of the weed. Our problem will be to keep the children from using too much of it, probably." He pulled a weed out and lighted it, puckering his face as the smoke bit his tongue. "I'm told that this gets to be an enjoyable habit. If I can believe that, surely you can believe me when I say we don't have to bargain with lives."
The village men were human, and most of them could remember the strain they had been under when they expected those they loved to die at any hour. It had made them crave vengeance, but now as they had a chance to reexamine it, they began to find it harder to impose the horror of any such threat on others. The final vote was almost unanimous.
Doc listened as they wrangled over the wording of the message to Earth, feeling disconnected from it. He passed Chris a bracky and lighted it for her. She took it automatically, smiling as the smoke hit her lungs. It was one thing they had in common now, at least.
Ben Wilson finally read the message.
"To the people of Earth, greetings!
"On behalf of the free people of Mars, I have the honor to announce that this planet hereby declares itself a sovereign and independent world. We shall continue to regard Earth as our mother, and to consider the health and welfare of her people in no way second to our own in matters which affect both planets. We trust that Earth will share this feeling of mutual friendship. We trust that all strains of hostility will be ended. The advantages to each from peaceful commerce make any course other than the most cordial of relations unthinkable.
"We shall consider proof of such friendship an order by Earth to all rockets circling this planet that they shall deliver themselves safely into our hands, in order that we may begin converting them to peaceful purposes for the trade that is to come. In turn, we pledge that all efforts will be made to ensure a prompt delivery of those products most in demand, including the curative bracky plant."
He turned to Doc then. "You want to sign it, Dr. Feldman? Make it as acting president or something, until we can get around to voting you into permanent office."
"You and Jake fight over the job," Doc told him. "No, Ben, I mean it."
He got up and moved out into the outer room, where he could avoid the stares of amazement that were turned to him. He'd never asked for the honor, and he didn't want it.
Chris came with him. Her face was shocked and something was slowly draining out of it as he looked at her.
"Forget it, Chris," he said. "You're going back to Earth. There is nothing for you here."
She hadn't quite given up. "There could be, Dan. You know that."
"No. No, Chris, I don't think there ever can be. You can't find a man strong enough to rule who'll be weak enough to let you rule in his place. It didn't work on Earth, and it won't work here. Forget the dreams you had of what could be done with a new planet. Those are the dreams that made a mess of the old one."
"I'll be back," she told him. "Some day I'll be back."
He shook his head again. "No. You wouldn't like what you find here. Freedom is heady stuff, but you have to have a taste for it. You can't acquire a fondness for it secondhand. And for a while, there's going to be freedom here. Besides, once you get back to Earth, you'll forget what happened here."
She sighed at last. For the first time since he had known her, she seemed to give in completely. And for that brief moment, he loved what she could have been, but never would be.
"All right, Dan," she said quietly. "I can't fight you. I never could, I see now. I'll take the rocket back. What are you going to do?"
He hadn't bothered to think, but he knew the answer. "Research. What else?"
There would be a lot of research done here. It had been suppressed too long, and had piled up a back-pressure that would have to be relieved. And from that research, he suspected, would come the end of the stable oligarchy of Earth. It could never stand against the changes that would be pouring out of Mars.
She put her hands on his shoulders and moved forward to kiss him. He bent down to meet her, and found her eyes were wet. Maybe his were, too. Then she broke free.
"You're a fool, Dan Feldman," she whispered, and began moving down the hallway and out of the council hall of Mars.
Doc Feldman nodded slowly as he let her go. He was a fool. He had always been a fool, and always would be. And that was why he could never take over leadership here. Fools and idealists should never govern a world. It took practical men such as Jake to do that.
But the practical men needed the foolish idealists, too. And maybe for a time here on Mars their kind of men and his kind of fools could make one more stab at the ancient puzzle of freedom.
Outside the war rockets of Earth began landing quietly on the free soil of Mars.
SECOND VARIETY
By Philip K. Dick
The claws were bad enough in the first place--nasty, crawling little death-robots. But when they began to imitate their creators, it was time for the human race to make peace--if it could!
The Russian soldier made his way nervously up the ragged side of the hill, holding his gun ready. He glanced around him, licking his dry lips, his face set. From time to time he reached up a gloved hand and wiped perspiration from his neck, pushing down his coat collar.
Eric turned to Corporal Leone. "Want him? Or can I have him?" He adjusted the view sight so the Russian's features squarely filled the glass, the lines cutting across his hard, somber features.
Leone considered. The Russian was close, moving rapidly, almost running. "Don't fire. Wait." Leone tensed. "I don't think we're needed."
The Russian increased his pace, kicking ash and piles of debris out of his way. He reached the top of the hill and stopped, panting, staring around him. The sky was overcast, drifting clouds of gray particles. Bare trunks of trees jutted up occasionally; the ground was level and bare, rubble-strewn, with the ruins of buildings standing out here and there like yellowing skulls.
The Russian was uneasy. He knew something was wrong. He started down the hill. Now he was only a few paces from the bunker. Eric was getting fidgety. He played with his pistol, glancing at Leone.
"Don't worry," Leone said. "He won't get here. They'll take care of him."
"Are you sure? He's got damn far."
"They hang around close to the bunker. He's getting into the bad part. Get set!"
The Russian began to hurry, sliding down the hill, his boots sinking into the heaps of gray ash, trying to keep his gun up. He stopped for a moment, lifting his fieldglasses to his face.
"He's looking right at us," Eric said.
* * * * *
The Russian came on. They could see his eyes, like two blue stones. His mouth was open a little. He needed a shave; his chin was stubbled. On one bony cheek was a square of tape, showing blue at the edge. A fungoid spot. His coat was muddy and torn. One glove was missing. As he ran his belt counter bounced up and down against him.
Leone touched Eric's arm. "Here one comes."
Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of mid-day. A metal sphere. It raced up the hill after the Russian, its treads flying. It was small, one of the baby ones. Its claws were out, two razor projections spinning in a blur of white steel. The Russian heard it. He turned instantly, firing. The sphere dissolved into particles. But already a second had emerged and was following the first. The Russian fired again.
A third sphere leaped up the Russian's leg, clicking and whirring. It jumped to the shoulder. The spinning blades disappeared into the Russian's throat.
Eric relaxed. "Well, that's that. God, those damn things give me the creeps. Sometimes I think we were better off before."
"If we hadn't invented them, they would have." Leone lit a cigarette shakily. "I wonder why a Russian would come all this way alone. I didn't see anyone covering him."
Lt. Scott came slipping up the tunnel, into the bunker. "What happened? Something entered the screen."
"An Ivan."
"Just one?"
Eric brought the view screen around. Scott peered into it. Now there were numerous metal spheres crawling over the prostrate body, dull metal globes clicking and whirring, sawing up the Russian into small parts to be carried away.
"What a lot of claws," Scott murmured.
"They come like flies. Not much game for them any more."
Scott pushed the sight away, disgusted. "Like flies. I wonder why he was out there. They know we have claws all around."
A larger robot had joined the smaller spheres. It was directing operations, a long blunt tube with projecting eyepieces. There was not much left of the soldier. What remained was being brought down the hillside by the host of claws.
"Sir," Leone said. "If it's all right, I'd like to go out there and take a look at him."
"Why?"
"Maybe he came with something."
Scott considered. He shrugged. "All right. But be careful."
"I have my tab." Leone patted the metal band at his wrist. "I'll be out of bounds."
* * * * *
He picked up his rifle and stepped carefully up to the mouth of the bunker, making his way between blocks of concrete and steel prongs, twisted and bent. The air was cold at the top. He crossed over the ground toward the remains of the soldier, striding across the soft ash. A wind blew around him, swirling gray particles up in his face. He squinted and pushed on.
The claws retreated as he came close, some of them stiffening into immobility. He touched his tab. The Ivan would have given something for that! Short hard radiation emitted from the tab neutralized the claws, put them out of commission. Even the big robot with its two waving eyestalks retreated respectfully as he approached.
He bent down over the remains of the soldier. The gloved hand was closed tightly. There was something in it. Leone pried the fingers apart. A sealed container, aluminum. Still shiny.
He put it in his pocket and made his way back to the bunker. Behind him the claws came back to life, moving into operation again. The procession resumed, metal spheres moving through the gray ash with their loads. He could hear their treads scrabbling against the ground. He shuddered.
Scott watched intently as he brought the shiny tube out of his pocket. "He had that?"
"In his hand." Leone unscrewed the top. "Maybe you should look at it, sir."
Scott took it. He emptied the contents out in the palm of his hand. A small piece of silk paper, carefully folded. He sat down by the light and unfolded it.
"What's it say, sir?" Eric said. Several officers came up the tunnel. Major Hendricks appeared.
"Major," Scott said. "Look at this."
Hendricks read the slip. "This just come?"
"A single runner. Just now."
"Where is he?" Hendricks asked sharply.
"The claws got him."
Major Hendricks grunted. "Here." He passed it to his companions. "I think this is what we've been waiting for. They certainly took their time about it."
"So they want to talk terms," Scott said. "Are we going along with them?"
"That's not for us to decide." Hendricks sat down. "Where's the communications officer? I want the Moon Base."
Leone pondered as the communications officer raised the outside antenna cautiously, scanning the sky above the bunker for any sign of a watching Russian ship.
"Sir," Scott said to Hendricks. "It's sure strange they suddenly came around. We've been using the claws for almost a year. Now all of a sudden they start to fold."
"Maybe claws have been getting down in their bunkers."
"One of the big ones, the kind with stalks, got into an Ivan bunker last week," Eric said. "It got a whole platoon of them before they got their lid shut."
"How do you know?"
"A buddy told me. The thing came back with--with remains."
"Moon Base, sir," the communications officer said.
On the screen the face of the lunar monitor appeared. His crisp uniform contrasted to the uniforms in the bunker. And he was clean shaven. "Moon Base."
"This is forward command L-Whistle. On Terra. Let me have General Thompson."
The monitor faded. Presently General Thompson's heavy features came into focus. "What is it, Major?"
"Our claws got a single Russian runner with a message. We don't know whether to act on it--there have been tricks like this in the past."
"What's the message?"
"The Russians want us to send a single officer on policy level over to their lines. For a conference. They don't state the nature of the conference. They say that matters of--" He consulted the slip. "--Matters of grave urgency make it advisable that discussion be opened between a representative of the UN forces and themselves."
He held the message up to the screen for the general to scan. Thompson's eyes moved.
"What should we do?" Hendricks said.
"Send a man out."
"You don't think it's a trap?"
"It might be. But the location they give for their forward command is correct. It's worth a try, at any rate."
"I'll send an officer out. And report the results to you as soon as he returns."
"All right, Major." Thompson broke the connection. The screen died. Up above, the antenna came slowly down.
Hendricks rolled up the paper, deep in thought.
"I'll go," Leone said.
"They want somebody at policy level." Hendricks rubbed his jaw. "Policy level. I haven't been outside in months. Maybe I could use a little air."
"Don't you think it's risky?"
Hendricks lifted the view sight and gazed into it. The remains of the Russian were gone. Only a single claw was in sight. It was folding itself back, disappearing into the ash, like a crab. Like some hideous metal crab....
"That's the only thing that bothers me." Hendricks rubbed his wrist. "I know I'm safe as long as I have this on me. But there's something about them. I hate the damn things. I wish we'd never invented them. There's something wrong with them. Relentless little--"
"If we hadn't invented them, the Ivans would have."
Hendricks pushed the sight back. "Anyhow, it seems to be winning the war. I guess that's good."
"Sounds like you're getting the same jitters as the Ivans." Hendricks examined his wrist watch. "I guess I had better get started, if I want to be there before dark."
* * * * *
He took a deep breath and then stepped out onto the gray, rubbled ground. After a minute he lit a cigarette and stood gazing around him. The landscape was dead. Nothing stirred. He could see for miles, endless ash and slag, ruins of buildings. A few trees without leaves or branches, only the trunks. Above him the eternal rolling clouds of gray, drifting between Terra and the sun.
Major Hendricks went on. Off to the right something scuttled, something round and metallic. A claw, going lickety-split after something. Probably after a small animal, a rat. They got rats, too. As a sort of sideline.
He came to the top of the little hill and lifted his fieldglasses. The Russian lines were a few miles ahead of him. They had a forward command post there. The runner had come from it.
A squat robot with undulating arms passed by him, its arms weaving inquiringly. The robot went on its way, disappearing under some debris. Hendricks watched it go. He had never seen that type before. There were getting to be more and more types he had never seen, new varieties and sizes coming up from the underground factories.
Hendricks put out his cigarette and hurried on. It was interesting, the use of artificial forms in warfare. How had they got started? Necessity. The Soviet Union had gained great initial success, usual with the side that got the war going. Most of North America had been blasted off the map. Retaliation was quick in coming, of course. The sky was full of circling disc-bombers long before the war began; they had been up there for years. The discs began sailing down all over Russia within hours after Washington got it.
* * * * *
But that hadn't helped Washington.
The American bloc governments moved to the Moon Base the first year. There was not much else to do. Europe was gone; a slag heap with dark weeds growing from the ashes and bones. Most of North America was useless; nothing could be planted, no one could live. A few million people kept going up in Canada and down in South America. But during the second year Soviet parachutists began to drop, a few at first, then more and more. They wore the first really effective anti-radiation equipment; what was left of American production moved to the moon along with the governments.
All but the troops. The remaining troops stayed behind as best they could, a few thousand here, a platoon there. No one knew exactly where they were; they stayed where they could, moving around at night, hiding in ruins, in sewers, cellars, with the rats and snakes. It looked as if the Soviet Union had the war almost won. Except for a handful of projectiles fired off from the moon daily, there was almost no weapon in use against them. They came and went as they pleased. The war, for all practical purposes, was over. Nothing effective opposed them.
* * * * *
And then the first claws appeared. And overnight the complexion of the war changed.
The claws were awkward, at first. Slow. The Ivans knocked them off almost as fast as they crawled out of their underground tunnels. But then they got better, faster and more cunning. Factories, all on Terra, turned them out. Factories a long way under ground, behind the Soviet lines, factories that had once made atomic projectiles, now almost forgotten.
The claws got faster, and they got bigger. New types appeared, some with feelers, some that flew. There were a few jumping kinds.
The best technicians on the moon were working on designs, making them more and more intricate, more flexible. They became uncanny; the Ivans were having a lot of trouble with them. Some of the little claws were learning to hide themselves, burrowing down into the ash, lying in wait.
And then they started getting into the Russian bunkers, slipping down when the lids were raised for air and a look around. One claw inside a bunker, a churning sphere of blades and metal--that was enough. And when one got in others followed. With a weapon like that the war couldn't go on much longer.
Maybe it was already over.
Maybe he was going to hear the news. Maybe the Politburo had decided to throw in the sponge. Too bad it had taken so long. Six years. A long time for war like that, the way they had waged it. The automatic retaliation discs, spinning down all over Russia, hundreds of thousands of them. Bacteria crystals. The Soviet guided missiles, whistling through the air. The chain bombs. And now this, the robots, the claws--
The claws weren't like other weapons. They were alive, from any practical standpoint, whether the Governments wanted to admit it or not. They were not machines. They were living things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward a man, climbing up him, rushing for his throat. And that was what they had been designed to do. Their job.
They did their job well. Especially lately, with the new designs coming up. Now they repaired themselves. They were on their own. Radiation tabs protected the UN troops, but if a man lost his tab he was fair game for the claws, no matter what his uniform. Down below the surface automatic machinery stamped them out. Human beings stayed a long way off. It was too risky; nobody wanted to be around them. They were left to themselves. And they seemed to be doing all right. The new designs were faster, more complex. More efficient.
Apparently they had won the war.
* * * * *
Major Hendricks lit a second cigarette. The landscape depressed him. Nothing but ash and ruins. He seemed to be alone, the only living thing in the whole world. To the right the ruins of a town rose up, a few walls and heaps of debris. He tossed the dead match away, increasing his pace. Suddenly he stopped, jerking up his gun, his body tense. For a minute it looked like--
From behind the shell of a ruined building a figure came, walking slowly toward him, walking hesitantly.
Hendricks blinked. "Stop!"
The boy stopped. Hendricks lowered his gun. The boy stood silently, looking at him. He was small, not very old. Perhaps eight. But it was hard to tell. Most of the kids who remained were stunted. He wore a faded blue sweater, ragged with dirt, and short pants. His hair was long and matted. Brown hair. It hung over his face and around his ears. He held something in his arms.
"What's that you have?" Hendricks said sharply.
The boy held it out. It was a toy, a bear. A teddy bear. The boy's eyes were large, but without expression.
Hendricks relaxed. "I don't want it. Keep it."
The boy hugged the bear again.
"Where do you live?" Hendricks said.
"In there."
"The ruins?"
"Yes."
"Underground?"
"Yes."
"How many are there?"
"How--how many?"
"How many of you. How big's your settlement?"
The boy did not answer.
Hendricks frowned. "You're not all by yourself, are you?"
The boy nodded.
"How do you stay alive?"
"There's food."
"What kind of food?"
"Different."
Hendricks studied him. "How old are you?"
"Thirteen."
* * * * *
It wasn't possible. Or was it? The boy was thin, stunted. And probably sterile. Radiation exposure, years straight. No wonder he was so small. His arms and legs were like pipecleaners, knobby, and thin. Hendricks touched the boy's arm. His skin was dry and rough; radiation skin. He bent down, looking into the boy's face. There was no expression. Big eyes, big and dark.
"Are you blind?" Hendricks said.
"No. I can see some."
"How do you get away from the claws?"
"The claws?"
"The round things. That run and burrow."
"I don't understand."
Maybe there weren't any claws around. A lot of areas were free. They collected mostly around bunkers, where there were people. The claws had been designed to sense warmth, warmth of living things.
"You're lucky." Hendricks straightened up. "Well? Which way are you going? Back--back there?"
"Can I come with you?"
"With me?" Hendricks folded his arms. "I'm going a long way. Miles. I have to hurry." He looked at his watch. "I have to get there by nightfall."
"I want to come."
Hendricks fumbled in his pack. "It isn't worth it. Here." He tossed down the food cans he had with him. "You take these and go back. Okay?"
The boy said nothing.
"I'll be coming back this way. In a day or so. If you're around here when I come back you can come along with me. All right?"
"I want to go with you now."
"It's a long walk."
"I can walk."
Hendricks shifted uneasily. It made too good a target, two people walking along. And the boy would slow him down. But he might not come back this way. And if the boy were really all alone--
"Okay. Come along."
* * * * *
The boy fell in beside him. Hendricks strode along. The boy walked silently, clutching his teddy bear.
"What's your name?" Hendricks said, after a time.
"David Edward Derring."
"David? What--what happened to your mother and father?"
"They died."
"How?"
"In the blast."
"How long ago?"
"Six years."
Hendricks slowed down. "You've been alone six years?"
"No. There were other people for awhile. They went away."
"And you've been alone since?"
"Yes."
Hendricks glanced down. The boy was strange, saying very little. Withdrawn. But that was the way they were, the children who had survived. Quiet. Stoic. A strange kind of fatalism gripped them. Nothing came as a surprise. They accepted anything that came along. There was no longer any normal, any natural course of things, moral or physical, for them to expect. Custom, habit, all the determining forces of learning were gone; only brute experience remained.
"Am I walking too fast?" Hendricks said.
"No."
"How did you happen to see me?"
"I was waiting."
"Waiting?" Hendricks was puzzled. "What were you waiting for?"
"To catch things."
"What kind of things?"
"Things to eat."
"Oh." Hendricks set his lips grimly. A thirteen year old boy, living on rats and gophers and half-rotten canned food. Down in a hole under the ruins of a town. With radiation pools and claws, and Russian dive-mines up above, coasting around in the sky.
"Where are we going?" David asked.
"To the Russian lines."
"Russian?"
"The enemy. The people who started the war. They dropped the first radiation bombs. They began all this."
The boy nodded. His face showed no expression.
"I'm an American," Hendricks said.
There was no comment. On they went, the two of them, Hendricks walking a little ahead, David trailing behind him, hugging his dirty teddy bear against his chest.
* * * * *
About four in the afternoon they stopped to eat. Hendricks built a fire in a hollow between some slabs of concrete. He cleared the weeds away and heaped up bits of wood. The Russians' lines were not very far ahead. Around him was what had once been a long valley, acres of fruit trees and grapes. Nothing remained now but a few bleak stumps and the mountains that stretched across the horizon at the far end. And the clouds of rolling ash that blew and drifted with the wind, settling over the weeds and remains of buildings, walls here and there, once in awhile what had been a road.
Hendricks made coffee and heated up some boiled mutton and bread. "Here." He handed bread and mutton to David. David squatted by the edge of the fire, his knees knobby and white. He examined the food and then passed it back, shaking his head.
"No."
"No? Don't you want any?"
"No."
Hendricks shrugged. Maybe the boy was a mutant, used to special food. It didn't matter. When he was hungry he would find something to eat. The boy was strange. But there were many strange changes coming over the world. Life was not the same, anymore. It would never be the same again. The human race was going to have to realize that.
"Suit yourself," Hendricks said. He ate the bread and mutton by himself, washing it down with coffee. He ate slowly, finding the food hard to digest. When he was done he got to his feet and stamped the fire out.
David rose slowly, watching him with his young-old eyes.
"We're going," Hendricks said.
"All right."
Hendricks walked along, his gun in his arms. They were close; he was tense, ready for anything. The Russians should be expecting a runner, an answer to their own runner, but they were tricky. There was always the possibility of a slipup. He scanned the landscape around him. Nothing but slag and ash, a few hills, charred trees. Concrete walls. But someplace ahead was the first bunker of the Russian lines, the forward command. Underground, buried deep, with only a periscope showing, a few gun muzzles. Maybe an antenna.
"Will we be there soon?" David asked.
"Yes. Getting tired?"
"No."
"Why, then?"
David did not answer. He plodded carefully along behind, picking his way over the ash. His legs and shoes were gray with dust. His pinched face was streaked, lines of gray ash in riverlets down the pale white of his skin. There was no color to his face. Typical of the new children, growing up in cellars and sewers and underground shelters.
* * * * *
Hendricks slowed down. He lifted his fieldglasses and studied the ground ahead of him. Were they there, someplace, waiting for him? Watching him, the way his men had watched the Russian runner? A chill went up his back. Maybe they were getting their guns ready, preparing to fire, the way his men had prepared, made ready to kill.
Hendricks stopped, wiping perspiration from his face. "Damn." It made him uneasy. But he should be expected. The situation was different.
He strode over the ash, holding his gun tightly with both hands. Behind him came David. Hendricks peered around, tight-lipped. Any second it might happen. A burst of white light, a blast, carefully aimed from inside a deep concrete bunker.
He raised his arm and waved it around in a circle.
Nothing moved. To, the right a long ridge ran, topped with dead tree trunks. A few wild vines had grown, up around, the trees, remains of arbors. And the eternal dark weeds. Hendricks studied the ridge. Was anything up there? Perfect place for a lookout. He approached the ridge warily, David coming silently behind. If it were his command he'd have a sentry up there, watching for troops trying to infiltrate into the command area. Of course, if it were his command there would be the claws around the area for full protection.
He stopped, feet apart, hands on his hips.
"Are we there?" David said.
"Almost."
"Why have we stopped?"
"I don't want to take any chances." Hendricks advanced slowly. Now the ridge lay directly beside him, along his right. Overlooking him. His uneasy feeling increased. If an Ivan were up there he wouldn't have a chance. He waved his arm again. They should be expecting someone in the UN uniform, in response to the note capsule. Unless the whole thing was a trap.
"Keep up with me." He turned toward David. "Don't drop behind."
"With you?"
"Up beside me! We're close. We can't take any chances. Come on."
"I'll be all right." David remained behind him, in the rear, a few paces away, still clutching his teddy bear.
"Have it your way." Hendricks raised his glasses again, suddenly tense. For a moment--had something moved? He scanned the ridge carefully. Everything was silent. Dead. No life up there, only tree trunks and ash. Maybe a few rats. The big black rats that had survived the claws. Mutants--built their own shelters out of saliva and ash. Some kind of plaster. Adaptation. He started forward again.
* * * * *
A tall figure came out on the ridge above him, cloak flapping. Gray-green. A Russian. Behind him a second soldier appeared, another Russian. Both lifted their guns, aiming.
Hendricks froze. He opened his mouth. The soldiers were kneeling, sighting down the side of the slope. A third figure had joined them on the ridge top, a smaller figure in gray-green. A woman. She stood behind the other two.
Hendricks found his voice. "Stop!" He waved up at them frantically. "I'm--"
The two Russians fired. Behind Hendricks there was a faint pop. Waves of heat lapped against him, throwing him to the ground. Ash tore at his face, grinding into his eyes and nose. Choking, he pulled himself to his knees. It was all a trap. He was finished. He had come to be killed, like a steer. The soldiers and the woman were coming down the side of the ridge toward him, sliding down through the soft ash. Hendricks was numb. His head throbbed. Awkwardly, he got his rifle up and took aim. It weighed a thousand tons; he could hardly hold it. His nose and cheeks stung. The air was full of the blast smell, a bitter acrid stench.
"Don't fire," the first Russian said, in heavily accented English.
The three of them came up to him, surrounding him. "Put down your rifle, Yank," the other said.
Hendricks was dazed. Everything had happened so fast. He had been caught. And they had blasted the boy. He turned his head. David was gone. What remained of him was strewn across the ground.
The three Russians studied him curiously. Hendricks sat, wiping blood from his nose, picking out bits of ash. He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Why did you do it?" he murmured thickly. "The boy."
"Why?" One of the soldiers helped him roughly to his feet. He turned Hendricks around. "Look."
Hendricks closed his eyes.
"Look!" The two Russians pulled him forward. "See. Hurry up. There isn't much time to spare, Yank!"
Hendricks looked. And gasped.
"See now? Now do you understand?"
* * * * *
From the remains of David a metal wheel rolled. Relays, glinting metal. Parts, wiring. One of the Russians kicked at the heap of remains. Parts popped out, rolling away, wheels and springs and rods. A plastic section fell in, half charred. Hendricks bent shakily down. The front of the head had come off. He could make out the intricate brain, wires and relays, tiny tubes and switches, thousands of minute studs--
"A robot," the soldier holding his arm said. "We watched it tagging you."
"Tagging me?"
"That's their way. They tag along with you. Into the bunker. That's how they get in."
Hendricks blinked, dazed. "But--"
"Come on." They led him toward the ridge. "We can't stay here. It isn't safe. There must be hundreds of them all around here."
The three of them pulled him up the side of the ridge, sliding and slipping on the ash. The woman reached the top and stood waiting for them.
"The forward command," Hendricks muttered. "I came to negotiate with the Soviet--"
"There is no more forward command. They got in. We'll explain." They reached the top of the ridge. "We're all that's left. The three of us. The rest were down in the bunker."
"This way. Down this way." The woman unscrewed a lid, a gray manhole cover set in the ground. "Get in."
Hendricks lowered himself. The two soldiers and the woman came behind him, following him down the ladder. The woman closed the lid after them, bolting it tightly into place.
"Good thing we saw you," one of the two soldiers grunted. "It had tagged you about as far as it was going to."
* * * * *
"Give me one of your cigarettes," the woman said. "I haven't had an American cigarette for weeks."
Hendricks pushed the pack to her. She took a cigarette and passed the pack to the two soldiers. In the corner of the small room the lamp gleamed fitfully. The room was low-ceilinged, cramped. The four of them sat around a small wood table. A few dirty dishes were stacked to one side. Behind a ragged curtain a second room was partly visible. Hendricks saw the corner of a cot, some blankets, clothes hung on a hook.
"We were here," the soldier beside him said. He took, off his helmet, pushing his blond hair back. "I'm Corporal Rudi Maxer. Polish. Impressed in the Soviet Army two years ago." He held out his hand.
Hendricks hesitated and then shook. "Major Joseph Hendricks."
"Klaus Epstein." The other soldier shook with him, a small dark man with thinning hair. Epstein plucked nervously at his ear. "Austrian. Impressed God knows when. I don't remember. The three of us were here, Rudi and I, with Tasso." He indicated the woman. "That's how we escaped. All the rest were down in the bunker."
"And--and they got in?"
Epstein lit a cigarette. "First just one of them. The kind that tagged you. Then it let others in."
Hendricks became alert. "The kind? Are there more than one kind?"
"The little boy. David. David holding his teddy bear. That's Variety Three. The most effective."
"What are the other types?"
Epstein reached into his coat. "Here." He tossed a packet of photographs onto the table, tied with a string. "Look for yourself."
Hendricks untied the string.
"You see," Rudi Maxer said, "that was why we wanted to talk terms. The Russians, I mean. We found out about a week ago. Found out that your claws were beginning to make up new designs on their own. New types of their own. Better types. Down in your underground factories behind our lines. You let them stamp themselves, repair themselves. Made them more and more intricate. It's your fault this happened."
* * * * *
Hendricks examined the photos. They had been snapped hurriedly; they were blurred and indistinct. The first few showed--David. David walking along a road, by himself. David and another David. Three Davids. All exactly alike. Each with a ragged teddy bear.
All pathetic.
"Look at the others," Tasso said.
The next pictures, taken at a great distance, showed a towering wounded soldier sitting by the side of a path, his arm in a sling, the stump of one leg extended, a crude crutch on his lap. Then two wounded soldiers, both the same, standing side by side.
"That's Variety One. The Wounded Soldier." Klaus reached out and took the pictures. "You see, the claws were designed to get to human beings. To find them. Each kind was better than the last. They got farther, closer, past most of our defenses, into our lines. But as long as they were merely machines, metal spheres with claws and horns, feelers, they could be picked off like any other object. They could be detected as lethal robots as soon as they were seen. Once we caught sight of them--"
"Variety One subverted our whole north wing," Rudi said. "It was a long time before anyone caught on. Then it was too late. They came in, wounded soldiers, knocking and begging to be let in. So we let them in. And as soon as they were in they took over. We were watching out for machines...."
"At that time it was thought there was only the one type," Klaus Epstein said. "No one suspected there were other types. The pictures were flashed to us. When the runner was sent to you, we knew of just one type. Variety One. The big Wounded Soldier. We thought that was all."
"Your line fell to--"
"To Variety Three. David and his bear. That worked even better." Klaus smiled bitterly. "Soldiers are suckers for children. We brought them in and tried to feed them. We found out the hard way what they were after. At least, those who were in the bunker."
"The three of us were lucky," Rudi said. "Klaus and I were--were visiting Tasso when it happened. This is her place." He waved a big hand around. "This little cellar. We finished and climbed the ladder to start back. From the ridge we saw. There they were, all around the bunker. Fighting was still going on. David and his bear. Hundreds of them. Klaus took the pictures."
Klaus tied up the photographs again.
* * * * *
"And it's going on all along your line?" Hendricks said.
"Yes."
"How about our lines?" Without thinking, he touched the tab on his arm. "Can they--"
"They're not bothered by your radiation tabs. It makes no difference to them, Russian, American, Pole, German. It's all the same. They're doing what they were designed to do. Carrying out the original idea. They track down life, wherever they find it."
"They go by warmth," Klaus said. "That was the way you constructed them from the very start. Of course, those you designed were kept back by the radiation tabs you wear. Now they've got around that. These new varieties are lead-lined."
"What's the other variety?" Hendricks asked. "The David type, the Wounded Soldier--what's the other?"
"We don't know." Klaus pointed up at the wall. On the wall were two metal plates, ragged at the edges. Hendricks got up and studied them. They were bent and dented.
"The one on the left came off a Wounded Soldier," Rudi said. "We got one of them. It was going along toward our old bunker. We got it from the ridge, the same way we got the David tagging you."
The plate was stamped: I-V. Hendricks touched the other plate. "And this came from the David type?"
"Yes." The plate was stamped: III-V.
Klaus took a look at them, leaning over Hendricks' broad shoulder. "You can see what we're up against. There's another type. Maybe it was abandoned. Maybe it didn't work. But there must be a Second Variety. There's One and Three."
"You were lucky," Rudi said. "The David tagged you all the way here and never touched you. Probably thought you'd get it into a bunker, somewhere."
"One gets in and it's all over," Klaus said. "They move fast. One lets all the rest inside. They're inflexible. Machines with one purpose. They were built for only one thing." He rubbed sweat from his lip. "We saw."
They were silent.
"Let me have another cigarette, Yank," Tasso said. "They are good. I almost forgot how they were."
* * * * *
It was night. The sky was black. No stars were visible through the rolling clouds of ash. Klaus lifted the lid cautiously so that Hendricks could look out.
Rudi pointed into the darkness. "Over that way are the bunkers. Where we used to be. Not over half a mile from us. It was just chance Klaus and I were not there when it happened. Weakness. Saved by our lusts."
"All the rest must be dead," Klaus said in a low voice. "It came quickly. This morning the Politburo reached their decision. They notified us--forward command. Our runner was sent out at once. We saw him start toward the direction of your lines. We covered him until he was out of sight."
"Alex Radrivsky. We both knew him. He disappeared about six o'clock. The sun had just come up. About noon Klaus and I had an hour relief. We crept off, away from the bunkers. No one was watching. We came here. There used to be a town here, a few houses, a street. This cellar was part of a big farmhouse. We knew Tasso would be here, hiding down in her little place. We had come here before. Others from the bunkers came here. Today happened to be our turn."
"So we were saved," Klaus said. "Chance. It might have been others. We--we finished, and then we came up to the surface and started back along the ridge. That was when we saw them, the Davids. We understood right away. We had seen the photos of the First Variety, the Wounded Soldier. Our Commissar distributed them to us with an explanation. If we had gone another step they would have seen us. As it was we had to blast two Davids before we got back. There were hundreds of them, all around. Like ants. We took pictures and slipped back here, bolting the lid tight."
"They're not so much when you catch them alone. We moved faster than they did. But they're inexorable. Not like living things. They came right at us. And we blasted them."
Major Hendricks rested against the edge of the lid, adjusting his eyes to the darkness. "Is it safe to have the lid up at all?"
"If we're careful. How else can you operate your transmitter?"
Hendricks lifted the small belt transmitter slowly. He pressed it against his ear. The metal was cold and damp. He blew against the mike, raising up the short antenna. A faint hum sounded in his ear. "That's true, I suppose."
But he still hesitated.
"We'll pull you under if anything happens," Klaus said.
"Thanks." Hendricks waited a moment, resting the transmitter against his shoulder. "Interesting, isn't it?"
"What?"
"This, the new types. The new varieties of claws. We're completely at their mercy, aren't we? By now they've probably gotten into the UN lines, too. It makes me wonder if we're not seeing the beginning of a now species. The new species. Evolution. The race to come after man."
* * * * *
Rudi grunted. "There is no race after man."
"No? Why not? Maybe we're seeing it now the end of human beings, the beginning of the new society."
"They're not a race. They're mechanical killers. You made them to destroy. That's all they can do. They're machines with a job."
"So it seems now. But how about later on? After the war is over. Maybe, when there aren't any humans to destroy, their real potentialities will begin to show."
"You talk as if they were alive!"
"Aren't they?"
There was silence. "They're machines," Rudi said. "They look like people, but they're machines."
"Use your transmitter, Major," Klaus said. "We can't stay up here forever."
Holding the transmitter tightly Hendricks called the code of the command bunker. He waited, listening. No response. Only silence. He checked the leads carefully. Everything was in place.
"Scott!" he said into the mike. "Can you hear me?"
Silence. He raised the gain up full and tried again. Only static.
"I don't get anything. They may hear me but they may not want to answer."
"Tell them it's an emergency."
"They'll think I'm being forced to call. Under your direction." He tried again, outlining briefly what he had learned. But still the phone was silent, except for the faint static.
"Radiation pools kill most transmission," Klaus said, after awhile. "Maybe that's it."
Hendricks shut the transmitter up. "No use. No answer. Radiation pools? Maybe. Or they hear me, but won't answer. Frankly, that's what I would do, if a runner tried to call from the Soviet lines. They have no reason to believe such a story. They may hear everything I say--"
"Or maybe it's too late."
Hendricks nodded.
"We better get the lid down," Rudi said nervously. "We don't want to take unnecessary chances."
* * * * *
They climbed slowly back down the tunnel. Klaus bolted the lid carefully into place. They descended into the kitchen. The air was heavy and close around them.
"Could they work that fast?" Hendricks said. "I left the bunker this noon. Ten hours ago. How could they move so quickly?"
"It doesn't take them long. Not after the first one gets in. It goes wild. You know what the little claws can do. Even one of these is beyond belief. Razors, each finger. Maniacal."
"All right." Hendricks moved away impatiently. He stood with his back to them.
"What's the matter?" Rudi said.
"The Moon Base. God, if they've gotten there--"
"The Moon Base?"
Hendricks turned around. "They couldn't have got to the Moon Base. How would they get there? It isn't possible. I can't believe it."
"What is this Moon Base? We've heard rumors, but nothing definite. What is the actual situation? You seem concerned."
"We're supplied from the moon. The governments are there, under the lunar surface. All our people and industries. That's what keeps us going. If they should find some way of getting off Terra, onto the moon--"
"It only takes one of them. Once the first one gets in it admits the others. Hundreds of them, all alike. You should have seen them. Identical. Like ants."
"Perfect socialism," Tasso said. "The ideal of the communist state. All citizens interchangeable."
Klaus grunted angrily. "That's enough. Well? What next?"
Hendricks paced back and forth, around the small room. The air was full of smells of food and perspiration. The others watched him. Presently Tasso pushed through the curtain, into the other room. "I'm going to take a nap."
The curtain closed behind her. Rudi and Klaus sat down at the table, still Watching Hendricks.
"It's up to you," Klaus said. "We don't know your situation."
Hendricks nodded.
"It's a problem." Rudi drank some coffee, filling his cup from a rusty pot. "We're safe here for awhile, but we can't stay here forever. Not enough food or supplies."
"But if we go outside--"
"If we go outside they'll get us. Or probably they'll get us. We couldn't go very far. How far is your command bunker, Major?"
"Three or four miles."
"We might make it. The four of us. Four of us could watch all sides. They couldn't slip up behind us and start tagging us. We have three rifles, three blast rifles. Tasso can have my pistol." Rudi tapped his belt. "In the Soviet army we didn't have shoes always, but we had guns. With all four of us armed one of us might get to your command bunker. Preferably you, Major."
"What if they're already there?" Klaus said.
Rudi shrugged. "Well, then we come back here."
* * * * *
Hendricks stopped pacing. "What do you think the chances are they're already in the American lines?"
"Hard to say. Fairly good. They're organized. They know exactly what they're doing. Once they start they go like a horde of locusts. They have to keep moving, and fast. It's secrecy and speed they depend on. Surprise. They push their way in before anyone has any idea."
"I see," Hendricks murmured.
From the other room Tasso stirred. "Major?"
Hendricks pushed the curtain back. "What?"
Tasso looked up at him lazily from the cot. "Have you any more American cigarettes left?"
Hendricks went into the room and sat down across from her, on a wood stool. He felt in his pockets. "No. All gone."
"Too bad."
"What nationality are you?" Hendricks asked after awhile.
"Russian."
"How did you get here?"
"Here?"
"This used to be France. This was part of Normandy. Did you come with the Soviet army?"
"Why?"
"Just curious." He studied her. She had taken off her coat, tossing it over the end of the cot. She was young, about twenty. Slim. Her long hair stretched out over the pillow. She was staring at him silently, her eyes dark and large.
"What's on your mind?" Tasso said.
"Nothing. How old are you?"
"Eighteen." She continued to watch him, unblinking, her arms behind her head. She had on Russian army pants and shirt. Gray-green. Thick leather belt with counter and cartridges. Medicine kit.
"You're in the Soviet army?"
"No."
"Where did you get the uniform?"
She shrugged. "It was given to me," she told him.
"How--how old were you when you came here?"
"Sixteen."
"That young?"
Her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"
* * * * *
Hendricks rubbed his jaw. "Your life would have been a lot different if there had been no war. Sixteen. You came here at sixteen. To live this way."
"I had to survive."
"I'm not moralizing."
"Your life would have been different, too," Tasso murmured. She reached down and unfastened one of her boots. She kicked the boot off, onto the floor. "Major, do you want to go in the other room? I'm sleepy."
"It's going to be a problem, the four of us here. It's going to be hard to live in these quarters. Are there just the two rooms?"
"Yes."
"How big was the cellar originally? Was it larger than this? Are there other rooms filled up with debris? We might be able to open one of them."
"Perhaps. I really don't know." Tasso loosened her belt. She made herself comfortable on the cot, unbuttoning her shirt. "You're sure you have no more cigarettes?"
"I had only the one pack."
"Too bad. Maybe if we get back to your bunker we can find some." The other boot fell. Tasso reached up for the light cord. "Good night."
"You're going to sleep?"
"That's right."
The room plunged into darkness. Hendricks got up and made his way past the curtain, into the kitchen.
And stopped, rigid.
Rudi stood against the wall, his face white and gleaming. His mouth opened and closed but no sounds came. Klaus stood in front of him, the muzzle of his pistol in Rudi's stomach. Neither of them moved. Klaus, his hand tight around his gun, his features set. Rudi, pale and silent, spread-eagled against the wall.
"What--" Hendricks muttered, but Klaus cut him off.
"Be quiet, Major. Come over here. Your gun. Get out your gun."
Hendricks drew his pistol. "What is it?"
"Cover him." Klaus motioned him forward. "Beside me. Hurry!"
Rudi moved a little, lowering his arms. He turned to Hendricks, licking his lips. The whites of his eyes shone wildly. Sweat dripped from his forehead, down his cheeks. He fixed his gaze on Hendricks. "Major, he's gone insane. Stop him." Rudi's voice was thin and hoarse, almost inaudible.
"What's going on?" Hendricks demanded.
Without lowering his pistol Klaus answered. "Major, remember our discussion? The Three Varieties? We knew about One and Three. But we didn't know about Two. At least, we didn't know before." Klaus' fingers tightened around the gun butt. "We didn't know before, but we know now."
He pressed the trigger. A burst of white heat rolled out of the gun, licking around Rudi.
"Major, this is the Second Variety."
* * * * *
Tasso swept the curtain aside. "Klaus! What did you do?"
Klaus turned from the charred form, gradually sinking down the wall onto the floor. "The Second Variety, Tasso. Now we know. We have all three types identified. The danger is less. I--"
Tasso stared past him at the remains of Rudi, at the blackened, smouldering fragments and bits of cloth. "You killed him."
"Him? It, you mean. I was watching. I had a feeling, but I wasn't sure. At least, I wasn't sure before. But this evening I was certain." Klaus rubbed his pistol butt nervously. "We're lucky. Don't you understand? Another hour and it might--"
"You were certain?" Tasso pushed past him and bent down, over the steaming remains on the floor. Her face became hard. "Major, see for yourself. Bones. Flesh."
Hendricks bent down beside her. The remains were human remains. Seared flesh, charred bone fragments, part of a skull. Ligaments, viscera, blood. Blood forming a pool against the wall.
"No wheels," Tasso said calmly. She straightened up. "No wheels, no parts, no relays. Not a claw. Not the Second Variety." She folded her arms. "You're going to have to be able to explain this."
Klaus sat down at the table, all the color drained suddenly from his face. He put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth.
"Snap out of it." Tasso's fingers closed over his shoulder. "Why did you do it? Why did you kill him?"
"He was frightened," Hendricks said. "All this, the whole thing, building up around us."
"Maybe."
"What, then? What do you think?"
"I think he may have had a reason for killing Rudi. A good reason."
"What reason?"
"Maybe Rudi learned something."
Hendricks studied her bleak face. "About what?" he asked.
"About him. About Klaus."
* * * * *
Klaus looked up quickly. "You can see what she's trying to say. She thinks I'm the Second Variety. Don't you see, Major? Now she wants you to believe I killed him on purpose. That I'm--"
"Why did you kill him, then?" Tasso said.
"I told you." Klaus shook his head wearily. "I thought he was a claw. I thought I knew."
"Why?"
"I had been watching him. I was suspicious."
"Why?"
"I thought I had seen something. Heard something. I thought I--" He stopped.
"Go on."
"We were sitting at the table. Playing cards. You two were in the other room. It was silent. I thought I heard him--whirr."
There was silence.
"Do you believe that?" Tasso said to Hendricks.
"Yes. I believe what he says."
"I don't. I think he killed Rudi for a good purpose." Tasso touched the rifle, resting in the corner of the room. "Major--"
"No." Hendricks shook his head. "Let's stop it right now. One is enough. We're afraid, the way he was. If we kill him we'll be doing what he did to Rudi."
Klaus looked gratefully up at him. "Thanks. I was afraid. You understand, don't you? Now she's afraid, the way I was. She wants to kill me."
"No more killing." Hendricks moved toward the end of the ladder. "I'm going above and try the transmitter once more. If I can't get them we're moving back toward my lines tomorrow morning."
Klaus rose quickly. "I'll come up with you and give you a hand."
* * * * *
The night air was cold. The earth was cooling off. Klaus took a deep breath, filling his lungs. He and Hendricks stepped onto the ground, out of the tunnel. Klaus planted his feet wide apart, the rifle up, watching and listening. Hendricks crouched by the tunnel mouth, tuning the small transmitter.
"Any luck?" Klaus asked presently.
"Not yet."
"Keep trying. Tell them what happened."
Hendricks kept trying. Without success. Finally he lowered the antenna. "It's useless. They can't hear me. Or they hear me and won't answer. Or--"
"Or they don't exist."
"I'll try once more." Hendricks raised the antenna. "Scott, can you hear me? Come in!"
He listened. There was only static. Then, still very faintly--
"This is Scott."
His fingers tightened. "Scott! Is it you?"
"This is Scott."
Klaus squatted down. "Is it your command?"
"Scott, listen. Do you understand? About them, the claws. Did you get my message? Did you hear me?"
"Yes." Faintly. Almost inaudible. He could hardly make out the word.
"You got my message? Is everything all right at the bunker? None of them have got in?"
"Everything is all right."
"Have they tried to get in?"
The voice was weaker.
"No."
Hendricks turned to Klaus. "They're all right."
"Have they been attacked?"
"No." Hendricks pressed the phone tighter to his ear. "Scott, I can hardly hear you. Have you notified the Moon Base? Do they know? Are they alerted?"
No answer.
"Scott! Can you hear me?"
Silence.
Hendricks relaxed, sagging. "Faded out. Must be radiation pools."
* * * * *
Hendricks and Klaus looked at each other. Neither of them said anything. After a time Klaus said, "Did it sound like any of your men? Could you identify the voice?"
"It was too faint."
"You couldn't be certain?"
"No."
"Then it could have been--"
"I don't know. Now I'm not sure. Let's go back down and get the lid closed."
They climbed back down the ladder slowly, into the warm cellar. Klaus bolted the lid behind them. Tasso waited for them, her face expressionless.
"Any luck?" she asked.
Neither of them answered. "Well?" Klaus said at last. "What do you think, Major? Was it your officer, or was it one of them?"
"I don't know."
"Then we're just where we were before."
Hendricks stared down at the floor, his jaw set. "We'll have to go. To be sure."
"Anyhow, we have food here for only a few weeks. We'd have to go up after that, in any case."
"Apparently so."
"What's wrong?" Tasso demanded. "Did you get across to your bunker? What's the matter?"
"It may have been one of my men," Hendricks said slowly. "Or it may have been one of them. But we'll never know standing here." He examined his watch. "Let's turn in and get some sleep. We want to be up early tomorrow."
"Early?"
"Our best chance to get through the claws should be early in the morning," Hendricks said.
* * * * *
The morning was crisp and clear. Major Hendricks studied the countryside through his fieldglasses.
"See anything?" Klaus said.
"No."
"Can you make out our bunkers?"
"Which way?"
"Here." Klaus took the glasses and adjusted them. "I know where to look." He looked a long time, silently.
Tasso came to the top of the tunnel and stepped up onto the ground. "Anything?"
"No." Klaus passed the glasses back to Hendricks. "They're out of sight. Come on. Let's not stay here."
The three of them made their way down the side of the ridge, sliding in the soft ash. Across a flat rock a lizard scuttled. They stopped instantly, rigid.
"What was it?" Klaus muttered.
"A lizard."
The lizard ran on, hurrying through the ash. It was exactly the same color as the ash.
"Perfect adaptation," Klaus said. "Proves we were right. Lysenko, I mean."
They reached the bottom of the ridge and stopped, standing close together, looking around them.
"Let's go." Hendricks started off. "It's a good long trip, on foot."
Klaus fell in beside him. Tasso walked behind, her pistol held alertly. "Major, I've been meaning to ask you something," Klaus said. "How did you run across the David? The one that was tagging you."
"I met it along the way. In some ruins."
"What did it say?"
"Not much. It said it was alone. By itself."
"You couldn't tell it was a machine? It talked like a living person? You never suspected?"
"It didn't say much. I noticed nothing unusual.
"It's strange, machines so much like people that you can be fooled. Almost alive. I wonder where it'll end."
"They're doing what you Yanks designed them to do," Tasso said. "You designed them to hunt out life and destroy. Human life. Wherever they find it."
* * * * *
Hendricks was watching Klaus intently. "Why did you ask me? What's on your mind?"
"Nothing," Klaus answered.
"Klaus thinks you're the Second Variety," Tasso said calmly, from behind them. "Now he's got his eye on you."
Klaus flushed. "Why not? We sent a runner to the Yank lines and he comes back. Maybe he thought he'd find some good game here."
Hendricks laughed harshly. "I came from the UN bunkers. There were human beings all around me."
"Maybe you saw an opportunity to get into the Soviet lines. Maybe you saw your chance. Maybe you--"
"The Soviet lines had already been taken over. Your lines had been invaded before I left my command bunker. Don't forget that."
Tasso came up beside him. "That proves nothing at all, Major."
"Why not?"
"There appears to be little communication between the varieties. Each is made in a different factory. They don't seem to work together. You might have started for the Soviet lines without knowing anything about the work of the other varieties. Or even what the other varieties were like."
"How do you know so much about the claws?" Hendricks said.
"I've seen them. I've observed them. I observed them take over the Soviet bunkers."
"You know quite a lot," Klaus said. "Actually, you saw very little. Strange that you should have been such an acute observer."
Tasso laughed. "Do you suspect me, now?"
"Forget it," Hendricks said. They walked on in silence.
"Are we going the whole way on foot?" Tasso said, after awhile. "I'm not used to walking." She gazed around at the plain of ash, stretching out on all sides of them, as far as they could see. "How dreary."
"It's like this all the way," Klaus said.
"In a way I wish you had been in your bunker when the attack came."
"Somebody else would have been with you, if not me," Klaus muttered.
Tasso laughed, putting her hands in her pockets. "I suppose so."
They walked on, keeping their eyes on the vast plain of silent ash around them.
* * * * *
The sun was setting. Hendricks made his way forward slowly, waving Tasso and Klaus back. Klaus squatted down, resting his gun butt against the ground.
Tasso found a concrete slab and sat down with a sigh. "It's good to rest."
"Be quiet," Klaus said sharply.
Hendricks pushed up to the top of the rise ahead of them. The same rise the Russian runner had come up, the day before. Hendricks dropped down, stretching himself out, peering through his glasses at what lay beyond.
Nothing was visible. Only ash and occasional trees. But there, not more than fifty yards ahead, was the entrance of the forward command bunker. The bunker from which he had come. Hendricks watched silently. No motion. No sign of life. Nothing stirred.
Klaus slithered up beside him. "Where is it?"
"Down there." Hendricks passed him the glasses. Clouds of ash rolled across the evening sky. The world was darkening. They had a couple of hours of light left, at the most. Probably not that much.
"I don't see anything," Klaus said.
"That tree there. The stump. By the pile of bricks. The entrance is to the right of the bricks."
"I'll have to take your word for it."
"You and Tasso cover me from here. You'll be able to sight all the way to the bunker entrance."
"You're going down alone?"
"With my wrist tab I'll be safe. The ground around the bunker is a living field of claws. They collect down in the ash. Like crabs. Without tabs you wouldn't have a chance."
"Maybe you're right."
"I'll walk slowly all the way. As soon as I know for certain--"
"If they're down inside the bunker you won't be able to get back up here. They go fast. You don't realize."
"What do you suggest?"
Klaus considered. "I don't know. Get them to come up to the surface. So you can see."
Hendricks brought his transmitter from his belt, raising the antenna. "Let's get started."
* * * * *
Klaus signalled to Tasso. She crawled expertly up the side of the rise to where they were sitting.
"He's going down alone," Klaus said. "We'll cover him from here. As soon as you see him start back, fire past him at once. They come quick."
"You're not very optimistic," Tasso said.
"No, I'm not."
Hendricks opened the breech of his gun, checking it carefully. "Maybe things are all right."
"You didn't see them. Hundreds of them. All the same. Pouring out like ants."
"I should be able to find out without going down all the way." Hendricks locked his gun, gripping it in one hand, the transmitter in the other. "Well, wish me luck."
Klaus put out his hand. "Don't go down until you're sure. Talk to them from up here. Make them show themselves."
* * * * *
Hendricks stood up. He stepped down the side of the rise.
A moment later he was walking slowly toward the pile of bricks and debris beside the dead tree stump. Toward the entrance of the forward command bunker.
Nothing stirred. He raised the transmitter, clicking it on. "Scott? Can you hear me?"
Silence.
"Scott! This is Hendricks. Can you hear me? I'm standing outside the bunker. You should be able to see me in the view sight."
He listened, the transmitter gripped tightly. No sound. Only static. He walked forward. A claw burrowed out of the ash and raced toward him. It halted a few feet away and then slunk off. A second claw appeared, one of the big ones with feelers. It moved toward him, studied him intently, and then fell in behind him, dogging respectfully after him, a few paces away. A moment later a second big claw joined it. Silently, the claws trailed him, as he walked slowly toward the bunker.
Hendricks stopped, and behind him, the claws came to a halt. He was close, now. Almost to the bunker steps.
"Scott! Can you hear me? I'm standing right above you. Outside. On the surface. Are you picking me up?"
* * * * *
He waited, holding his gun against his side, the transmitter tightly to his ear. Time passed. He strained to hear, but there was only silence. Silence, and faint static.
Then, distantly, metallically--
"This is Scott."
The voice was neutral. Cold. He could not identify it. But the earphone was minute.
"Scott! Listen. I'm standing right above you. I'm on the surface, looking down into the bunker entrance."
"Yes."
"Can you see me?"
"Yes."
"Through the view sight? You have the sight trained on me?"
"Yes."
Hendricks pondered. A circle of claws waited quietly around him, gray-metal bodies on all sides of him. "Is everything all right in the bunker? Nothing unusual has happened?"
"Everything is all right."
"Will you come up to the surface? I want to see you for a moment." Hendricks took a deep breath. "Come up here with me. I want to talk to you."
"Come down."
"I'm giving you an order."
Silence.
"Are you coming?" Hendricks listened. There was no response. "I order you to come to the surface."
"Come down."
Hendricks set his jaw. "Let me talk to Leone."
There was a long pause. He listened to the static. Then a voice came, hard, thin, metallic. The same as the other. "This is Leone."
"Hendricks. I'm on the surface. At the bunker entrance. I want one of you to come up here."
"Come down."
"Why come down? I'm giving you an order!"
Silence. Hendricks lowered the transmitter. He looked carefully around him. The entrance was just ahead. Almost at his feet. He lowered the antenna and fastened the transmitter to his belt. Carefully, he gripped his gun with both hands. He moved forward, a step at a time. If they could see him they knew he was starting toward the entrance. He closed his eyes a moment.
Then he put his foot on the first step that led downward.
Two Davids came up at him, their faces identical and expressionless. He blasted them into particles. More came rushing silently up, a whole pack of them. All exactly the same.
Hendricks turned and raced back, away from the bunker, back toward the rise.
At the top of the rise Tasso and Klaus were firing down. The small claws were already streaking up toward them, shining metal spheres going fast, racing frantically through the ash. But he had no time to think about that. He knelt down, aiming at the bunker entrance, gun against his cheek. The Davids were coming out in groups, clutching their teddy bears, their thin knobby legs pumping as they ran up the steps to the surface. Hendricks fired into the main body of them. They burst apart, wheels and springs flying in all directions. He fired again through the mist of particles.
A giant lumbering figure rose up in the bunker entrance, tall and swaying. Hendricks paused, amazed. A man, a soldier. With one leg, supporting himself with a crutch.
"Major!" Tasso's voice came. More firing. The huge figure moved forward, Davids swarming around it. Hendricks broke out of his freeze. The First Variety. The Wounded Soldier.
He aimed and fired. The soldier burst into bits, parts and relays flying. Now many Davids were out on the flat ground, away from the bunker. He fired again and again, moving slowly back, half-crouching and aiming.
From the rise, Klaus fired down. The side of the rise was alive with claws making their way up. Hendricks retreated toward the rise, running and crouching. Tasso had left Klaus and was circling slowly to the right, moving away from the rise.
A David slipped up toward him, its small white face expressionless, brown hair hanging down in its eyes. It bent over suddenly, opening its arms. Its teddy bear hurtled down and leaped across the ground, bounding toward him. Hendricks fired. The bear and the David both dissolved. He grinned, blinking. It was like a dream.
"Up here!" Tasso's voice. Hendricks made his way toward her. She was over by some columns of concrete, walls of a ruined building. She was firing past him, with the hand pistol Klaus had given her.
"Thanks." He joined her, grasping for breath. She pulled him back, behind the concrete, fumbling at her belt.
"Close your eyes!" She unfastened a globe from her waist. Rapidly, she unscrewed the cap, locking it into place. "Close your eyes and get down."
* * * * *
She threw the bomb. It sailed in an arc, an expert, rolling and bouncing to the entrance of the bunker. Two Wounded Soldiers stood uncertainly by the brick pile. More Davids poured from behind them, out onto the plain. One of the Wounded Soldiers moved toward the bomb, stooping awkwardly down to pick it up.
The bomb went off. The concussion whirled Hendricks around, throwing him on his face. A hot wind rolled over him. Dimly he saw Tasso standing behind the columns, firing slowly and methodically at the Davids coming out of the raging clouds of white fire.
Back along the rise Klaus struggled with a ring of claws circling around him. He retreated, blasting at them and moving back, trying to break through the ring.
Hendricks struggled to his feet. His head ached. He could hardly see. Everything was licking at him, raging and whirling. His right arm would not move.
Tasso pulled back toward him. "Come on. Let's go."
"Klaus--He's still up there."
"Come on!" Tasso dragged Hendricks back, away from the columns. Hendricks shook his head, trying to clear it. Tasso led him rapidly away, her eyes intense and bright, watching for claws that had escaped the blast.
One David came out of the rolling clouds of flame. Tasso blasted it. No more appeared.
"But Klaus. What about him?" Hendricks stopped, standing unsteadily. "He--"
"Come on!"
* * * * *
They retreated, moving farther and farther away from the bunker. A few small claws followed them for a little while and then gave up, turning back and going off.
At last Tasso stopped. "We can stop here and get our breaths."
Hendricks sat down on some heaps of debris. He wiped his neck, gasping. "We left Klaus back there."
Tasso said nothing. She opened her gun, sliding a fresh round of blast cartridges into place.
Hendricks stared at her, dazed. "You left him back there on purpose."
Tasso snapped the gun together. She studied the heaps of rubble around them, her face expressionless. As if she were watching for something.
"What is it?" Hendricks demanded. "What are you looking for? Is something coming?" He shook his head, trying to understand. What was she doing? What was she waiting for? He could see nothing. Ash lay all around them, ash and ruins. Occasional stark tree trunks, without leaves or branches. "What--"
Tasso cut him off. "Be still." Her eyes narrowed. Suddenly her gun came up. Hendricks turned, following her gaze.
* * * * *
Back the way they had come a figure appeared. The figure walked unsteadily toward them. Its clothes were torn. It limped as it made its way along, going very slowly and carefully. Stopping now and then, resting and getting its strength. Once it almost fell. It stood for a moment, trying to steady itself. Then it came on.
Klaus.
Hendricks stood up. "Klaus!" He started toward him. "How the hell did you--"
Tasso fired. Hendricks swung back. She fired again, the blast passing him, a searing line of heat. The beam caught Klaus in the chest. He exploded, gears and wheels flying. For a moment he continued to walk. Then he swayed back and forth. He crashed to the ground, his arms flung out. A few more wheels rolled away.
Silence.
Tasso turned to Hendricks. "Now you understand why he killed Rudi."
Hendricks sat down again slowly. He shook his head. He was numb. He could not think.
"Do you see?" Tasso said. "Do you understand?"
Hendricks said nothing. Everything was slipping away from him, faster and faster. Darkness, rolling and plucking at him.
He closed his eyes.
* * * * *
Hendricks opened his eyes slowly. His body ached all over. He tried to sit up but needles of pain shot through his arm and shoulder. He gasped.
"Don't try to get up," Tasso said. She bent down, putting her cold hand against his forehead.
It was night. A few stars glinted above, shining through the drifting clouds of ash. Hendricks lay back, his teeth locked. Tasso watched him impassively. She had built a fire with some wood and weeds. The fire licked feebly, hissing at a metal cup suspended over it. Everything was silent. Unmoving darkness, beyond the fire.
"So he was the Second Variety," Hendricks murmured.
"I had always thought so."
"Why didn't you destroy him sooner?" she wanted to know.
"You held me back." Tasso crossed to the fire to look into the metal cup. "Coffee. It'll be ready to drink in awhile."
She came back and sat down beside him. Presently she opened her pistol and began to disassemble the firing mechanism, studying it intently.
"This is a beautiful gun," Tasso said, half-aloud. "The construction is superb."
"What about them? The claws."
"The concussion from the bomb put most of them out of action. They're delicate. Highly organized, I suppose."
"The Davids, too?"
"Yes."
"How did you happen to have a bomb like that?"
Tasso shrugged. "We designed it. You shouldn't underestimate our technology, Major. Without such a bomb you and I would no longer exist."
"Very useful."
Tasso stretched out her legs, warming her feet in the heat of the fire. "It surprised me that you did not seem to understand, after he killed Rudi. Why did you think he--"
"I told you. I thought he was afraid."
"Really? You know, Major, for a little while I suspected you. Because you wouldn't let me kill him. I thought you might be protecting him." She laughed.
"Are we safe here?" Hendricks asked presently.
"For awhile. Until they get reinforcements from some other area." Tasso began to clean the interior of the gun with a bit of rag. She finished and pushed the mechanism back into place. She closed the gun, running her finger along the barrel.
"We were lucky," Hendricks murmured.
"Yes. Very lucky."
"Thanks for pulling me away."
* * * * *
Tasso did not answer. She glanced up at him, her eyes bright in the fire light. Hendricks examined his arm. He could not move his fingers. His whole side seemed numb. Down inside him was a dull steady ache.
"How do you feel?" Tasso asked.
"My arm is damaged."
"Anything else?"
"Internal injuries."
"You didn't get down when the bomb went off."
Hendricks said nothing. He watched Tasso pour the coffee from the cup into a flat metal pan. She brought it over to him.
"Thanks." He Struggled up enough to drink. It was hard to swallow. His insides turned over and he pushed the pan away. "That's all I can drink now."
Tasso drank the rest. Time passed. The clouds of ash moved across the dark sky above them. Hendricks rested, his mind blank. After awhile he became aware that Tasso was standing over him, gazing down at him.
"What is it?" he murmured.
"Do you feel any better?"
"Some."
"You know, Major, if I hadn't dragged you away they would have got you. You would be dead. Like Rudi."
"I know."
"Do you want to know why I brought you out? I could have left you. I could have left you there."
"Why did you bring me out?"
"Because we have to get away from here." Tasso stirred the fire with a stick, peering calmly down into it. "No human being can live here. When their reinforcements come we won't have a chance. I've pondered about it while you were unconscious. We have perhaps three hours before they come."
"And you expect me to get us away?"
"That's right. I expect you to get us out of here."
"Why me?"
"Because I don't know any way." Her eyes shone at him in the half-light, bright and steady. "If you can't get us out of here they'll kill us within three hours. I see nothing else ahead. Well, Major? What are you going to do? I've been waiting all night. While you were unconscious I sat here, waiting and listening. It's almost dawn. The night is almost over."
* * * * *
Hendricks considered. "It's curious," he said at last.
"Curious?"
"That you should think I can get us out of here. I wonder what you think I can do."
"Can you get us to the Moon Base?"
"The Moon Base? How?"
"There must be some way."
Hendricks shook his head. "No. There's no way that I know of."
Tasso said nothing. For a moment her steady gaze wavered. She ducked her head, turning abruptly away. She scrambled to her feet. "More coffee?"
"No."
"Suit yourself." Tasso drank silently. He could not see her face. He lay back against the ground, deep in thought, trying to concentrate. It was hard to think. His head still hurt. And the numbing daze still hung over him.
"There might be one way," he said suddenly.
"Oh?"
"How soon is dawn?"
"Two hours. The sun will be coming up shortly."
"There's supposed to be a ship near here. I've never seen it. But I know it exists."
"What kind of a ship?" Her voice was sharp.
"A rocket cruiser."
"Will it take us off? To the Moon Base?"
"It's supposed to. In case of emergency." He rubbed his forehead.
"What's wrong?"
"My head. It's hard to think. I can hardly--hardly concentrate. The bomb."
"Is the ship near here?" Tasso slid over beside him, settling down on her haunches. "How far is it? Where is it?"
"I'm trying to think."
Her fingers dug into his arm. "Nearby?" Her voice was like iron. "Where would it be? Would they store it underground? Hidden underground?"
"Yes. In a storage locker."
"How do we find it? Is it marked? Is there a code marker to identify it?"
Hendricks concentrated. "No. No markings. No code symbol."
"What, then?"
"A sign."
"What sort of sign?"
* * * * *
Hendricks did not answer. In the flickering light his eyes were glazed, two sightless orbs. Tasso's fingers dug into his arm.
"What sort of sign? What is it?"
"I--I can't think. Let me rest."
"All right." She let go and stood up. Hendricks lay back against the ground, his eyes closed. Tasso walked away from him, her hands in her pockets. She kicked a rock out of her way and stood staring up at the sky. The night blackness was already beginning to fade into gray. Morning was coming.
Tasso gripped her pistol and walked around the fire in a circle, back and forth. On the ground Major Hendricks lay, his eyes closed, unmoving. The grayness rose in the sky, higher and higher. The landscape became visible, fields of ash stretching out in all directions. Ash and ruins of buildings, a wall here and there, heaps of concrete, the naked trunk of a tree.
The air was cold and sharp. Somewhere a long way off a bird made a few bleak sounds.
Hendricks stirred. He opened his eyes. "Is it dawn? Already?"
"Yes."
Hendricks sat up a little. "You wanted to know something. You were asking me."
"Do you remember now?"
"Yes."
"What is it?" She tensed. "What?" she repeated sharply.
"A well. A ruined well. It's in a storage locker under a well."
"A well." Tasso relaxed. "Then we'll find a well." She looked at her watch. "We have about an hour, Major. Do you think we can find it in an hour?"
* * * * *
"Give me a hand up," Hendricks said.
Tasso put her pistol away and helped him to his feet. "This is going to be difficult."
"Yes it is." Hendricks set his lips tightly. "I don't think we're going to go very far."
They began to walk. The early sun cast a little warmth down on them. The land was flat and barren, stretching out gray and lifeless as far as they could see. A few birds sailed silently, far above them, circling slowly.
"See anything?" Hendricks said. "Any claws?"
"No. Not yet."
They passed through some ruins, upright concrete and bricks. A cement foundation. Rats scuttled away. Tasso jumped back warily.
"This used to be a town," Hendricks said. "A village. Provincial village. This was all grape country, once. Where we are now."
They came onto a ruined street, weeds and cracks criss-crossing it. Over to the right a stone chimney stuck up.
"Be careful," he warned her.
A pit yawned, an open basement. Ragged ends of pipes jutted up, twisted and bent. They passed part of a house, a bathtub turned on its side. A broken chair. A few spoons and bits of china dishes. In the center of the street the ground had sunk away. The depression was filled with weeds and debris and bones.
"Over here," Hendricks murmured.
"This way?"
"To the right."
They passed the remains of a heavy duty tank. Hendricks' belt counter clicked ominously. The tank had been radiation blasted. A few feet from the tank a mummified body lay sprawled out, mouth open. Beyond the road was a flat field. Stones and weeds, and bits of broken glass.
"There," Hendricks said.
* * * * *
A stone well jutted up, sagging and broken. A few boards lay across it. Most of the well had sunk into rubble. Hendricks walked unsteadily toward it, Tasso beside him.
"Are you certain about this?" Tasso said. "This doesn't look like anything."
"I'm sure." Hendricks sat down at the edge of the well, his teeth locked. His breath came quickly. He wiped perspiration from his face. "This was arranged so the senior command officer could get away. If anything happened. If the bunker fell."
"That was you?"
"Yes."
"Where is the ship? Is it here?"
"We're standing on it." Hendricks ran his hands over the surface of the well stones. "The eye-lock responds to me, not to anybody else. It's my ship. Or it was supposed to be."
There was a sharp click. Presently they heard a low grating sound from below them.
"Step back," Hendricks said. He and Tasso moved away from the well.
A section of the ground slid back. A metal frame pushed slowly up through the ash, shoving bricks and weeds out of the way. The action ceased, as the ship nosed into view.
"There it is," Hendricks said.
The ship was small. It rested quietly, suspended in its mesh frame, like a blunt needle. A rain of ash sifted down into the dark cavity from which the ship had been raised. Hendricks made his way over to it. He mounted the mesh and unscrewed the hatch, pulling it back. Inside the ship the control banks and the pressure seat were visible.
* * * * *
Tasso came and stood beside him, gazing into the ship. "I'm not accustomed to rocket piloting," she said, after awhile.
Hendricks glanced at her. "I'll do the piloting."
"Will you? There's only one seat, Major. I can see it's built to carry only a single person."
Hendricks' breathing changed. He studied the interior of the ship intently. Tasso was right. There was only one seat. The ship was built to carry only one person. "I see," he said slowly. "And the one person is you."
She nodded.
"Of course."
"Why?"
"You can't go. You might not live through the trip. You're injured. You probably wouldn't get there."
"An interesting point. But you see, I know where the Moon Base is. And you don't. You might fly around for months and not find it. It's well hidden. Without knowing what to look for--"
"I'll have to take my chances. Maybe I won't find it. Not by myself. But I think you'll give me all the information I need. Your life depends on it."
"How?"
"If I find the Moon Base in time, perhaps I can get them to send a ship back to pick you up. If I find the Base in time. If not, then you haven't a chance. I imagine there are supplies on the ship. They will last me long enough--"
Hendricks moved quickly. But his injured arm betrayed him. Tasso ducked, sliding lithely aside. Her hand came up, lightning fast. Hendricks saw the gun butt coming. He tried to ward off the blow, but she was too fast. The metal butt struck against the side of his head, just above his ear. Numbing pain rushed through him. Pain and rolling clouds of blackness. He sank down, sliding to the ground.
* * * * *
Dimly, he was aware that Tasso was standing over him, kicking him with her toe.
"Major! Wake up."
He opened his eyes, groaning.
"Listen to me." She bent down, the gun pointed at his face. "I have to hurry. There isn't much time left. The ship is ready to go, but you must tell me the information I need before I leave."
Hendricks shook his head, trying to clear it.
"Hurry up! Where is the Moon Base? How do I find it? What do I look for?"
Hendricks said nothing.
"Answer me!"
"Sorry."
"Major, the ship is loaded with provisions. I can coast for weeks. I'll find the Base eventually. And in a half hour you'll be dead. Your only chance of survival--" She broke off.
Along the slope, by some crumbling ruins, something moved. Something in the ash. Tasso turned quickly, aiming. She fired. A puff of flame leaped. Something scuttled away, rolling across the ash. She fired again. The claw burst apart, wheels flying.
"See?" Tasso said. "A scout. It won't be long."
"You'll bring them back here to get me?"
"Yes. As soon as possible."
Hendricks looked up at her. He studied her intently. "You're telling the truth?" A strange expression had come over his face, an avid hunger. "You will come back for me? You'll get me to the Moon Base?"
"I'll get you to the Moon Base. But tell me where it is! There's only a little time left."
"All right." Hendricks picked up a piece of rock, pulling himself to a sitting position. "Watch."
Hendricks began to scratch in the ash. Tasso stood by him, watching the motion of the rock. Hendricks was sketching a crude lunar map.
* * * * *
"This is the Appenine range. Here is the Crater of Archimedes. The Moon Base is beyond the end of the Appenine, about two hundred miles. I don't know exactly where. No one on Terra knows. But when you're over the Appenine, signal with one red flare and a green flare, followed by two red flares in quick succession. The Base monitor will record your signal. The Base is under the surface, of course. They'll guide you down with magnetic grapples."
"And the controls? Can I operate them?"
"The controls are virtually automatic. All you have to do is give the right signal at the right time."
"I will."
"The seat absorbs most of the take-off shock. Air and temperature are automatically controlled. The ship will leave Terra and pass out into free space. It'll line itself up with the moon, falling into an orbit around it, about a hundred miles above the surface. The orbit will carry you over the Base. When you're in the region of the Appenine, release the signal rockets."
Tasso slid into the ship and lowered herself into the pressure seat. The arm locks folded automatically around her. She fingered the controls. "Too bad you're not going, Major. All this put here for you, and you can't make the trip."
"Leave me the pistol."
Tasso pulled the pistol from her belt. She held it in her hand, weighing it thoughtfully. "Don't go too far from this location. It'll be hard to find you, as it is."
"No. I'll stay here by the well."
Tasso gripped the take-off switch, running her fingers over the smooth metal. "A beautiful ship, Major. Well built. I admire your workmanship. You people have always done good work. You build fine things. Your work, your creations, are your greatest achievement."
"Give me the pistol," Hendricks said impatiently, holding out his hand. He struggled to his feet.
"Good-bye, Major." Tasso tossed the pistol past Hendricks. The pistol clattered against the ground, bouncing and rolling away. Hendricks hurried after it. He bent down, snatching it up.
The hatch of the ship clanged shut. The bolts fell into place. Hendricks made his way back. The inner door was being sealed. He raised the pistol unsteadily.
* * * * *
There was a shattering roar. The ship burst up from its metal cage, fusing the mesh behind it. Hendricks cringed, pulling back. The ship shot up into the rolling clouds of ash, disappearing into the sky.
Hendricks stood watching a long time, until even the streamer had dissipated. Nothing stirred. The morning air was chill and silent. He began to walk aimlessly back the way they had come. Better to keep moving around. It would be a long time before help came--if it came at all.
He searched his pockets until he found a package of cigarettes. He lit one grimly. They had all wanted cigarettes from him. But cigarettes were scarce.
A lizard slithered by him, through the ash. He halted, rigid. The lizard disappeared. Above, the sun rose higher in the sky. Some flies landed on a flat rock to one side of him. Hendricks kicked at them with his foot.
It was getting hot. Sweat trickled down his face, into his collar. His mouth was dry.
Presently he stopped walking and sat down on some debris. He unfastened his medicine kit and swallowed a few narcotic capsules. He looked around him. Where was he?
Something lay ahead. Stretched out on the ground. Silent and unmoving.
Hendricks drew his gun quickly. It looked like a man. Then he remembered. It was the remains of Klaus. The Second Variety. Where Tasso had blasted him. He could see wheels and relays and metal parts, strewn around on the ash. Glittering and sparkling in the sunlight.
Hendricks got to his feet and walked over. He nudged the inert form with his foot, turning it over a little. He could see the metal hull, the aluminum ribs and struts. More wiring fell out. Like viscera. Heaps of wiring, switches and relays. Endless motors and rods.
He bent down. The brain cage had been smashed by the fall. The artificial brain was visible. He gazed at it. A maze of circuits. Miniature tubes. Wires as fine as hair. He touched the brain cage. It swung aside. The type plate was visible. Hendricks studied the plate.
And blanched.
IV--IV.
For a long time he stared at the plate. Fourth Variety. Not the Second. They had been wrong. There were more types. Not just three. Many more, perhaps. At least four. And Klaus wasn't the Second Variety.
But if Klaus wasn't the Second Variety--
Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash beyond the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash.
Coming toward him.
Hendricks crouched quickly, raising his gun. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. He fought down rising panic, as the figures neared.
The first was a David. The David saw him and increased its pace. The others hurried behind it. A second David. A third. Three Davids, all alike, coming toward him silently, without expression, their thin legs rising and falling. Clutching their teddy bears.
He aimed and fired. The first two Davids dissolved into particles. The third came on. And the figure behind it. Climbing silently toward him across the gray ash. A Wounded Soldier, towering over the David. And--
* * * * *
And behind the Wounded Soldier came two Tassos, walking side by side. Heavy belt, Russian army pants, shirt, long hair. The familiar figure, as he had seen her only a little while before. Sitting in the pressure seat of the ship. Two slim, silent figures, both identical.
They were very near. The David bent down suddenly, dropping its teddy bear. The bear raced across the ground. Automatically, Hendricks' fingers tightened around the trigger. The bear was gone, dissolved into mist. The two Tasso Types moved on, expressionless, walking side by side, through the gray ash.
When they were almost to him, Hendricks raised the pistol waist high and fired.
The two Tassos dissolved. But already a new group was starting up the rise, five or six Tassos, all identical, a line of them coming rapidly toward him.
And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible.
He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact.
The line of Tassos came up to him. Hendricks braced himself, watching them calmly. The familiar face, the belt, the heavy shirt, the bomb carefully in place.
The bomb--
As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks' mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb. Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties. Made for that end alone.
They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.
OUT OF THE EARTH
By George Edrich
Offences against the State meant elimination in the Black Passage. Death. And these people were to die!
First Awake, 2 Juli, 2207
We have walked much this awake and have stopped now for sleep. Last City is far behind us. Except for the two lamps we keep lighted to frighten away the Groles, there is nothing but blackness in the passage. The others are sleeping, and close beside me, Nina sleeps also. The sound of her breathing is all I have in the darkness.
Thoughts are not clear when the body is so tired, and the things that have happened seem unreal, like something dreamed. The arrest--the State Guards in their black uniforms--coming to our cubicle in the middle of the sleep hours--frightening Nina.
Ten awakes and sleeps of not knowing why. Then the trial--"Jon Farmer 8267, we show you a copy of The Mushroom Farmers' Journal of 21 January 2204. We call your attention to the article Experiments With Red Lake Mushrooms in Rock Soil. This article discusses with favor some policies of the Dictatorium of President Charles 27, an Enemy of the State. Do you admit to writing this treason?"
You are not permitted to answer the Judges in a State trial because they know the answers to everything they ask you. But while they were talking together, I thought how different things became with time. I remembered the fine letter from the Secretary of Agriculture of the Dictatorium, and the two extra free days they had given me. But there was a new Dictatorium now. President Charles and General William had been lowered into Copper Pit and metallized. Now they were mounted in the Historical Museum in Central City. The others of the Dictatorium had been eliminated in Black Passage.
"--Jon Farmer 8267. You have written with favor about Enemies of the State. You are therefore yourself declared an Enemy of the State. By order of the Supreme Council of the Dictatorium of President Joseph 28, you are hereby sentenced to elimination in Black Passage."
Then Nina--"Nina Farmerswife 8267, you have mated with an Enemy of the State. By condescension of the Supreme Council of the Dictatorium of President Joseph 28, you are to be permitted to take an oath of renunciation and separation."
It is not too difficult for the heart to be strong when there is no decision for the mind to make. But what strength of heart Nina must have had then. I was terribly proud and terribly frightened when she walked over and stood with me.
"Please, Nina--" I said, but she shook her head, and her eyes told me I could say nothing more.
The Judges were angry. "Nina Farmerswife 8267, you are hereby declared an Enemy of the State. By order of ..."
* * * * *
There was no one else in the guard cubicle when they locked us in. When the May trials were over, five awakes later, there were seven of us. Doctor Dorn 394 was brought in the awake after we were. He had read the forbidden books in the Chambers of the Dead at the Historical Museum. He was almost thirty-five years old, and had been third assistant physician to the Supreme Council. This was a very strong office and only something as terrible as reading the forbidden books could have made him an Enemy of the State.
Ralf Fishcatcher and his wife, Mari, came from Red Lake. They were Enemies of the State because they had not reported all of the fish they had caught.
Except for Nina, the youngest one of us was Theodor Cook 3044. He was very frightened. He told how he had stolen mushroom bread from the Central City Ration Station where he worked, and how his wife had reported him so she wouldn't become an Enemy of the State also.
The last one to be brought in was Bruno Oreminer 2139. He had killed his foreman by hitting him in the head with a rock. He was a very big man, and very strong. But he talked very little and there was a cold and dangerous look in his eyes.
Early on the sixth awake, the guards came for us. The march was long, almost seven awakes. We passed through many cities--Big City, Power City, and Red Lake; then Iron City, Deep Pit, and Last City. There was only a ten-lamp-per-mile passage from Big Pit to Last City. We passed few people. At Last City, we were taken to the State Guard Station and given small shoulder packs with the food, water, and lamps the law says we may have.
Out of Last City the passage was narrow and poorly lighted, only five lamps per mile. After a few miles the guards became silent, and then just up ahead we saw what looked like a solid iron wall. We had come to the gate to Black Passage.
One of the guards took a paper from his pocket and read it very quickly so that it was hard to understand most of the words. But every little while we could hear "Enemies of the State." When he finished reading, all three of the guards put their fingers in some notches in the gate and pulled with all their strength, and the gate slid into the side of the wall.
Black Passage was before us!
Mari Fishcatcherswife gave a little scream, and Nina pressed up against me and held my arm tightly. Lying on the floor of the passage were many dead bones.
The guard who had read the paper said we must now go into Black Passage. For a long time no one moved. It is hard to be the first into a darkness where, no matter how far the eye searches, there is not the faintest light. Then Doctor Dorn struck the flint on his oil lamp and walked through the gate. With the light of his lamp ahead of us, the fear became less and we turned on our own lamps and followed after him.
The iron wall slid closed behind us. We could hear the steps of the guards as they walked back toward Last City. After a while we couldn't hear them any longer.
Bruno Oreminer tried to move the gate, but the iron was smooth on this side and nothing happened. Theodor Cook had put his face in his hands so he would not have to look at the dead bones, but he stepped on one, and when it cracked, he gave a little cry.
Doctor Dorn started to walk down the passage. I took Nina's hand and we followed after him. It would do no good to stay there by the gate which would never again open for us. If we remained, we would just become dead bones like the rest. The others came along a little way behind.
After we had walked through the passage far enough away from the dead bones so we could not see them, Doctor Dorn stopped. He said we should rest awhile and eat a little of the food, and then we would talk.
Theodor Cook was the first one to ask him the question we were all thinking about. "When will we die?" he asked.
Doctor Dorn said he didn't know. The food and water we had been given was supposed to last for ten awakes and sleeps. If we were very, very careful, it might last for much longer. The oil would probably become used up first, and when there was no more light, then probably the Groles would get us.
Theodor asked whether the dead bones we had seen were people who had been killed by the Groles.
Doctor Dorn said he didn't know, but he didn't think so. When the Groles found someone, there were not supposed to be even dead bones left. No one had ever seen a Grole because they came only when there was no light at all.
Doctor Dorn said he was sorry he had to say such frightening things. But he wanted us to know and understand the worst before he told us things that might give us hope.
There was the smallest chance, Doctor Dorn said, that Black Passage might go to some other State where there was life, the way Copper Passage from Deep City went to the State of the Savages. Our hope was terribly small though, because even if the passage did go to such a place, it would probably be many more awakes and sleeps away than we had oil for; and also, the life there might be wild the way it was in the State of the Savages.
It is strange though how even a hope so small as to be almost nothing can give new strength to the heart.
Doctor Dorn talked more, telling us how we would have to learn to live with less and less light so that the oil would last as long as possible. In the beginning we would burn four lamps. Because the passage was not wide enough for more than two people to walk together, one of us would have to walk alone. But whoever walked alone would always carry one of the lighted lamps, and would never be first or last. When we became used to four lamps, we would turn one off and try walking with only three. After a while another lamp would be turned off and only two lamps would be kept lighted, one at the beginning and one at the end of the column. During sleeps we would keep two lamps on. One would be enough to frighten away the Groles, but there was always the danger it might go out, so it was safer to use two.
Theodor asked wouldn't we get the Black Fear, with so little light.
Doctor Dorn said he didn't know. It was to prevent the Black Fear that we would turn off the lamps gradually instead of all at once. But anyway, it was better to get the Black Fear for a few hours than to use up all of the oil and have the Groles come.
When we started walking again, Doctor Dorn and Bruno went first, then Ralf and Mari, then Theodor. Nina and I walked last. It is frightening to be last with the blackness behind. Later, we will have a different position, and others will take our place.
We have walked for many hours. Now we have stopped for sleep and only the two guard lamps are burning. The light they make is hardly enough to write by. When I look up and see the terrible blackness in the passage before and behind us, a strange and awful feeling seems to form inside. This may be the beginning of Black Fear. I think it is better that I stop writing now. I want to hold Nina in my arms and sleep with the warmth of her life close to me.
* * * * *
Second Awake, 3 Juli 2207
Since last sleep, the hours have been slow and the walk long, but Black Passage remains the same. Doctor Dorn thinks there may be no change for many awakes and sleeps.
To walk in silence except for the sound of our steps becomes a fearsome thing, so we talk much. Doctor Dorn tells us interesting things that have happened while he was Physician to the Supreme Council. When he does this, we do not think so much of what may be ahead for us.
There is something of a strangeness about Bruno, the ore-miner who killed his foreman. Although he rests when we rest, and sleeps when we sleep, the feeling comes that he is not with us. He walks always first with Doctor Dorn, and says nothing.
Sometimes Mari and Nina walk together and talk about woman things. Mari is twenty-two, three years older than Nina, and even though she has been married to Ralf for only five years, she has almost borne life once. Nina said it must be wonderful to bear life, and Doctor Dorn heard her and said she had the look of one who might bear life herself some day, perhaps even before she was twenty-five. Nina was very thrilled.
But it is strange to talk of a time so far ahead. The mind forgets sometimes there may be only a few awakes and sleeps left to all our lives.
One feels a great sorrow for Theodor. He does not have someone who is a part of him the way I have Nina and Ralf has Mari, and he does not have the strength of heart of Doctor Dorn or Bruno. Fear seems to hold his mind more than any of us. Many times Nina or Mari, or Ralf or I, walk beside him so he will not have to walk alone always. But when we speak to him he almost never answers.
* * * * *
Third Awake, 4 Juli 2207
Another sleep has come and our tiredness is greater. Doctor Dorn thinks we are about twenty-five miles from Lost City.
After an hour of the walk, we turned off one of the lamps, leaving only three on, and the blackness of the passage seemed to jump in toward us. It is like a live and evil thing, the blackness, running in fear from the light before us, yet following so closely behind. Sometimes I cannot help feeling that, like the Groles, it is just waiting for our last lamp to go out so it can rush in and kill us. In one thing we have been fortunate. Even with only three lamps lighted no one has had the Black Fear. But after this sleep we will burn only two lamps and again the blackness will move closer. It is not a pleasant thought to sleep with.
* * * * *
Fourth Awake, 5 Juli 2207
Except for the greater darkness because of only two lamps, all is the same. It is strange not to have the City Signals to tell us when to sleep and when to awake. Because we have only our tiredness to measure awakes and sleeps, I am no longer sure the date I write above is the right one.
We do not talk as much now. All of our strength must be used for walking.
* * * * *
Fifth Awake, 6 Juli 2207
One of the lamps went out while we were walking, this awake. Although we were able to light it again in a few seconds, we could not help thinking how the Groles might have come if the other lamp hadn't been burning.
Doctor Dorn says our tiredness is so great because we eat so little of the food. It is very hard to be careful when one remains so hungry; yet not knowing how many days are before us in Black Passage makes the mind fearful and the will strong.
* * * * *
Seventh Awake, 8 Juli 2207
This awake, Theodor had the Black Fear. We had to hold one of the lamps in front of his eyes for more than an hour before he was able to stop trembling. Then it was almost another hour before he was able to go on.
* * * * *
Eleventh Awake, 12 Juli 2207
Sleep follows sleep and nothing changes. Sometimes I feel that we have not moved at all, that we are still just outside Last City. Yet Doctor Dorn says we have come almost one hundred miles.
* * * * *
Twelfth Awake, 13 Juli 2207
Just before this sleep we emptied our shoulder packs to see how much food and water we have used. Most of us have used about one-fourth of what we have been given. Doctor Dorn says this is not bad, but we must learn to use even less. Theodor has much more food left than any of us. This is not surprising, because during rests he eats almost nothing.
It is the little oil we have left that worries Doctor Dorn. He does not believe there will be enough for even ten more awakes and sleeps. We would use less oil if we burned only one lamp, but it would be a terrible chance. We remember how a lamp went out several awakes ago.
* * * * *
Fourteenth Awake, 15 Juli 2207
There was much trouble during our last sleep. Soon after sleep had come, a terrible cry awoke us again. My mind first had the thought that the lamps had gone out and the Groles had come. But both lamps were still burning, and near one of them, we could see Bruno and Theodor struggling together on the floor of the passage. Bruno's hands were around Theodor's throat, and Theodor was no longer able to make any sounds. Bruno is terribly strong, and Ralf and I and Doctor Dorn had to use all of our own strength to force his hands away. Doctor Dorn asked Bruno why he had done this, and Bruno pointed to where his shoulder pack was lying open, and said, "He was stealing." These were the only words he had said for a long time. When Theodor stopped choking and was able to speak again, Doctor Dorn asked him if what Bruno had said was true. Theodor said no, and Doctor Dorn said he should look directly into his eyes and answer again. Theodor said he was sleepy and his throat hurt and he didn't want to talk any more. Doctor Dorn gave a big sigh, and said he understood. He said Theodor must promise never to steal again. If he didn't promise, or if he broke his promise, then perhaps the next time Bruno tried to kill him, we might not hear him in time. Theodor became very frightened, and said all right, he promised.
When we were going back to sleep, Nina told me she had wondered why Theodor slept each time near someone else. He had probably thought by taking a little from each one of us, his stealing would not be noticed.
* * * * *
Seventeenth Awake, 18 Juli 2207
The awakes and sleeps pass again and everything is as it was, except that our food and oil becomes less, and our tiredness greater. Several times during our walk we have found a little water in the passage. How wonderful it would be if we could so easily find more food and oil.
Although Bruno shows no sign that he wants to hurt Theodor again, Theodor is still terribly frightened of him, and stays as far from him as possible. Before each sleep, Doctor Dorn makes Theodor open his shoulder pack and show him the food he has left. His food is being used up as fast as ours is now.
* * * * *
Eighteenth Awake, 19 Juli 2207
Eighteen awakes and sleeps we have walked in Black Passage. To the mind, it is forever.
The passage has begun to climb a little. This is not a good thing.
* * * * *
Nineteenth Awake, 20 Juli 2207
I write this during rest.
We have come to a Dead City. No lamps are lighted in the dark street passages and all the cubicles are empty. We have found many other passages going out of the City, and we must now decide which is the best to try. I do not think this will be difficult. One of the passages seems newer than any of the others, much newer and larger than Black Passage through which we have walked for so long. There are lamps in this passage, and even though they are not lighted, they would not have been put there unless the passage went to some other City. Although this other city may be dead also, hope is now a little greater. Doctor Dorn calls this passage Hope Passage. Another thing that adds to hope is the way the passage goes down so steeply.
Hope Passage was found many hours ago, sleep time has now come, and yet a decision has not been made. Much of this is because of Nina. Although she has spoken very little, the things she has said have made Doctor Dorn behave very strangely.
When he asked each of us if we thought Hope Passage would be the best one to follow, everyone but Nina said yes right away. Even Bruno nodded. But when he asked Nina, she did not answer so quickly. Then she said if we all thought Hope Passage was the best, it was probably so.
But Doctor Dorn was not satisfied. Did she not think so herself, he asked. Was there something about Hope Passage she did not like? Was there some other passage she thought might be better?
I could feel Nina's fingers tighten on my arm the way they did whenever she became very frightened or worried or disturbed. It was not something her mind thought, she said. It was just a feeling she had which she couldn't understand or explain.
Doctor Dorn's voice became very gentle. He said Nina shouldn't try to understand or explain her feeling. But would she try to describe what it was like, even a little.
Nina looked at me very troubled and I put my arm around her shoulders, and said she didn't have to answer if she didn't want to. But then she took a little breath and said in a very low voice that as far back as she could remember, even when she was a tiny girl, she always had a good feeling when she was going up and a bad feeling when she was going down. It was a strange way to be, she knew, and she had never told anyone before. But that was why she did not like Hope Passage, which went down so fast. The passage she had liked best was the one near the old statue. The way it went up gave her a good feeling.
Doctor Dorn asked didn't she know the passage by the statue was the oldest one we had found, and therefore it should have the smallest chance of going to a live city.
Nina said she knew, and her mind understood everything Doctor Dorn said. But the things her mind knew and understood were not able to change the way she felt. She said she was sorry she had made us all lose so much time. She would not talk about it any more.
Doctor Dorn asked Nina would she please answer just one more question. Did she have this good feeling while we were walking up the little climb near the end of Black Passage.
Nina nodded her head yes, and Doctor Dorn said it was very interesting. Then in a different voice, he said that Hope Passage was our best chance of finding life, and after this sleep we would continue our walk there.
* * * * *
Twentieth Awake, 21 Juli 2207
A few hours ago we said goodbye to Ralf and Mari and Bruno, and watched them start down Hope Passage. I think they may find life again soon.
Even now, I do not understand clearly why we are not with them; why we are climbing in this old rough passage which rises so steeply we must stop every little while to rest.
Many thoughts must have come to Doctor Dorn during our last sleep, because when we awoke he was different from any way he had been before. For a little while, he just walked up and back rubbing his chin as if he were thinking very hard. Then all of a sudden he stopped and came over to Nina. He asked Nina whether if we were not here, if she had to decide only for herself, knowing all he had told her, would she still take the old passage?
Nina said yes, she would. Doctor Dorn sat down. He said he was going to say strong words. He was going to tell us some of the things he had read in the Forbidden Books.
For thousands of years Man had first lived on Earth Surface, the books said. But then great wars had come and Man had studied hard and learned ways to kill each other millions at a time. But some of the men who did not want to die had dug deep into the earth to live. Everyone in the earth, the books said, came from these first men from Earth Surface.
Doctor Dorn stopped to let us think about what he had told us. Earth Surface--nothing above but nothing--and nothing beyond nothing--the thought is more than the mind can hold. That men could have lived on such a place is too much to be believed.
There were some things written in the Forbidden Books that could not be true, Doctor Dorn said, like the plants called trees that grew to be many times taller than a man; or lakes called oceans that were larger than a thousand Red Lakes together. But even though these and some other things the books said were not possible, there was something about the story of men living on Earth Surface that made him wonder. All sleep he had not slept, but had thought how the old passage we had found near the statue might be one of the surface passages the books told about. He could not imagine any City in the Earth building a passage so steep and so rough.
Doctor Dorn stopped talking for a moment, and he looked at me. He seemed very excited. "Jon," he said, "my own feeling now is to take Surface Passage. I cannot do this alone with one lamp. You know how Nina feels. Will you and Nina come with me?"
My thoughts must have been like those of the lost-mind men in the hospital at Central City. Even now I do not know why I said we would. Maybe it was because of the way Nina's eyes shone when Doctor Dorn talked about Earth Surface. Nina is a wonderful girl and I love her very much, but sometimes I think I do not understand her completely.
Ralf and Mari talked together for a long time. Then Ralf told Doctor Dorn he thought Hope Passage was the best chance for finding life. They would not come with us.
Doctor Dorn said he understood. He was sorry we had to separate now, but each must do what was in his own thoughts and heart. Then he asked Bruno if he was coming with us, and Bruno shook his head no, and did not say anything.
Theodor thought for even a longer time than Ralf and Mari. He kept biting the nails on his fingers and every little while his eyes would look at Bruno. I knew he was afraid to come with us; but also he was afraid to be alone with Bruno with only Ralf to help him if anything happened. Finally, in a very low voice, he said he would come with us.
Doctor Dorn said fine, now there was one more thing we must do before we started. We must take the oil from one of the lamps and put it in the other six lamps so there would be the same amount in each one. Then each group would take three lamps.
Theodor said this was not fair. There were four of us so we should have four lamps. Doctor Dorn said four people needed no more light than three people.
It was very sad when we had to separate. Mari and Nina cried a little. For a long time after we found Surface Passage and were climbing in it, no one said anything. Perhaps after next sleep, our sadness may be less.
* * * * *
Twenty-First Awake, 22 Juli 2207
The passage is still climbing and we rest often. I write a little during some of our rests.
* * * * *
There is very little oil left. Doctor Dorn says we must take a dangerous chance. No lamp has gone out for a long time. If we burn only one lamp, we can have light for almost four more awakes and sleeps. If this is really a Surface Passage, and if what is written in the forbidden books is true, this time may be enough for us to reach Earth Surface.
We have been burning only one lamp since our last rest. How bright does the light from the two lamps seem now. Nina says she feels she can reach out and touch the blackness.
Theodor is very frightened. Over and over he says we must go back and take the other passage, that if we go on we shall all be dead bones. I think Doctor Dorn would become angry if he did not understand how frightened Theodor is.
During rest, Theodor spoke words that made Nina feel very sad. He said it was because of her that we would all die. I became very angry, and told him if he said anything like that again, I would finish what Bruno had started. He knows I would not do this, but now he talks very little.
* * * * *
Twenty-Second Awake, 23 Juli 2207
We walk up Surface Passage still, but there is a difference. Before last sleep there was much hope in our hearts. Now our hope is almost nothing.
It was Nina who knew first. She brought me out of sleep, shaking my shoulder and saying my name, until my mind was awake enough to understand.
Theodor was gone!
He had left us the one lamp that was burning. The other two lamps he had taken; and all of our food and water. But our hunger may never become too great. With one lamp, there will be light until only a few hours after next sleep.
Doctor Dorn blames himself. He says he should have been able to tell that Theodor might do something like this. But Doctor Dorn feels the same tiredness that is in us all, making our thoughts like shadows.
Sleep time has come, but we do not stop. We will walk on and rest when we must. When the end of life is so near, the will finds strength.
* * * * *
Twenty-Third Awake, 24 Juli 2207
We have walked through sleep and we have slept while we walked. The rise is steeper. Our oil lamp is still burning and our shadows fall behind us into the blackness. There will be light for perhaps ten more hours.
There is a dampness now in the passage, like that of the passage to Red Lake. Our tiredness is so great we become afraid sometimes that after one of our rests we may not be able to go on. I am worried about Nina. She says nothing, but I think for a long while now she has been walking on heart strength alone. We have seven hours of light before us.
The passage has ended. For a moment the thought came that we were on Earth Surface. But Doctor Dorn says we are in a great cavern, larger even than the Cavern of Red Lake. Our one light is as nothing in this great blackness, and we walk close to the wall so we will not become lost. In some places the walls are like glass as if from a very great heat. There are more passages in the sides of this cavern than the mind can imagine. But after this rest there is nothing else we can do but try one of them.
For five hours we have been lost in passages that curve and turn and join with each other as madly as if they were made by lost-mind men. Now we have found our way back to the Great Cavern. We shall stay here the two hours longer our light and lives will last.
It is easier now that our hope is nothing.
We can rest and wait, and even our fear becomes less in our tiredness.
The time has gone slowly, but the light from the lamp is becoming less now. In a few seconds it will go out, and the Groles will come, and our lives will be over. Perhaps for an instant before we die, we shall know what the Groles are; or perhaps it happens so quickly we will never know anything. This may be the better way. Nina trembles in my arms.
We wait in the blackness. The lamp has been out for many minutes but the Groles have not come.
How can this be? Can the mind conceive that there are no such things as Groles, that, like so many other things, they are only a lie of the State?
These last words I write now.
The Groles are coming! We can hear their murmuring sounds through the passages. We say goodbye to each other.
They are very close now--very--
* * * * *
ALVAREZ COUNTY DAILY RECORD
Inhabitants of Earth's Interior Come to Alvarez by Franklin Williams, Staff Writer
Alvarez, May 9, 2204.--An almost unbelievable event of the greatest significance not only to Alvarez, or the United States of the Western Hemisphere, but to the entire world, occurred in our Alvarez County yesterday. Visitors on the early morning tour through Alvarez Caverns, came upon an astonishing spectacle. Two men and a young girl of indescribable strangeness of manner and dress were seated on the floor of Atom Cave. All were in the last stages of exhaustion and exposure, and even the little light from the electric hand lamps seemed to blind them. Fortunately, in the tour was Dr. and Mrs. Ferguson of New Washington, and Dr. Ferguson, appraising himself rapidly of the situation, led the trio out of the Caverns and drove them to Alvarez Hospital. Dr. Ferguson says they seemed completely dazed and unable to speak. They came with him without resistance.
After an examination by Dr. Stutfeldt of Alvarez Hospital which completely confirmed Dr. Ferguson's earlier diagnosis, the strange visitors were put in a darkened room, in which they surprisingly had no difficulty seeing, and were given simple nourishment.
Late in the evening, after they had slept and rested for many hours, they were questioned. In the presence of a distinguished group which included Mayor Whitehead, Professor Lorraine Johnson (a very charming young lady) of the Alvarez University, J. W. Wilson, Chairman of the Alvarez Chamber of Commerce, and your reporter, they told an amazing, but according to Professor Johnson, entirely credible story.
Speaking slowly with an accent strongly reminiscent of twenty-first century North American, but with somewhat peculiar grammatical formations, the oldest of the group told of their having walked for many weeks from their State deep within the Earth.
Undoubtedly, they will have much more of interest to tell, but Dr. Stutfeldt refused to let them talk for more than a few minutes. He says it will be many weeks before they will regain their strength, and much longer before they will be able to adjust to the tremendous differences between their old life and life on the surface of the earth. It is entirely possible, Dr. Stutfeldt says, that they may never be able to make this adjustment.
An interesting sidelight of their within-the-earth civilization is that, although they apparently have the same calendar system as ours, in some way their time seems to have gotten out of step. According to their reckoning it is now some three years and two months later than it is.
* * * * *
NEW WASHINGTON SUN
What's New Under the Sun by Dick Richard
The (very) little furor that has been caused by the recent report from Alvarez County of the arrival of visitors from inside the earth shows signs of abating completely. Very likely it is just a case of poor timing, (three reports of flying saucers and one of Saturnian birdmen in less than a month has pretty well saturated the gullibility market). But perhaps it is just as well. Not that we are skeptical by nature, but we cannot help wondering at the somewhat amazing coincidence of the Alvarez report being issued just two weeks before the start of the Alvarez County Festival.
* * * * *
UNITED STATES OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE DEPARTMENT OF STATE DIVISION OF INVESTIGATION
Report on Supernatural Phenomena: File No. B5138.
Subject: Subterranean Inhabitants.
Reference: Alvarez County Record, News Item of May 9, 2204, et al. (See File).
On January 3, 2206, in performance of the subject investigation, a visit was made to the Alvarez Hospital at Alvarez, Alvarez County. Dr. Ernest Stutfeldt was contacted, and upon being questioned, expressed surprise and some annoyance that an investigation was being conducted, in his words, "so damned long after everything was over." It was pointed out to Dr. Stutfeldt that qualified investigative personnel was limited, that these matters had to be taken in their proper turn, and that a year and a half interval for an investigation of this nature was not considered excessive. The information was then elicited from Dr. Stutfeldt that the "earth visitors" were no longer patients at the hospital, that two of them, a Mr. and Mrs. Jon Farmer, were living on their farm about ten miles out of Alvarez, and that the third, a Dr. Dorn Smith, was studying medicine at Alvarez University.
Transportation to the university was thereupon obtained, and after considerable time and difficulty, Dr. Dorn Smith was located. When asked for some proof of his subterranean origin, the doctor was unable to provide same. His descriptions of the life and government of his claimed underground "State" could with a little imagination, have been derived from any textbook on the absolute governments of the twenty-first century.
A certain measure of authenticity was temporarily ascribed to Dr. Dorn Smith's statements, when these were termed as "entirely credible" by Professor Lorraine Johnson of the university. However, the explanation for Professor Johnson's corroboration became obvious when it was learned that the professor and Dr. Dorn Smith were engaged to be married.
Although it was apparent by this time that the claims made by the subject investigatees had no information in fact, in order to insure a completely comprehensive inquiry, a visit was made to the Farmers' domicile. Obviously alerted by a phonovision from Dr. Dorn Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Farmer were cordial, but no more informative than their three-month-old baby daughter. The inquiry was then terminated.
A verbatim account of all questions and answers pertaining to the above investigation is affixed hereto.
Therefore, and in consequence of this inquiry, it is recommended that the subject supernatural phenomenon be classified as "Not Verified," and that the file be closed.
Respectfully submitted, Clarence B. Pendergast, Special Investigator of Supernatural Phenomena DEPARTMENT OF STATE January 5, 2206.
THE VERY BLACK
by Dean Evans
Jet test-pilots and love do not mix too happily as a rule--especially with a ninth-dimensional alter ego messing the whole act.
There was nothing peculiar about that certain night I suppose--except to me personally. A little earlier in the evening I'd walked out on the Doll, Margie Hayman--and a man doesn't do that and cheer over it. Not if he's in love with the Doll he doesn't--not this doll. If you've ever seen her you'll give the nod on that.
The trouble had been Air Force's new triangular ship--the new saucer. Not radio controlled, this one--this one was to carry a real live pilot. At least that's what the doll's father, who was Chief Engineer at Airtech, Inc., had in mind when he designed it.
The doll had said to me sort of casually, "Got something, Baby." She called me baby. Me, one eighty-five in goose pimples.
"Toss it over, Doll," I said.
"No strings on you, Baby." She'd grinned that little one-sided grin of hers. "No strings on you. Not even one. You're a flyboy, you are, and you can take off or land any time any place you feel like it."
"Stake your mom's Charleston cup on that," I said.
She nodded. Her one-sided grin seemed to fade slightly but she hooked it up again fast. A doll--like I said. This was the original model, they've never gone into production on girls like her full-time.
She said, "Therefore, I've got no right to go stalking with a salt shaker in one hand and a pair of shears for your tailfeathers in the other."
"You're cute, Doll," I said, still going along with her one hundred percent.
"Nice--we get along nice."
"Somebody oughta set 'em up on that."
"So far."
"Huh?" I blinked. I hate sour notes. That's why I'm not a musician. You never get a sour note in a jet job--or if you do you don't get annoyed. That's the sour note to end all sour notes.
"Brace yourself, Baby," she said.
I took a hitch on the highball glass I was holding and let one eye get a serious look in it. "Shoot," I told her.
"This new job--this new saucer the TV newscasts are blatting about. You boys in the Air Force heard about it yet?"
"There's been a rumor," I said. I frowned. Top secret--in a pig's eyelash!
"Uh-huh. Is it true this particular ship is supposed to carry a pilot this time?"
"Where do they dig up all this old stuff?" I growled. "Hell, I knew all about that way way back this afternoon already."
"Uh-huh, Is it also true they've asked a flyboy named Eddie Anders to take it up the first time? This flyboy named Eddie Anders being my Baby?"
I got bored with the highball. I tossed it down the hole in my head and put the glass on a table. "You're psychic," I said.
She shrugged. "Good looking, maybe. Nice shape, maybe. Peachy disposition, maybe. Psychic, unh-unhh. But who else would they ask to do it?"
"A point," I conceded.
"Fork in the road coming up," the Doll said.
"Huh?"
"Fork--look. It'll be voluntary, won't it? You don't have to do it? They won't think the worse of you if you refuse?"
"Huh?" I gawked at her.
"I'm scared, Baby."
Her eyes weren't blue anymore. They'd been blue before but not now. Now they were violet balls that were laying me like somebody taking a last long look at the thing down inside the nice white satin before they close the cover on it for the final time.
"Have a drink, Doll," I said. I got up, went to the liquor wagon. "Seltzer? There isn't any mixer left."
"Asked you something, Baby."
I took her glass over. I handed it to her. My own drink I poured down that same hole in my head. I said finally, "Nice smooth bourbon but I like scotch better."
"They've already crashed four of this new type on tests, haven't they?"
I nearly choked. That was supposed to be the very pinnacle of the top secret stuff. But she was right of course. Four of the earlier models had cracked up. No pilots in them at the time--radio controlled. But jobs designed to carry pilots nevertheless.
"Some pitchers have great big ugly-looking ears," I said.
She didn't seem to mind. She said, "Or maybe I'm really psychic as you said. Or maybe my Dad's being Chief at Airtech has something to do with it."
"Somebody oughta stitch a zipper across his big fat yap," I said. "And weld the damn thing shut."
"He told only me," she said softly. "And then only because of you. You see, Baby, he isn't like us. He's got old fashioned notions you and I've got strings tied around each other already just because you gave me a ring."
I stared at her.
"Crazy, isn't it? He isn't sensible like us."
"Can the gag lines, Doll," I said sourly. "The old bird's okay."
And that fetched a few moments of silence in the room--thick pervading silence. A silence to be broken at any fractional second and heavy--supercharged--because of it.
I said finally, "Somebody has to take it up. It might as well be me. And they've already asked me."
"You could refuse, Baby."
"Sure I could. It's voluntary. They don't horsewhip a guy into it."
"Uh-huh--voluntary. And you can refuse." She stopped, waited, then, "Making me get right down there on the hard bare floor on both knees, Baby? All right. None of us should be proud. None of us has a right to be proud, have we?
"All right, Baby. I'm down there--way, way down there. I'm asking you not to take that ship up. I'm begging you--begging, Baby. Look, on me you've never seen anything like this before. Begging!"
I looked at my empty glass. The taste in my mouth was suddenly bitter. "No strings, we said," I said harshly. "A flyboy, we said. Guy who can take off and land anywhere, anytime he likes. Stuff like that we just got through saying."
She didn't answer that. I waited. She didn't answer. I got up finally, got my lousy new officer's cap off the TV set and went over to the door. I opened the door. I went on through.
But before I closed it I heard her whisper. That's the trouble with whispers, they go incredible distances to get places. The whisper said, "That's right, Baby. Right as rain. No strings--ever!"
* * * * *
When you don't have any scotch in the house you'd be surprised how well rum will do--even Jamaica rum. I was on my own davenport in my own apartment and there were two shot glasses in front of me. I was taking turns on them so they wouldn't wear out. And what was keeping these glasses busy was me and a fifth of the Jamaica rum in my right hand. And that's when it all began.
Across the room a rather stout woman was needling a classic through the television screen and at the same time needing a shave rather badly. I wasn't paying any attention to her. I was thinking about the Doll. Wondering, worrying a little. And that's when it began.
That's when the voice said, "Mr. Anders, would you do me the goodness to forget that bottle for a moment?"
The voice seemed to be coming from the TV screen although the stout lady hadn't finished her song. The voice was like the disappointed sigh of a poor old bloke down to his last beer dime and having to look up into the bartender's grinning puss as the bartender downs a nice bubbly glass of champagne somebody bought for him. Poor guy, I thought. I downed glass number one. And then glass number two. And then I looked over at the TV screen.
That sent a little shiver up my spine. I dropped my eyes to the glasses, filled them once more. Strong stuff, Jamaica rum. At the first the taste is medicine. A little later the taste is pleasant syrup. And a little later still the taste is delightful. But strong--the whole way strong. I downed glass number one.
I figured I wouldn't touch glass number two yet. I brought up my eyes, let them go over to the TV screen again.
He didn't have any eyes. That was the first thing that struck me. There were other things of course, such as the fact he didn't have any arms or legs. He didn't have any head either, in case he had eyes in the first place. He was a black swirling bioplastic mass of something or other and he was doing a graceful tango directly in front of the TV screen, thereby blocking off from view the stout woman who needed a shave.
He said, "Do you have any idea what I am, Mr. Anders?"
"Sure," I said. "Somebody's blennorrheal nightmare."
"Incorrect, Mr. Anders. This substance is not mucous. Mucous is very seldom black."
"Mucous is very seldom black," I mimicked.
"Correct, Mr. Anders."
So all right. So they were making Jamaica rum a little stronger these days. So all right! Next time I wouldn't get rum, I'd get scotch. Hell with rum. I dismissed the thought from my mind. I picked up glass number two, downed it. I wondered if the Doll was feeling sorry for herself.
"Incorrect, Mr. Anders," he said. "The rum is no stronger than usual."
I jerked. I stared at the black sticky-looking thing he was. I shut my eyes tightly, snapped them open again. Then I worked the glasses again with the bottle.
"Don't be shocked, Mr. Anders. I'm not a mind reader. It's just that you discarded the thought of a moment ago. I picked it up, see?"
"Sure," I said. "You picked it out of the junk pile of my mind, where all my little gems go."
"Correct, Mr. Anders."
It was about time to empty the glasses again. I varied the routine this time by picking up number-two glass first.
"Light a cigarette, Mr. Anders."
I'm a guy to go along with a gag. I fished a cigarette out, lit it "Lit," I said. And just at that instant the stout dame without the shave hit a sour one way up around A above high C. My ears cringed. I forgot the cigarette and glared across the room, trying to see through the black swirling mass that stood in front of the TV screen.
"Puff, Mr. Anders."
I puffed. The puff sounded like somebody getting his lips on a very full glass of beer and quickly sucking so that foaming clouds don't go down the sides of the glass and all over the bar. I didn't have any cigarette.
"Ah!"
I blinked. The black swirling mass was going gently to and fro. At about head height on a man my cigarette was sticking out from it and a little curl of smoke was coming from the end. Even as I looked the curl ceased and then a big blue cloud of smoke barreled across the room toward my face.
"Your cigarette, Mr. Anders."
"Nice trick," I said. "Took it out from between my lips and I never felt it. Nice trick."
"Incorrect, Mr. Anders. When the singer flatted that particular note your attention was diverted momentarily. Your senses are exceptional, you see. Your ears register pain at false sounds. Therefore, you discarded the thoughts of your cigarette during the moment you suffered with the singer. Following this reasoning, your cigarette went into abandonment. And I salvaged it. No trick at all, really."
I thought, to hell with the shot glasses. I put the rum bottle to my lips and tilted it up and held it there until it wasn't good for anything anymore. Then I took it down by the neck and heaved it straight at the black mass.
The television screen didn't shatter, which proved something or other. The bottle didn't even reach the screen. It hit the black swirling mass about navel high. It went in, sank in like slamming your fist into a fat man's stomach. And then it rebounded and clattered on the floor.
"Scream!" I said thickly. "You dirty black delusion--scream!"
"I am screaming, Mr. Anders. That hurt terribly."
He sort of unfolded then, like unfolding a limp wool sweater in the air. And from this unfolding, something came forth that could have been somebody's old fashioned idea of what a rifle looked like. He held it up in firing position, pointed at my head.
"Don't be alarmed, Mr. Anders. This is to convince you. A gun, yes, a very old gun--a Brown Bess, they used to call it. I just took it from the City Museum, where it was on display."
He had a nice point-blank sight on my forehead. Now he moved the gun, aimed it off me, pointed, it across the room toward the open windows.
"Note the workmanship, Mr. Anders. Note the stock. Someone put a little effort on the carving. Note the sentiment carved here."
The rum was working hard now. I could feel it climbing hand over hand up from my knees.
"Let me read what it says, Mr. Anders--'Deathe to ye Colonies'. Note the odd wording, the spelling. And now watch, Mr. Anders."
The gun came up a trifle, stiffened. There was a loud snapping sound, a click of metal on metal--Flintlock. As all the ancient guns were.
And then came the roar. Wood across the room--the window casing--splintered and flew wildly. Smoke and smell filled my senses.
He said, chuckling, "Let's call it the Abandonment Theory for lack of a better name. This old Brown Bess hasn't been thought of acquisitively for some years. It's been in the museum--abandoned. T h e r e f o r e subject to the discarded junk pile as you yourself so cleverly put it before. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Anders?"
Perfectly--oh, perfectly, Mr. Bioplast. The rum was going around my eyes now. Going up and around and headed like an arrow for the hunk of my brain that can't seem to hide fast enough.
I guess I made it to the bedroom but I wouldn't put any hard cash on it. And I guess I passed out.
* * * * *
The morning was a bad one as all bad ones usually are. But no matter how bad they get there's always the consoling thought that in a few hours things will ease up. I hugged this thought through a needle shower, through three cups of coffee in the kitchen. What I was neglecting in this reasoning was the splintered wood in the living room.
I saw it on my way out. It hit me starkly, like the blasted section of a eucalyptus trunk writhing up from the ground. I stopped dead in the doorway and stared at it. Then I got out my knife and got at it.
I probed but it was going to take more than a pocket knife. The ball--and it was just that--was buried a half inch in the soft pine of the casing.
I closed the knife and went to the phone and got Information to ring the museum.
"You people aren't missing a Brown Bess musket," I said. It was a question, of course, but not now--not the way I had said it. "Nobody stole anything out of the museum last night, did they?"
Sweat was oozing over my upper lip. I could feel it. I could feel sweat wetting the phone in my hand. The woman on the other end told me to wait. I said, "Yeah"--not realizing. I waited, not realizing, until a man's voice came on.
"You were saying something about a Brown Bess musket, mister?" A cold sharp voice--a gutter voice but with the masking tag of official behind it. Like the voice of someone behind a desk writing something on a blotter--a real police voice.
I put the phone down. I pulled all the shades in the living room, went out the door, locked it behind me and drove as fast as you can make a Buick go, out to the field. But fast!
The XXE-1 was ready. She'd been ready for weeks. There wasn't a mechanical or electronic flaw in her. We hoped, I hoped, the man who designed her hoped. The Doll's father--he hoped most of all. Even lying quiescent in her hangar, she looked as sleek as a Napoleon hat done in poured monel. When your eyes went over her you knew instinctively they'd thrown the mach numbers out the window when she was done.
I went through a door that had the simple word Plotting on it.
The Doll's father was there already behind his desk, studying something as I came in. He looked up, smiled, said, "Hi, guy."
I flipped a finger at him. I wondered if the Doll had told him about last night.
"Wife and I were going to suggest a snack when we got home last night but you had already gone, and Marge was in bed."
I didn't look at him. "Left early, Pop. Growing boy."
"Yeah. You look lousy, guy."
I put my teeth together. I still didn't look at him. "These nights," I said vaguely.
"Sure."
I could feel something in his voice. I took a breath and put my eyes on his. He said, "I'm a hell of an old duck."
"Not so old, Pop."
"Sure I am. But not too old to remember back to the days when I wasn't too old." There was a grave look in his eyes.
I didn't have to answer that. The door banged open and Melrose, the LC, came in. He jerked a look at both of us, butted a cigarette he'd just lit--lighted another, butted that. He ran a hand through thick graying hair and frowned.
"Anybody got a cigarette?" he said sourly. "Couldn't sleep last night. This damned responsibility. Worried all night about something we hadn't thought of."
Pop looked up. Melrose went on. "Light--travels in a straight line, no?" He blinked small nervous eyes at us. Then, "Can't go around corners unless it's helped, you see. I mean just this. The XXE-One is expected to hit a significant fraction of the speed of light once it gets beyond the atmosphere. Now here's the point--how in hell do we control it then?"
He waited. I didn't say anything. Pop didn't say anything. Melrose ran a hand through his hair once more, muttered goddamit to himself, turned around and went barging out the door.
Pop said wryly, "Another quick memo to the Pentagon. He never heard of the Earth's gravity."
"He's heard," I said. "It's just that it slipped his mind these last few years."
Pop grinned. He handed me a sheaf of typewritten notes. "These'll just about make it. You'll notice the initial flight is charted pretty damn closely."
"Thanks, Pop. I better take these, somewhere else to look 'em over. Melrose might be back."
"Pretty damn closely," he repeated. "Almost as closely as if she was going up under radio control...." He stopped. He looked at me from under his eyebrows.
I studied him. "Already told the brass I'd take her up, Pop." I kept my voice down.
"Sure, guy. Sure. Uh--you mention it to Marge?"
"Last night."
"I see." His eyes got suddenly far away. I left him like that. Hell with him--hell with the whole family!
* * * * *
It was in the evening paper, tucked in the second section. They treated it lightly. It seemed the night watchman had opened the rear door of the museum for a breath of air or maybe a smoke. Or maybe to kitchie-koo some babe under the chin in the alley.
That's the only way it could have happened. And he'd discovered the empty exhibit case at 2:10 in the morning. The case still had a little white card on it that told about the Brown Bess musket and the powder horn and the ball shot inside.
But the little white card lied in its teeth. There weren't any such things in the case at all. And he'd notified the curator at once.
There was also mention of a mysterious phone call which couldn't be traced.
Things like this don't happen in 1953. So I didn't get loaded that night. I went home, went to the davenport, sat down and told myself they don't happen. Things like this have never happened, will never happen. What occurred last night was something in the bottom of a bottle of Jamaica rum.
"Thinking, Mr. Anders?"
I took a slow breath. He was swaying gently in the air a foot from my elbow and he was still a black mucous scum, as he had been the night before. I got up.
I said, "I'm not loaded tonight. I haven't had a thing all day." I took two steps toward him.
He wasn't there.
I took another breath--a very very slow breath. I turned around and went back to the davenport.
He was back again.
"They'll find that musket," he said. "I have no use for it now. You see I wanted it only to convince you, Mr. Anders."
I put my hands on my knees and didn't look at him. I was suddenly trying to remember where I'd put that Luger I'd brought home from Germany a couple years back.
"You're not quite convinced yet, Mr. Anders?"
Where in the hell did I put it?
"Very well, Mr. Anders. Now hear this, please. Now watch me." He stirred at about hip height. A shelf-like section of the black mass protruded a little distance from the main part of him. On this shelf suddenly lay a rusted penknife.
"A very little boy, Mr. Anders. And a very long while ago. A talented boy, one of those who has what might be called an exceptional imagination. This boy cherished a penknife when he was quite small. Pick up the knife, Mr. Anders."
The knife was suddenly in my lap. I picked it up. It was rusty. It had a flat bone handle. "Museums again," I whispered to myself.
"So highly did this boy prize his knife that he went to great pains to carve his name very very carefully on one side of the bone handle. Turn the knife over, Mr. Anders."
The name was Edward Anders.
"You lost it when you were eleven. You wouldn't remember though. I found it in an attic where it lay unnoticed. As the years went by you gradually forgot about the knife, you see, and when your mind had completely abandoned the thoughts of it, it was mine--had I wanted it. As a matter of fact I didn't. I retrieved it just today."
I put the knife down. Sweat was coming on my forehead now, I could feel it. I was remembering. I was remembering the knife and what was scaring me even more was I was remembering the very day I had lost it. In the attic.
I said very carefully, "All right. You've made your point. You can take it from there."
"Quite so, Mr. Anders. You now admit I exist, that I have extraordinary powers. I am your own creation, Mr. Anders. As I said before you have exceptional senses, including imagination. And yes, imagination is the greatest of all the senses.
"Some humans with this gift often imagine ludicrous things, exciting things, horrifying things--depending don't you see, on mood, emotion. And the things these mortals imagine become real, are actually, created--only they don't know it, of course."
He stopped. He was probably giving me time to soak that up. Then he went on. "You've forgotten to keep trying to remember where you put that Luger, Mr. Anders. I just picked up the abandoned thought as it left your consciousness just now."
I gulped down something that tried to rise in my throat. I didn't like this guy.
"You created me when you were fourteen, Mr. Anders. You imagined me as a swashbuckling pirate. The only difference between me and the others who have been created in times past is that I have attained the ninth dimension. I am the first to do that. Also the first to capture the secrets of your own third dimension. Naturally then, it would be a pity for me to die."
"Get out," I said.
"Forgive me, Mr. Anders. My time is short. I die tomorrow."
"That's swell. Now get out."
"We're not immortal, you see. When our creators die their imaginations die with them. We too die. It follows. But for some time I've had an idea."
"Out," I said again. "Get the hell out of here!"
"You're going to die tomorrow, Mr. Anders, in that new flying saucer. And I must die with you. Except that I've had this idea."
There are times when you look yourself in the eye and don't like what you see. Or maybe what you see scares the living hell out of you. When those times come along some little something inside tells you you'd better watch out. Then the doubts creep in. After that the melancholy. And from that instant on you aren't very sane anymore.
"Out!" I yelled. "Out, out, OUT! Get the hell out!"
"One moment, Mr. Anders. Now as to this idea of mine. There's this woman--this Margie Hayman. This woman you call the Doll."
That one jerked me around.
"Exactly. Now listen very carefully. You aren't entirely you anymore, Mr. Anders. I mean, you aren't the complete whole individual you as you once were. You love this woman. Something inside you has gone out and is now a part of her."
"Therefore, if you will just discard the thought of her sometime between now and when you take that ship up I can attach myself to her sentient being, don't you see, and thereby exist--at least partly--even though you yourself are dead."
I pushed myself unsteadily to my feet. I stared at the entire black repulsive undulating mass before me. I took a step toward it.
"It isn't much to ask, Mr. Anders. You've quarrelled with her. You want no more of her. You've practically told her that. All I ask is that you finish the job--forget her. Discard her--throw her into the mental junk pile of Abandonment."
I didn't take any more steps. Something inside me was screaming, was ripping at my guts, was roaring with all the cacaphony of all the giant discords of all eternity. Something inside my brain was sucking all my strength in one tremendous, surging power-dive of wish fulfillment. I was willing the black mucous mass of him out of my consciousness.
He was no longer there. The only thing to prove he'd ever been there at all was a very-old, very-rusty penknife over on the table in front of the davenport--the knife with my name carved on the bone handle.
After that I went unsteadily to the dresser in the living room. I got the Doll's picture down off the dresser. I undressed. I took the picture to bed with me. The lights burned in my bedroom the entire night.
* * * * *
Lieutenant Colonel Melrose looked weatherbeaten. His graying hair was pulled here and there like a rag mop that's dried dirty--stiff. He had a freshly lit cigarette between his lips. He grinned nervously when he saw me, butted the cigarette, said in a thin voice, "This is it, Anders. Ship goes up in twenty minutes."
"I know," I said.
He poked another cigarette at his lips. He said, "What?" in a startled tone.
"Nothing," I said. "All right, I'll get ready."
He lit the cigarette, took a puff that made the smoke do a frenetic dance around his nostrils. He jabbed it at an ashtray, bobbed his head in a convulsive movement, said, "Righto!"
They strapped me in. Pop came to the open hatch. He stuck his head in, grinned, said, "Hi, guy," softly. There was something in his eyes. The Doll had told him how I hate sour notes.
"How's the Doll, Pop?" I forced myself to say it.
"Swell, Ed. Just got a call from her. On her way out here to see you take off. Looks like she won't make it now though."
I didn't say anything. His eyes went down to the wallet I had propped up on my knees. The wallet was open, celluloid window showing. Inside the window was the Doll's picture.
"Tell her that, Pop," I said.
"Yeah, guy. Luck."
They shut the hatch.
There was no doubt about the takeoff. If one thing was perfected in the XXE-1 it was that. The ship rose like the mercury in a thermometer on a hot day in July. I took it slow to fifty thousand feet.
"Fifty thousand," I said into the throat mike.
"Hear you, Anders." Melrose's voice.
"Smooth," I said. "Radar on me?"
"On you, Anders."
I let the ship have a little head. This job used the clutch of a tax collector's claws for fuel. It just hooked itself on the nothing around us and yanked--and there we were.
One hundred thousand.
"Double that," I said into the mike.
"Yeah, Anders. How is it?"
"Haven't yet begun. Radar still on me?"
I heard a nervous laugh. He was nervous. "The General--General Hotchkiss just said something, Anders. He--ha, ha--he said you're on plot like stitches in a fat lady's hip. Ha, ha! He's got us all in stitches. Ha, ha!"
Ha, ha!
This was it. I released my grip on the accelerator control, yet it slide up. They say you can't feel speed in the air unless there's something relative within vision to tip you off. They're going to have to revise that. You can not only feel speed you can reach out and break hunks off it--in the XXE-1, that is. I shook my head, took my eyes off the instruments and looked down at the Doll on my lap.
"Melrose?"
"Hear you, Anders."
"This is it. Reaching me on radar still?"
"Naturally."
"All right."
This was it. This was where the other four ships like the XXE-1--the radio controlled models--had disintegrated. This was where it happened, and they didn't come back anymore.
I sucked in oxygen and let the accelerator control go over all the way.
Pulling a ship out of a steep dive, yes. Blackout then, yes. If the wings stay with you everything's fine and you live to mention the incident at the bar a little while later. Blackout accelerating--climbing--is not in the books. But blackout, nevertheless. Not just plain blackout but a thick mucous, slimy undulating blackout--the very black.
The very very black.
* * * * *
General Hotchkiss, "What's he saying, Melrose?"
Melrose, "Doesn't answer."
General Eaton, "Try again."
Melrose, "Yes sir."
General Hotchkiss, "What's he saying, Melrose?"
General Eaton, "Still nothing?"
Melrose, "Nothing."
General Hotchkiss, "Dammit, you've still got him on radar, haven't you?"
Melrose, "Yes sir."
General Hotchkiss, "Well, dammit, what's he doing?"
Melrose, "Still going up, sir."
General Eaton, "How far up?"
Melrose, "Signal takes sixty seconds to get back, sir."
General Hotchkiss, "God in heaven! One hundred and twenty thousand miles out! Halfway to the moon. How much more fuel has he?"
Melrose, "Five seconds, sir. Then the auto-switch cuts in. Power will go off until he nears atmosphere again. After that, if he isn't conscious--well, I'm awfully afraid we've lost another ship."
General Eaton, "Cold blooded--"
* * * * *
The purple drapes before my eyes were wavering. Hung like rippled steel pieces of a caisson suspended by a perilously thin whisper of thread, they swayed, hesitated, shuddered their entire length, then began to bend in the middle from the combined weights of thirteen galaxies. The bend became a cracking bulge that in another second would explode destruction directly into my face. I screamed.
"Is--is that you, Anders?"
I screamed good this time.
"An--Anders! You all right? What happened? I couldn't get through to you?"
I took my hand from the accelerator control and stared numbly at it. The mark of it was deep in the skin. I sucked in oxygen.
"Anders! Your power is off. When you hear the signal you've got just three more seconds. You know what to do then. You've been out of the envelope, Anders! You broke through the atmosphere!"
And then I heard him speak to somebody else--he must have been speaking to somebody else, he couldn't have meant me--"Crissake, give me a cigarette. The guy's still alive."
I suppose I was grinning when they unstrapped me and slid me out of the hatch. They were grinning back at any rate. The ground held me up surprisingly--like it always had all my life before. They'd stopped grinning now, their eyes were eating the inside of the ship. They weren't interested in me anymore--all they wanted was the instruments' readings.
My feet could still move me. Knew where to go. Knew where to find the door that had the simple word Plotting on it.
The Doll was there with her father. The two of them didn't say anything, just looked at me--just stared at me. I said, "He tried damned hard. He put everything he had in it. He got me. He had me down and there wasn't any up again for the rest of the world. For me there wasn't."
They stared. Pop stared. The Doll stared.
"Just one thing he forgot," I muttered. "He gave me the tip-off himself and then he forgot it. He told me I wasn't all me anymore, that a part of me had gone out to you since I was supposed to be in love with you. And that's where the tip-off lies. I wasn't all me anymore but I hadn't lost anything. You know why, Doll?"
They stared.
"Simple--any damn fool would tumble. If I wasn't all me, then you weren't all you. Part of you was me--get it? And you weren't scheduled to bust out today. Not you--me! And that's what he couldn't work over. That's what brought me down again. He couldn't touch that." I stopped for a moment.
I said suddenly, "What the hell you guys staring at?" I growled.
"That's my Baby," said the Doll.
"No strings," I said.
"Like we said." Her words were soft petals. "Like we said, Baby. Just like we said."
"Sure. Only damn it, I don't like it that way. I want strings, see? I want meshes of 'em, balls of 'em, like what comes in yarn--get it?"
The Doll grinned. "Sure, Baby--you're sure you want it that way?"
"Sure I'm sure. I just said it, didn't I? Didn't I?"
"You just said it, Baby." She left her father's side, came over to me, put her arm in mine, pulled close. We turned, started to go out the door.
"Where you guys going?" asked Pop. We turned again. He looked like something was skipped somewhere on a sound track he'd been listening to. I grinned.
"Gotta look for a Brown Bess," I said. "Museum just lost one."
THE WEDGE
By H. B. Fyfe
When the concealed gong sounded, the man sitting on the floor sighed. He continued, however, to slump loosely against the curving, pearly plastic of the wall, and took care not to glance toward the translucent ovals he knew to be observation panels.
He was a large man, but thin and bony-faced. His dirty gray coverall bore the name "Barnsley" upon grimy white tape over the heart. Except at the shoulders, it looked too big for him. His hair was dark brown, but the sandy ginger of his two-week beard seemed a better match for his blue eyes.
Finally, he satisfied the softly insistent gong by standing up and gazing in turn at each of the three doors spaced around the cylindrical chamber. He deliberately adopted an expression of simple-minded anticipation as he ambled over to the nearest one.
The door was round, about four feet in diameter, and set in a flattened part of the wall with its lower edge tangent with the floor. Rods about two inches thick projected a hand's breadth at four, eight, and twelve o'clock. The markings around them suggested that each could be rotated to three different positions. Barnsley squatted on his heels to study these.
Noting that all the rods were set at the position he had learned to think of as "one," he reached out to touch the door. It felt slightly warm, so he allowed his fingertips to slide over the upper handle. A tentative tug produced no movement of the door.
"That's it, though," he mumbled quietly. "Well, now to do our little act with the others!"
He moved to the second door, where all the rods were set at "two." Here he fell to manipulating the rod handles, pausing now and then to shove hopefully against the door. Some twenty minutes later, he tried the same routine at the third door.
Eventually, he returned to his starting point and rotated the rods there at random for a few minutes. Having, apparently by accident, arranged them in a sequence of one-two-three, he contrived to lean against the door at the crucial instant. As it gave beneath his weight, he grabbed the two lower handles and pushed until the door rose to a horizontal position level with its hinged top. It settled there with a loud click.
* * * * *
Barnsley stooped to crawl through into an arched passage of the same pearly plastic. He straightened up and walked along for about twenty feet, flashing a white-toothed grin through his beard while muttering curses behind it. Presently, he arrived at a small, round bay, to be confronted by three more doors.
"Bet there's a dozen of you three-eyed clods peeping at me," he growled. "How'd you like me to poke a boot through the panel in front of you and kick you blubber-balls in all directions? Do you have a page in your data books for that?"
He forced himself to feel sufficiently dull-witted to waste ten minutes opening one of the doors. The walls of the succeeding passage were greenish, and the tunnel curved gently downward to the left. Besides being somewhat warmer, the air exuded a faint blend of heated machine oil and something like ripe fish. The next time Barnsley came to a set of doors, he found also a black plastic cube about two feet high. He squatted on his heels to examine it.
I'd better look inside or they'll be disappointed, he told himself.
From the corner of his eye, he watched the movement of shadows behind the translucent panels in the walls. He could picture the observers there: blubbery bipeds with three-jointed arms and legs ending in clusters of stubby but flexible tentacles. Their broad, spine-crested heads would be thrust forward and each would have two of his three protruding eyes directed at Barnsley's slightest move. They had probably been staring at him in relays every second since picking up his scout ship in the neighboring star system.
That is, Barnsley thought, it must have been the next system whose fourth planet he had been photo-mapping for the Terran Colonial Service. He hoped he had not been wrong about that.
Doesn't matter, he consoled himself, as long as the Service can trace me. These slobs certainly aren't friendly.
He reconsidered the scanty evidence of previous contact in this volume of space, light-years from Terra's nearest colony. Two exploratory ships had disappeared. There had been a garbled, fragmentary message picked up by the recorders of the colony's satellite beacon, which some experts interpreted as a hasty warning. As far as he knew, Barnsley was the only Terran to reach this planet alive.
To judge from his peculiar imprisonment, his captors had recovered from their initial dismay at encountering another intelligent race--at least to the extent of desiring a specimen for study. In Barnsley's opinion, that put him more or less ahead of the game.
"They're gonna learn a lot!" he muttered, grinning vindictively.
He finished worrying the cover off the black box. Inside was a plastic sphere of water and several varieties of food his captors probably considered edible. The latter ranged from a leafy stalk bearing a number of small pods to a crumbling mass resembling moldy cheese. Barnsley hesitated.
"I haven't had the guts to try this one yet," he reminded himself, picking out what looked like a cluster of long, white roots.
The roots squirmed feebly in his grasp. Barnsley returned them to the box instantly.
Having selected, instead, a fruit that could have been a purple cucumber, he put it with the water container into a pocket of his coverall and closed the box.
Maybe they won't remember that I took the same thing once before, he thought. Oh, hell, of course they will! But why be too consistent?
He opened one of the doors and walked along a bluish passage that twisted to the left, chewing on the purple fruit as he went. It was tougher than it looked and nearly tasteless. At the next junction, he unscrewed the cap of the water sphere, drained it slowly, and flipped the empty container at one of the oval panels. A dim shadow blurred out of sight, as if someone had stepped hastily backward.
"Why not?" growled Barnsley. "It's time they were shaken up a little!"
* * * * *
Pretending to have seen something where the container had struck the wall, he ran over and began to feel along the edge of the panel. When his fingertips encountered only the slightest of seams, he doubled his fists and pounded. He thought he could detect a faint scurrying on the other side of the wall.
Barnsley laughed aloud. He raised one foot almost waist-high and drove the heel of his boot through the translucent observation panel. Seizing the splintered edges of the hole, he tugged and heaved until he had torn out enough of the thin wall to step through to the other side. He found himself entering a room not much larger than the passage behind him.
To his left, there was a flicker of blue from a crack in the wall. The crack widened momentarily, emitting a gabble of mushy voices. The blue cloth was twitched away by a cluster of stubby tentacles, whereupon the crack closed to an almost imperceptible line. Barnsley fingered his beard to hide a grin and turned the other way.
He stumbled into a number of low stools surmounted by spongy, spherical cushions. One of these he tore off for a pillow before going on. At the end of the little room, he sought for another crack, kicked the panel a bit to loosen it, and succeeded in sliding back a section of wall. The passage revealed was about the size of those he had been forced to explore during the past two weeks, but it had an unfinished, behind-the-scenes crudeness in appearance. Barnsley pottered along for about fifteen minutes, during which time the walls resounded with distant running and he encountered several obviously improvised barriers.
He kicked his way through one, squeezed through an opening that had not been closed quite in time, restrained a wicked impulse to cross some wiring that must have been electrical, and at last allowed himself to be diverted into a passage leading back to his original cell. He amused himself by trying to picture the disruption he had caused to the honeycomb of passageways.
"There!" he grinned to himself. "That should keep them from bothering me for a few hours. Maybe one or two of them will get in trouble over it--I hope!"
He arranged his stolen cushion where the wall met the floor and lay down.
A thought struck him. He sat up to examine the cushion suspiciously. It appeared to be an equivalent to foam rubber. He prodded and twisted until convinced that no wires or other unexpected objects were concealed inside. Not till then did he resume his relaxed position.
Presently one of his hands located and pinched a tiny switch buried in the lobe of his left ear. Barnsley concentrated upon keeping his features blank as a rushing sound seemed to grow in his ear. He yawned casually, moving one hand from behind his head to cover his mouth.
Having practiced many times before a mirror, he did not think that any possible watcher would have noticed how his thumb slipped briefly inside his mouth to give one eyetooth a slight twist.
A strong humming inundated his hearing. It continued for perhaps two minutes, paused, and began again. Barnsley waited through two repetitions before he "yawned" again and sleepily rolled over to hide his face in his folded arms.
"Did you get it all?" he murmured.
"Clear as a bell," replied a tiny voice in his left ear. "Was that your whole day's recording?"
"I guess so," said Barnsley. "To tell the truth, I lose track a bit after two weeks without a watch. Who's this? Sanchez?"
"That's right. You seem to come in on my watch pretty nearly every twenty-four hours. Okay, I'll tape a slowed-down version of your blast for the boys in the back room. You're doing fine."
* * * * *
"Not for much longer," Barnsley told him. "When do I get out of here?"
"Any day," Sanchez reassured him. "It was some job to learn an alien language with just your recordings and some of your educated guesses to go on. We've had a regular mob sweating on it night and day."
"How is it coming?"
"It turns out they're nothing to worry about. The fleet is close enough now to pick up their surface broadcasting. Believe me, your stupid act has them thoroughly confused. They hold debates over whether you could possibly be intelligent enough to belong in a spaceship."
"Meanwhile, I'm slowly starving," said Barnsley.
"Just hang on for a couple of days. Now that we know where they are, they're in for a shock. One of these mornings, they're going to hear voices from all over their skies, demanding to know what kind of savages they are to have kidnapped you--and in their own language!"
Barnsley grinned into his improvised pillow as Sanchez signed off. Things would really work out after all. He was set for an immensely lucrative position; whether as ambassador, trade consultant, or colonial governor depended upon how well the experts bluffed the blubber-heads. Well, it seemed only his due for the risks he had taken.
"Omigosh!" he grunted, sitting up as he pictured the horde of Terran Colonial experts descending upon the planet. "I'll be the only one here that hasn't learned to speak the language!"
END
THE PLANET STRAPPERS
By Raymond Z. Gallun
I
The Archer Five came in a big packing box, bound with steel ribbons and marked, This end up--handle with care. It was delivered at a subsidized government surplus price of fifty dollars to Hendricks' Sports and Hobbies Center, a store in Jarviston, Minnesota, that used to deal mostly in skin diving equipment, model plane kits, parts for souping up old cars, and the like. The Archer Five was a bit obsolete for the elegant U.S. Space Force boys--hence the fantastic drop in price from two thousand dollars since only last June. It was still a plenty-good piece of equipment, however; and the cost change was a real break for the Bunch.
By 4:30 that bright October afternoon, those members who were attending regular astronautics classes at Jarviston Technical College had gathered at Hendricks' store. Ramos and Tiflin, two wild characters with seldom-cut hair and pipe stem pants, who didn't look as if they could be trusted with a delicate unpacking operation, broke the Archer out with a care born of love, there in Paul Hendricks' big backroom shop, while the more stolid members--and old Paul, silent in his swivel chair--watched like hawks.
"So who tries it on first?" Ramos challenged. "Dumb question. You, Eileen--naturally."
Most Bunches have a small, hard, ponytailed member, dungareed like the rest.
Still kidding around, Ramos dropped an arm across Eileen Sands' shoulders, and got her sharp elbow jabbed with vigor into his stomach.
She glanced back in a feminine way at Frank Nelsen, a tall, lean guy of nineteen, butch-haircutted and snub featured. But he was the purposeful, studious kind, more an observer and a personal doer than a leader; he hadn't much time for the encouraging smiles of girls, and donning even an Archer Five now instead of within a few hours, didn't exactly represent his kind of hurry.
"I'll wait, Eileen," he said. Then he nodded toward Gimp Hines. That the others would also pick Gimp was evident at once. There were bravos and clapping, half for a joke.
"Think I won't?" Gimp growled, tossing his crutches on a workbench littered with scraps of color-coded wire, and hopping forward on the one leg that had grown to normal size. He sort of swaggered, Frank Nelsen noticed. Maybe the whole Bunch swaggered with him in a way, because, right now, he represented all of them in their difficult aim. Gimp Hines, with the nylon patch in his congenitally imperfect heart, and with that useless right underpinning, had less chance of taking part in space-development than any of them--even with all his talent for mechanics and electronics.
Two-and-Two (George) Baines, a large, mild person who was an expert bricklayer in his spare time, while he struggled to absorb the intricate math that spacemen are supposed to know--he used to protest that he could at least add two and two--bounced forward, saying, "I'll give yuh a hand, Gimp."
Mitch Storey, the lean colored kid with the passion for all plant life, and the specific urge to get somehow out to Mars, was also moving to help Gimp into the Archer. Gimp waved them off angrily, but they valeted for him, anyhow.
"Shucks, Gimp," Storey soothed. "Anybody needs assistance--the first time..."
They got his good leg, and what there was of the other, into the boots. They laced carefully, following all they had learned from books. They rolled the wire-braced silicone rubber body-section up over his torso, guided his arms into the sleeves, closed the zipper-sealers and centered the chest plate. While the others checked with their eyes, they inspected the nipples of the moisture-reclaimer and chlorophane air-restorer capsules. They lifted the helmet of clear, darkened plastic over his head, and dogged it to the gasket with the automatic turnbuckles. By then, Gimp Hines' own quick fingers, in the gloves, were busy snapping this and adjusting that. There was a sleepy hum of aerating machinery.
"It even smells right, in here," Gimp growled muffledly, trying to be nonchalant.
There was loud laughter and clapping. Ramos whistled piercingly, with two fingers. The huge Kuzak twins, Art and Joe--both had football scholarships at Tech--gave Indian yells. Eileen Sands clasped her hands over her head and went up on her toes like the ballet dancer she had once meant to be. Old Paul, in his chair, chortled, and slapped his arm. Even little David Lester said "Bravo!" after he had gulped. The applause wasn't entirely facetious.
Gimp's whole self had borrowed hard lines and an air of competence from the Archer Five. For a second he looked like somebody who could really cross millions of miles. There was a tiny, solar-powered ionic-propulsion unit mounted on the shoulders of the armor, between the water-tank and the beam-type radio transmitter and receiver. A miniaturized radar sprouted on the left elbow joint. On the inside of the Archer's chest plate, reachable merely by drawing an arm out of a sleeve, emergency ration containers were racked. In the same place was a small airlock for jettisoning purposes and for taking in more supplies.
"What do yuh know--toilet facilities, yet!" Ramos chirped with spurious naivete, and there were guffaws which soon died out. After all, this was a serious occasion, and who wanted to be a jerk? Now that the price had been shoved down into the ground, they could probably get their Archer Fives--their all-important vacuum armor. They were one more hurdle nearer to the stars.
Two regular members of the Bunch hadn't yet shown up. Ten were present, including Gimp in the Archie. All were different. Each had a name.
But Frank Nelsen figured that numbers, names, and individual variations didn't count for much, just then. They were a crowd with an overall personality--often noisy, sometimes quiet like now, always a bit grim to sustain their nerve before all they had to learn in order to reduce their inexperienced greenness, and before the thought of all the expensive equipment they had to somehow acquire, if they were to take part in the rapid adaptation of the solar system to human uses. Most of all, their courage was needed against fear of a region that could be deadly dangerous, but that to them seemed wonderful like nothing else.
The shop smelled of paint, solvent and plastic, like most any other. Gimp, sitting in the Archer, beside the oil-burning stove, didn't say any more. He forgot to play tough, and seemed to lose himself in a mind-trip Out There--probably as far as he would ever get. His face, inside the helmet, now looked pinched. His freckles were very plain in his paled cheeks. Gimp was awed.
So was everybody else, including Paul Hendricks, owner of the Hobby Center, who was approaching eighty and was out of the running, though his watery blue eyes were still showing the shine of boyhood, right now.
Way back, Paul Hendricks used to barnstorm county fairs in a wood-and-fabric biplane, giving thrill rides to sports and their girls at five dollars a couple, because he had been born sixty years too soon.
Much later in his spotty career, he had started the store. He had also meant to do general repair work in the backroom shop. But in recent years it had degenerated into an impromptu club hall, funk hole, griping-arguing-and-planning pit, extracurricular study lab and project site for an indefinite horde of interplanetary enthusiasts who were thought of in Jarviston as either young adults of the most resourceful kind--for whom the country should do much more in order to insure its future in space--or as just another crowd of delinquents, more bent on suicide and trouble-making than any hot rod group had ever been. Paul Hendricks was either a fine, helpful citizen--among so many who were disinterested and preoccupied--or a corrupting Socrates who deserved to drink hemlock.
Frank Nelsen knew all this as well as most. He had been acquainted with Paul ever since, at the age of seven, he had come into the store and had tried to make a down payment on a model building kit for a Y-71 ground-to-orbit freight rocket--clearly marked $49.95 in the display window--with his fortune of a single dime. Frank had never acquired a Y-71 kit, but he had found a friend in Paul Hendricks, and a place to hang around and learn things he wanted to know. Later on, as now, he had worked in the store whenever he had some free time.
Frank leaned against a lathe, watching the others, the frosty thrill and soul-searching hidden inside himself. Maybe it was hard to guess what Eileen Sands, standing near, was thinking, but she was the firm kind who would have a definite direction. Perhaps unconsciously, she hummed a tune under her breath, while her feet toyed with graceful steps. No doubt, her mind was also on the Big Vacuum beyond the Earth.
But what is there about a dangerous dream? When it is far out of reach, it has a safe, romantic appeal. Bring its fulfillment a little closer, and its harsh aspects begin to show. You get a kick out of that, but you begin to wonder nervously if you have the guts, the stamina, the resistance to loneliness and complete strangeness.
Looking at a real Archie--with a friend inside it, even--did this to Frank Nelsen. But he could see similar reactions in some of the others.
Mitch Storey sat, bent forward, on a box, staring at his big, sepia hands, in which he tossed back and forth a tiny, clear capsule containing a fuzzy fragment of vegetation from Mars. He had bought this sealed curio from Paul a year ago for fifty dollars--souvenirs that came from so far were expensive. And now, in view of what was happening to hopeful colonists of that once inhabited and still most Earth-like other planet, ownership of such a capsule on Earth seemed about to be banned, not only by departments of agriculture, but by bodies directly concerned with public safety.
Did the color photographs of Mars, among all the others that the Bunch had thumbtacked to the shop walls, still appeal as strongly to Mitch? Did he still want to go out to that world of queer, swirled markings, like the fluid flow in the dregs of a paper coffee cup? Mitch would--more so than ever. He had plant life in his soul, maybe from wandering in the swamps near his home in Mississippi. He had been supporting himself here at school by fixing gardens. If it was plant life of a different, dangerous sort, with other billions of years of development behind it, that just made the call stronger. Mitch just sat and thought, now, the mouth organ he seldom played sagging forward in his frayed shirt pocket.
Ramos--Miguel Ramos Alvarez--only stood with his black-visored cap pushed back on his head, and a cocky smirk of good humor on his mouth. Reckless Ramos, who went tearing around the country in an ancient motor scooter, decorated with squirrel tails and gaudy bosses, would hardly be disturbed by any risky thing he wanted to do. The thumbtacked pictures of the systems of far, cold Jupiter and Saturn--Saturn still unapproached, except by small, instrumented rockets--would be the things to appeal to him.
The Kuzak twins stood alertly, as if an extra special homecoming football game was in prospect. But they weren't given to real doubts, either. From their previous remarks it was clear that the asteroids, those fragments of an exploded and once populated world, orbiting out beyond Mars, would be for them. Osmium, iridium, uranium. The rich, metallic guts of a planet exposed for easy mining. Thousands of prospectors, hopeful characters, and men brutalized by the life in space, were already drifting around in the Asteroid Belt.
Two-and-Two Baines wore a worried, perplexed expression. He was a massive, rather lost young man who had to keep up with the times, and with his companions, and was certainly wondering if he was able.
Little David Lester, the pedant, the mother's boy, who looked eighteen but was probably older, pouted, and his heavy lips in his thin face moved. "Cores," Nelsen heard him whisper. He had the habit of talking to himself. Frank knew his interests. Drill cores withdrawn from the strata of another planet, and inspected for fossils and other evidences of its long history, was what he probably meant. Seeing Gimp in the Archie had set off another scientific reverie in his head. He was a whizz in any book subject. Maybe he had the brains to be a great investigator of the past, in the Belt or on Mars, if his mind didn't crack first, which seemed sure to happen if he left Earth at all.
But it was Glen Tiflin's reactions that were the strangest. He had his switch blade out, and was tossing it expertly against a wall two-by-four, in which it stuck quivering each time. This seemed his one skill, his pride, his proof of manhood. And he wanted to get into space like nobody else around, except maybe Gimp Hines. It wasn't hard to sense how his head worked--the whole Bunch knew.
Tiflin's face seemed to writhe, now, with self-doubt and truculence; his eyes were on the photos of the heroes, beginning way back; Goddard. Von Braun. Clifford, who had first landed on the far side of the Moon. LaCrosse, who had reached Mercury, closest to the sun. Vasiliev, who had just come back from the frozen moons of Jupiter, scoring a triumph for the Tovies--somebody had started calling them that, a few years ago--up in high Eurasia, the other side of an ideological rift that still threatened the ever more crowded and competitive Earth, though mutual fear had so far kept the flare ups within limits. Bannon, whose expedition was even now exploring the gloomy cellar of Venus' surface, smothered in steam, carbon dioxide and poisonous formaldehyde.
To Tiflin, as to the others, even such places were glamorous. But he wanted to be a big shot, too. It was like a compulsion. He was touchy and difficult. Three years back, he had been in trouble for breaking and entering. Maybe his worship of space, and his desire to get there and prove himself, were the only things that had kept him straight for so long--grimly attentive at Tech, and at work at his car-washing job, nights.
In his nervousness, now, he stuck a cigarette savagely between his lips, and lighted it with a quick, arrogant gesture, hardly slowing down the continuous toss and recovery of his knife.
This had begun to annoy big Art Kuzak. For one thing, Tiflin was doing his trick too close to the mass of crinkly, cellophane-like stuff draped over a horizontal wooden pole suspended by iron straps from the ceiling. The crinkly mass was one of the Bunch's major projects--their first space bubble, or bubb which they had been cutting and shaping with more care and devotion than skill.
"Cripes--put that damn shiv away, Tif!" Art snapped. "Or lose it someplace!"
Ramos, who was a part-time mechanic at the same garage where Tiflin worked, couldn't help taunting. "Yeah--smoking, too. Oh-oh. Using up precious oxygen. Better quit, pal. Can't do much of that Out There."
This was a wrong moment to rib Tiflin. He was in an instant flare. But he ground out the cigarette at once, bitterly. "What do you care what I do, Mex?" he snarled. "And as for you two Hunky Kuzaks--you oversized bulldozers--how about weight limits for blastoff? Damn--I don't care how big you are!"
In mounting rage, he was about to lash out with his fists, even at the two watchful football men. But then he looked surprised. With a terrible effort, he bottled up even his furious words.
The Bunch was a sort of family. Members of families may love each other, but it doesn't have to happen. For a second it was as if Ramos had Tiflin spitted on some barb of his taunting smile--aimed at Tiflin's most vulnerable point.
Ramos clicked his tongue. What he was certainly going to remark was that people who couldn't pass the emotional stability tests, just couldn't get a space-fitness card. But Ramos wasn't unkind. He checked himself in time. "No sweat, Tif," he muttered.
"Hey, Gimp--are you going to sit in that Archie all night?" Joe Kuzak, the easy-going twin, boomed genially. "How about the rest of us?"
"Yeah--how about that, Gimp?" Dave Lester put in, trying to sound as brash and bold as the others, instead of just bookish.
Two-and-Two Baines, still looking perplexed, spoke in a hoarse voice that sounded like sorrow. "What I wanna know is just how far this fifty buck price gets us. Guess we have enough dough left in the treasury to buy us each an Archer Five, huh, Paul?"
Paul Hendricks rubbed his bald head and grinned in a way that attempted to prove him a disinterested sideliner. "Ask Frank," he said. "He's your historian-secretary and treasurer."
Frank Nelsen came out of his attitude of observation enough to warn, "That much we've got, if we want as many as twelve Archies. And a little better than a thousand dollars more, left over from the prize money."
They had won twenty-five hundred dollars during the summer for building a working model of a sun-powered ionic drive motor--the kind useful for deep-space propulsion, but far too weak in thrust to be any good, starting from the ground. The contest had been sponsored by--of all outfits--a big food chain, Trans-Columbia. But this wasn't so strange. Everybody was interested in, or affected by, interplanetary travel, now.
On a workbench, standing amid a litter of metal chips and scraps of color-coded wire, was the Bunch's second ionic, full-size this time, and almost finished. On crossed arms it mounted four parabolic mirrors; its ion guide was on a universal joint. Out There, in orbit or beyond, and in full, spatial sunlight, its jetting ions would deliver ten pounds of continuous thrust.
"A thousand bucks--that's nowhere near enough," Two-and-Two mourned further. "Doggone, why can't we get blasted up off the Earth--that costs the most, all by itself--just in our Archies? They've got those little ionic drives on their shoulders, to get around with, after we're in orbit. Lots of asteroid hoppers live and ride only in their space suits. Why do they make us get all that other expensive equipment? Space bubbs, full-size ionics, lots of fancy instruments!"
"'Cause it isn't legal, otherwise," Mitch Storey pointed out. "'Cause new men are green--it isn't safe for them, otherwise--the Extra-Terrestrial Commission thinks. Got to have all the gear to get clearance. Travelling light isn't even legal in the Belt. You know that."
"Maybe we'll win us another prize," Ramos laughed, touching the crinkly substance of their first bubb, hanging like a deflated balloon over the ceiling pole.
Tiflin sneered. "Oh, sure, you dumb Mex. Too many other Bunches, now. Too much competition. Like companies starting up on the Moon not hiring ordinary help on Earth and shipping them out, anymore--saying contract guys don't stick. Nuts--it's because enough slobs save them the expense by showing up on their own... Or like most all of us trying to get into the Space Force. The Real Elite--sure. Only 25,000 in the Force, when there are over 200,000,000 people in the country to draw from. Just one guy from Jarviston--Harv Diamond--ever made it. Choosy? We can get old waiting for them to review our submitted personal data, only to have a chance to take their lousy tests!"
Joe Kuzak grinned. "So down with 'em--down with the worthy old U.S.S.F.! We're on our own--to Serenitatis Base on the Moon, to the Belt, Pallastown, and farther!"
Ramos still hovered near Eileen Sands. "What do you say, Sweetie?" he asked. "You haven't hardly made a comment."
Eileen remained tough and withdrawn. "I'm just listening while you smart male characters figure out everything," she snapped. "Why don't you become a listener, too, for a change, and go help Gimp out of that Archer?"
Ramos bowed elegantly, and obeyed the latter half of her suggestion.
"I have a premonition--a hunch," little Lester offered, trying to sound firm. "Our request for a grant from the Extra-Terrestrial Development Board will succeed. Because we will be as valuable as anybody, Out There. Then we will have money enough to buy the materials to make most of our equipment."
Joe Kuzak, the gentler twin, answered him. "You're right about one thing, Les. We'll wind up building most of our own stuff--with our own mitts...!"
Some noisy conversation about who should try the Archer next, was interrupted when the antique customer's bell over the street door of the store, jangled. There was a scrape of shoe soles, as the two previously absent members of the Bunch, Jig Hollins and Charlie Reynolds, arriving together by chance, came into the shop.
Jig (Hilton) Hollins was a mechanic out at the airport. He was lean, cocky, twenty-four, with a stiff bristle of blond hair. Like Charlie Reynolds, he added up what had just been happening, here, at a glance. Both were older than the others. They had regular jobs. Their educations were completed, except for evening supplementary courses.
"Well, the men have arrived," Jig announced.
Maybe Charlie Reynolds' faint frown took exception to this remark. He was the only one in a suit, grey and tasteful, with a subdued flash to match the kind of car he drove. Few held this against him, nor the fact that he usually spent himself broke, nor the further fact that J. John Reynolds, tight-fisted president of the Jarviston First National Bank, was his grandfather. Charlie was an engineer at the new nuclear powerhouse, just out of town. Charlie was what is generally known as a Good Guy. He was brash and sure--maybe too sure. He had a slight swagger, balanced by a certain benignancy. He was automatically the leader of the Bunch, held most likely to succeed in their aims.
"Hi, gang," he breezed. "Otto is bringing beer, Pepsi and sandwiches from his joint across the street. Special day--so it's on me. Time to relax--maybe unsnarl. Any new problems?"
"Still plenty of old ones," Frank Nelsen commented laconically.
"Has anybody suddenly decided to back out?" Charlie chuckled. "It's tiresome for me always to be asking that." He looked around, meeting carefully easy grins and grim expressions. "Nope--I guess we're all shaggy folk, bent on high and wild living, so far. So you know the only answer we can have."
"Umhmm, Charlie," Art Kuzak, the tough, business-like twin, gruffed. "We can get the Archers, now. I think Frank has our various sizes noted down. Let everybody sign up that wants an Archie. Better hurry, though--there'll be a run on them now that they're being almost given away... List all the other stuff we need--with approximate purchase price, or cost of construction materials, attached. Sure--we'll be way short of funds. But we can start with the items we can make, ourselves, now. The point is not to lose time. New restrictions may turn up, and give us trouble, if we do. We'll have to ride our luck for a break."
"Hell--you know the lists are ready, Art," Frank Nelsen pointed out. "A bubb for everybody--or the stuff to make it. Full-scale ionic drives, air-restorers and moisture-reclaimers, likewise. Some of the navigation instruments we'll almost have to buy. Dehydrated food, flasks of oxygen and water, and blastoff drums to contain our gear, are all relatively simple. Worst, of course, is the blastoff price, from one of the spaceports. Who could be rich enough to have a ground-to-orbit nuclear rocket of his own? Fifteen hundred bucks--a subsidized rate at that--just to lift a man and a thousand pounds of equipment into orbit. Five thousand dollars, minimum per person, is what we're going to need, altogether."
Gimp Hines, who always acted as if he expected to get off the Earth, too, had yielded his position inside the Archer to Tiflin, and had hobbled close.
"The cost scares a guy who has to go to school, too, so he can pass the tests," he said. "Well, don't worry, Frank. A thousand dollars buys a lot of stellene for bubbs. And we can scratch up a few bucks of our own. I can find a hundred, myself, saved from my TV repair work, and my novelties business. Charlie, here, ought to be able to contribute a thousand. Same for you, Hollins. That'll buy parts and materials for some ionic motors, too."
"Oh, certainly, Gimp," Hollins growled.
But Charlie Reynolds grinned. "I can kick in that much, if I hold down a while," he said. "Maybe more, later. What we've got to have, however, is a loan. We can't expect a grant from the Board. Sure they want more people helping to develop resources in space, but they're swamped with requests. Let's not sweat, though. With a little time, I'll swing something... Hey, everybody! Proposition! I move that whoever wants an Archer put his name down for Frank. I further move that we have him order us a supply of stellene, and basic materials for at least three more ionic motors. I also suggest that everybody donate as much cash as he can, no matter how little, and as much time as possible for making equipment. With luck, and if we get our applications for space-fitness tests mailed to Minneapolis within a week, at least some of us should get off Earth by next June. Now, shall we sign for the whole deal?"
Art Kuzak hunched his shoulders and displayed white teeth happily. "I'm a pushover," he said. "Here I come. I like to see things roll."
"Likewise," said his brother, Joe. Their signatures were both small, in contrast to their size.
Ramos, fully clad in the Archer, clowned his way forward to write his name with great flourishes, his ball point clutched in a space glove.
Tiflin made a fierce, nervous scrawl.
Mitch Storey wrote patiently, in big, square letters.
Gimp chewed his lip, and signed, "Walter Hines," in a beautiful, austere script, with a touch as fine as a master scientist's. "I'll go along as far as they let me," he muttered.
"I think it will be the same--in my case," David Lester stammered. He shook so much that his signature was only a quavering line.
"For laughs," Eileen Sands said, and wrote daintily.
Two-and-Two Baines gulped, sighed, and made a jagged scribble, like the trail of a rocket gone nuts.
Jig Hollins wrote in swooping, arrogant circles, that came, perhaps, from his extra jobs as an advertising sky writer with an airplane.
Frank Nelsen was next, and Charlie Reynolds was last. Theirs were the most indistinctive signatures in the lot. Just ordinary writing.
"So here we all are, on a piece of paper--pledged to victory or death," Reynolds laughed. "Anyhow, we're out of a rut."
Nelsen figured that that was the thing about Charlie Reynolds. Some might not like him, entirely. But he could get the Bunch unsnarled and in motion.
Old Paul Hendricks had come back from waiting on some casual customers in the store.
"Want to sign, too, Paul?" Reynolds chuckled.
"Nope--that would make thirteen," Paul answered, his eyes twinkling. "I'll watch and listen--and maybe tell you if I think you're off beam."
"Here comes Otto with the beer and sandwiches," Ramos burst out.
They all crowded around heavy Otto Kramer and his basket--all except Frank Nelsen and Paul Hendricks, and Eileen Sands who made the ancient typewriter click in the little office-enclosure, as she typed up the order list that Nelsen would mail out with a bank draft in the morning.
Nelsen had a powerful urge to talk to the old man who was his long-time friend, and who had said little all during the session, though he knew more about space travel than any of them--as much as anybody can know without ever having been off the Earth.
"Hey, Paul," Frank called in a low tone, leaning his elbows across a workbench.
"Yeah?"
"Nothing," Frank Nelsen answered with a lopsided smile.
But he felt that that was the right word, when your thoughts and feelings became too huge and complicated for you to express with any ease.
Grandeur, poetry, music--for instance, the haunting popular song, Fire Streak, about the burial of a spaceman--at orbital speed--in the atmosphere of his native planet. And fragments of history, such as covered wagons. All sorts of subjects, ideas and pictures were swirling inside his head. Wanting to sample everything in the solar system... Home versus the distance, and the fierce urge to build a wild history of his own... Gentleness and lust to be fulfilled, sometime. There would be a girl... And there were second thoughts to twist your guts and make you wonder if all your savage drives were foolish. But there was a duty to be equal to your era--helping to give dangerously crowded humanity on Earth more room, dispersal, a chance for race survival, if some unimaginable violence were turned loose...
He thought of the names of places Out There. Serenitatis Base--Serene--on the Moon. Lusty, fantastic Pallastown, on the Golden Asteroid, Pallas... He remembered his parents, killed in a car wreck just outside of Jarviston, four Christmases ago. Some present!... But there was one small benefit--he was left free to go where he wanted, without any family complications, like other guys might have. Poor Dave Lester. How was it that his mother allowed him to be with the Bunch at all? How did he work it? Or was she the one that was right?...
Paul Hendricks had leaned his elbows on the workbench, too. "Sure--nothing--Frank," he said, and his watery eyes were bland.
The old codger understood. Neither of them said anything for a minute, while the rest of the Bunch, except Eileen who was still typing, guzzled Pepsi and beer, and wolfed hotdogs. There was lots of courage-lifting noise and laughter.
Ramos said something, and Jig Hollins answered him back. "Think there'll be any girls in grass skirts out in the Asteroid Belt, Mex?"
"Oh, they'll arrive," Ramos assured him.
Nelsen didn't listen anymore. His and Paul's attention had wandered to the largest color photo thumbtacked to the wall, above the TV set, and the shelf of dog-eared technical books. It showed a fragile, pearly ring, almost diaphanous, hanging tilted against spatial blackness and pinpoint stars. Its hub was a cylindrical spindle, with radial guys of fine, stainless steel wire. It was like the earliest ideas about a space station, yet it was also different. To many--Frank Nelsen and Paul Hendricks certainly included--such devices had as much beauty as a yacht under full sail had ever had for anybody.
Old Paul smirked with pleasure. "It's a shame, ain't it, Frank--calling a pretty thing like that a 'bubb'--it's an ugly word. Or even a 'space bubble.' Technical talk gets kind of cheap."
"I don't mind," Frank Nelsen answered. "Our first one, here, could look just as nice--inflated, and riding free against the stars."
He touched the crinkly material, draped across its wooden support.
"It will," the old man promised. "Funny--not so long ago people thought that space ships would have to be really rigid--all metal. So how did they turn out? Made of stellene, mostly--an improved form of polyethylene--almost the same stuff as a weather balloon."
"A few millimeters thick, light, perfectly flexible when deflated," Nelsen added. "Cut out and cement your bubb together in any shape you choose. Fold it up firmly, like a parachute--it makes a small package that can be carried up into orbit in a blastoff rocket with the best efficiency. There, attached flasks of breathable atmosphere fill it out in a minute. Eight pounds pressure makes it fairly solid in a vacuum. So, behold--you've got breathing and living room, inside. There's nylon cording for increased strength--as in an automobile tire--though not nearly as much. There's a silicone gum between the thin double layers, to seal possible meteor punctures. A darkening lead-salt impregnation in the otherwise transparent stellene cuts radiation entry below the danger level, and filters the glare and the hard ultra-violet out of the sunshine. So there you are, all set up."
"Rig your hub and guy wires," old Paul carried on, cheerfully. "Attach your sun-powered ionic drive, set up your air-restorer, spin your vehicle for centrifuge-gravity, and you're ready to move--out of orbit."
They laughed, because getting into space wasn't as easy as they made it sound. The bubbs, one of the basic inventions that made interplanetary travel possible, were, for all their almost vagabondish simplicity, still a concession in lightness and compactness for atmospheric transit, to that first and greatest problem--breaking the terrific initial grip of Earth's gravity from the ground upward, and gaining stable orbital speed. Only a tremendously costly rocket, with a thrust greater than its own weight when fully loaded, could do that. Buying a blastoff passage had to be expensive.
"Figuring, scrounging, counting our pennies, risking our necks," Nelsen chuckled. "And maybe, even if we make it, we'll be just a third-rate group, lost in the crowd that's following the explorers... Just the same, I wish you could plan to go, too, Paul."
"Don't rub it in, kid. But I figure on kicking in a couple of thousand bucks, soon, to help you characters along."
Nelsen felt an embarrassed lift of hope.
"You shouldn't, Paul," he advised. "We've overrun and taken possession of your shop--almost your store, too. You've waived any profit, whenever we've bought anything. That's enough favors."
"My dough, my pleasure... Let's each get one of Reynolds' beers and hotdogs, if any are left..."
Later, when all the others had gone, except Gimp Hines, they uncovered the Archer, which everyone else had tried. Paul got into it, first. Then Nelsen took his turn, sitting as if within an inclosed vault, hearing the gurgle of bubbles passing through the green, almost living fluid of the air-restorer capsule. Chlorophane, like the chlorophyl of green plants, could break up exhaled carbon dioxide, freeing the oxygen for re-breathing. But it was synthetic, far more efficient, and it could use much stronger sunlight as an energy source. Like chlorophyl, too, it produced edible starches and sugars that could be imbibed, mixed with water, through a tube inside the Archer's helmet.
Even with the Archer enclosing him, Nelsen's mind didn't quite reach. He had learned a lot about space, but it remained curiously inconceivable to him. He felt the frost-fringed thrill.
"Now we know--a little," he chortled, after he stood again, just in his usual garb.
It was almost eight o'clock. Gimp Hines hadn't gone to supper, or to celebrate decision on one of the last evenings of any kind of freedom from work. He couldn't wait for that... Under fluorescent lights, he was threading wire through miniature grommets, hurrying to complete the full-size ionic drive. He said, "Hi, Frank," and let his eyes drop, again, into absorption in his labors. Mad little guy. Tragic, sort of. A cripple...
"I'll shove off, Paul," Nelsen was saying in a moment.
Out under the significant stars of the crisp October night, Nelsen was approached at once by a shadow. "I was waiting for you, Frank. I got a problem." The voice was hoarse sorrow--almost lugubrious comedy.
"Math again, Two-and-Two? Sure--shoot."
"Well--that kind is always around--with me," Two-and-Two Baines chuckled shakily. "This is something else--personal. We're liable--honest to gosh--to go, aren't we?"
"Some of us, maybe," Nelsen replied warily. "Sixty thousand bucks for the whole Bunch looks like a royal heap of cabbage to me."
"Split among a dozen guys, it looks smaller," Two-and-Two persisted. "And you can earn royal dough on the Moon--just for example. Plenty to pay back a loan."
"Still, you don't pick loans off trees," Nelsen gruffed. "Not for a shoestring crowd like us. We look too unsubstantial."
"Okay, Frank--have that part your way. I believe there still is a good chance we will go. I want to go. But I get to thinking. Out There is like being buried in millions of miles of nothing that you can breathe. Can a guy stand it? You hear stories about going loopy from claustrophobia and stuff. And I got to think about my mother and dad."
"Uh-huh--other people could be having minor second thoughts--including me," Frank Nelsen growled.
"You don't get what I mean, Frank. Sure I'm scared some--but I'm gonna try to go. Well, here's my point. I'm strong, willing, not too clumsy. But I'm no good at figuring what to do. So, Out There, in order to have a reasonable chance, I'll have to be following somebody smart. I thought I'd fix it now--beforehand. You're the best, Frank."
Nelsen felt the scared earnestness of the appeal, and the achy shock of the compliment. But in his own uncertainty, he didn't want to be carrying any dead weight, in the form of a dependent individual.
"Thanks, Two-and-Two," he said. "But I can't see myself as any leader, either. Talk about it to me tomorrow, if you still feel like it. Right now I want to sweat out a few things for myself--alone."
"Of course, Frankie." And Two-and-Two was gone.
Frank Nelsen looked upward, over the lighted street. There was no Moon--site of many enterprises, these days--in the sky, now. Old Jupiter rode in the south. A weather-spotting satellite crept across zenith, winking red and green. A skip glider, an orbit-to-ground freight vehicle, possibly loaded with rich metals from the Belt, probably about to land at the New Mexico spaceport far to the west, moved near it. Frank felt a deliciously lonesome chill as he walked through the business section of Jarviston. From somewhere, dance music lilted.
In front of Lehman's Drug Store he looked skyward again, to see a dazzling white cluster, like many meteors, falling. The gorgeous display lasted more than a second.
"Good heavens, Franklin Nelsen--what was that?"
He looked down at the slight, aging woman, and stiffened slightly. Miss Rosalie Parks had been his Latin teacher in high school. Plenty of times she used to scold him for not having his translations of Caesar worked out. A lot she understood about a fella who had to spend plenty of time working to support himself, while attending school!
"Good evening, Miss Parks," he greeted rather stiffly. "I think it was that manned weather satellite dumping garbage. It hits the atmosphere at orbital velocity, and is incinerated."
She seemed to be immensely pleased and amused. "Garbage becoming beauty! That is rather wonderful, Franklin. I'll remember. Thank you and good night."
She marched off with the small purchase she had made, in the direction opposite his own.
He got almost to the house where he had his room, when there was another encounter. But it was nothing new to run into Nancy Codiss, the spindly fifteen-year-old next door. He had a sudden, unbelievably expansive impulse.
"Hi, Nance," he said. "I didn't get much supper. Let's go down to Lehman's for a hamburger and maybe a soda."
"Why--good--Frankie!"
They didn't talk very much, walking down, waiting for their orders, or eating their hamburgers. But she wasn't as spindly as he used to think. And her dark hair, even features and slim hands were nicer than he recalled.
"I hear you fellas got your space-armor sample, Frank."
"Yep--we did. We're ordering more."
Her expression became speculative. Her brown eyes lighted. "I've been wondering if I should look Outward, too. Whether it makes sense--for a girl."
"Could be--I've heard."
Their conversation went something like that, throughout, with long silences. Finally she smiled at him, very brightly.
"The Junior Fall dance is in two weeks," she said. "But I guess you'll be too busy to be interested?"
"'Guess' just isn't the word, Nance. I regret that--truly."
He looked and sounded as though he meant it. In some crazy way, it seemed that he did mean it.
He walked her home. Then he went to the next house, and up to his rented room. He showered, and for once climbed very early into bed, feeling that he must have nightmares. About strange sounds in the thin winds, over the mysterious thickets of Mars. Or about some blackened, dried-out body of a sentient being, sixty million years dead, floating free in the Asteroid Belt. A few had been found. Some were in museums.
Instead, he slept the dreamless sleep of the just--if there was any particular reason for him to consider himself just.
II
Gimp Hines put the finishing touches on the first full-scale ionic during that next week. The others of the Bunch, each working when he could, completed cementing the segments of the first bubb together.
On a Sunday morning they carried the bubb out into the yard behind the store and test inflated the thirty-foot ring by means of a line of hose from the compressor in the shop. Soapsuds dabbed along the seams revealed a few leaks by its bubbling. These were fixed up.
By late afternoon the Bunch had folded up the bubb again, and were simulating its practice launching from a ground-to-orbit rocket--as well as can be done on the ground with a device intended only for use in a state of weightlessness, when the operators are supposed to be weightless, too. The impossibility of establishing such conditions produced some ludicrous results:
The two Kuzaks diving with a vigor, as if from a rocket airlock, hitting the dirt with a thud, scrambling up, opening and spreading the great bundle, attaching the air hose. Little Lester hopping in to help fit wire rigging, most of it still imaginary. A friendly dog coming over to sniff, with a look of mild wonder in his eyes.
"Laugh, you leather-heads!" Art Kuzak roared at the others. He grinned, wiping his muddy face. "We've got to learn, don't we? Only, it's like make-believe. Hell, I haven't played make-believe since I was four! But if we keep doing it here, all the kids and townspeople will be peeking over the fence to see how nuts we've gone."
This was soon literally true. In some embarrassment, the Bunch rolled up their bubb and lugged it into the shop.
"I can borrow a construction compressor unit on a truck," Two-and-Two offered. "And there's a farm I know..."
A great roll of stellene tubing, to have a six-feet six-inch inside diameter when inflated, was delivered on Monday. Enough for three bubbs. The Archer Fives were expected to be somewhat delayed, due to massive ordering. But small boxes of parts and raw stock for the ionics had begun to arrive, too. Capacitors, resistors, thermocouple units. Magnesium rods for Storey or Ramos or the Kuzaks to shape in a lathe. Sheet aluminum to be spun and curved and polished. With Eileen Sands helping, Gimp Hines would do most of that.
So the real work began. Nobody in the Bunch denied that it was a grind. For most, there were those tough courses at Tech. And a job, for money, for sustenance. And the time that must be spent working for--Destiny. Sleep was least important--a few hours, long after midnight, usually.
Frank Nelsen figured that he had it relatively easy--almost as easy as the Kuzak twins, who, during football season, were under strict orders to get their proper sack time. He worked at Hendricks'--old Paul didn't mind his combining the job with his labors of aspiration. Ramos, the night-mechanic, Tiflin, the car-washer, and Two-and-Two Baines, the part-time bricklayer, didn't have it so easy. Eileen, a first-rate legal typist employed for several hours a day by a partnership of lawyers, could usually work from notes, at the place where she lived.
Two-and-Two would lift a big hand facetiously, when he came into the shop. Blinking and squinting, he would wiggle his fingers. "I can still see 'em--to count!" he would moan. "Thanks, all you good people, for coaching me in my math."
"Think nothing of it," Charlie Reynolds or David Lester, or most any of the others, would tell him. Two-and-Two hadn't come near Frank Nelsen very much, during the last few days, though Frank had tried to be friendly.
Lester was the only one without an activity to support himself. But he was at the shop every weekday, six to ten p.m., cementing stellene with meticulous care, while he muttered and dreamed.
The Bunch griped about courses, jobs, and the stubbornness of materials, but they made progress. They had built their first bubb and ionic. The others would be easier.
Early in November, Nelsen collected all available fresh capital, including a second thousand from Paul Hendricks and five hundred from Charlie Reynolds, and sent it in with new orders.
That about exhausted their own finances for a long time to come. Seven bubbs, minus most of even their simpler fittings, and five ionics, seemed as much as they could pay for, themselves. Charlie Reynolds hadn't yet lined up a backer.
"We should have planned to outfit one guy completely," Jig Hollins grumbled on a Sunday afternoon at the shop. "Then we could have drawn lots about who gets a chance to use the gear. That we goofed there is your fault, Reynolds. Or--your Grandpappy didn't come through, huh?"
Charlie met Hollins' sneering gaze for a moment. "Never mind the 'Grandpappy', Jig," he said softly. "I knew that chances weren't good, there. However, there are other prospects which I'm working on. I remember mentioning that it might take time. As for your other remarks, what good is equipping just one person? I thought that this was a project for all of us."
"I'm with Charlie," Joe Kuzak commented.
"Don't fight, guys--we've got to figure on training, too," Ramos laughed. "I've got the problem of an expensive training centrifuge about beat. Out at my old motor scooter club. Come on, Charlie--you, too, Jig--get your cars and let's go! It's only seven miles, and we all need a break."
Paul Hendricks had gone for a walk. So Nelsen locked the shop, and they all tore off, out to the place, Ramos leading the way in his scooter. At the scooter club they found an ancient carnival device which used to be called a motordrome. It was a vertical wooden cylinder, like a huge, ironbound, straight sided cask, thirty feet high and wide, standing on its bottom.
Ramos let himself and the scooter through a massive, curved door--conforming to the curvature of the walls--at the base of the 'drome.
"Secure the latch bar of this door from the outside, fellas," he said. "Then go to the gallery around the top to watch."
Ramos started riding his scooter in a tight circle around the bottom of the 'drome. Increasing speed, he swung outward to the ramped juncture between floor and smooth, circular walls. Then, moving still faster, he was riding around the vertical walls, themselves, held there by centrifugal force. He climbed his vehicle to the very rim of the great cask, body out sideways, grinning and balancing, hands free, the squirrel tails flapping from his gaudily repainted old scooter.
"Come on, you characters!" he shouted through the noise and smoke. "You should try this, too! It's good practice for the rough stuff to come, when we blast out!... Hey, Eileen--you try it first--ride with me--then alone--when you get the hang of it!..."
This time she accepted. Soon she was riding by herself, smiling recklessly. Reynolds rode after that, then the Kuzaks. Like most of them, Frank Nelsen took the scooter up alone, from the start. He was a bit scared at first, but if you couldn't do a relatively simple stunt like this, how could you get along in space? He became surer, then gleeful, even when the centrifugal force made his head giddy, pushed his buttocks hard against the scooter's seat, and his insides down against his pelvis.
Storey, Hollins and Tiflin all accomplished it. Even Gimp Hines rode behind Ramos in some very wild gyrations, though he didn't attempt to guide the scooter, himself.
Then it was David Lester's turn. It was a foregone conclusion that he couldn't take the scooter up, alone. Palefaced, he rode double. Ramos was careful this time. But on the downward curve before coming to rest, the change of direction made Lester grab Ramos' arm at a critical instant. The scooter wavered, and they landed hard, even at reduced speed. Agile Ramos skipped clear, landing on his feet. Lester flopped heavily, and skidded across the bottom of the 'drome.
When the guys got to him, he was covered with friction burns, and with blood from a scalp gash. Ramos, Storey and Frank worked on him to get him cleaned up and patched up. Part of the time he was sobbing bitterly, more from failure, it seemed, than from his physical hurt. By luck there didn't seem to be any bones broken.
"Darn!" he choked in some infinite protest, beating the ground with his fists. "Damn--that's the end of it for me...! So soon... Pop..."
"I'll drive you to Doc Miller's, Les," Charlie Reynolds said briskly. "Then home. You other people better stay here..."
Charlie had a baffled, subdued look, when he returned an hour later. "I thought his mother would chew my ear, sure," he said. "She didn't. She was just polite. That was worse. She's small--not much color. Of course she was scared, and mad clean through. Know her?"
"I guess we've all seen her around," Nelsen answered. "Widow. Les was in one of my classes during my first high school year. He was a senior, then. They haven't been in Jarviston more than a few years. I never heard where they came from..."
Warily, back at the shop, the Bunch told Paul what had happened.
For once his pale eyes flashed. "You Bright Boys," he said. "Especially you, Ramos...! Well, I'm most to blame. I let him hang around, because he was so doggone interested. And driven--somehow. Lucky nothing too bad happened. Last August, when you romantics got serious about space, I made him prove he was over twenty-one..."
They sweated it out, expecting ear-burning phone calls, maybe legal suits. Nothing happened. Nelsen felt relieved that Lester was gone. One dangerous link in a chain was removed. Contempt boosted his own arrogant pride of accomplishment. Then pity came, and anger for the sneers of Jig Hollins. Then regret for a fallen associate.
The dozen Archers were delivered--there would be a spare, now. The Bunch continued building equipment, they worked out in the motordrome, they drilled at donning their armor and at inflating and rigging a bubb. Gimp Hines exercised with fierce, perspiring doggedness on a horizontal bar he had rigged in the back of the shop. He meant to compensate for his bad leg by improving his shoulder muscles.
Most of the guys still figured that Charlie Reynolds would solve their money problem. But in late November he had a bad moment. Out in front of Hendricks', he looked at his trim automobile. "It's a cinch I can't use it Out There," he chuckled ruefully and unprompted. Then he brightened. "Nope--selling it wouldn't bring one tenth enough, anyhow. I'll get what we need--just got to keep trying... I don't know why, but some so-called experts are saying that off-the-Earth enterprises have been overextended. That makes finding a backer a bit tougher than I thought."
"You ought to just take off on your own, Reynolds," Jig Hollins suggested airily. "I'll bet it's in your mind. The car would pay for that. Or since you're a full-fledged nuclear engineer, some company on the Moon might give you a three year contract and send you out free in a comfortable vehicle. Or wouldn't you like to be tied that long? I wouldn't. Maybe I could afford to be an independent, too. Tough on these shoestring boys, here, but is it our fault?"
Hollins was trying to taunt Reynolds. "You're tiresome, Jig," Reynolds said without heat. "Somebody's going to poke you sometime..."
Next morning, before going to classes at Tech, Frank Nelsen, with the possibility of bitter disappointment looming in his own mind, spotted Glen Tiflin, the switch blade tosser, standing on the corner, not quite opposite the First National Bank. Tiflin's mouth was tight and his eyes were narrowed.
Nelsen felt a tingle in his nerves--very cold.
"Hi--what cooks, Tif?" he said mildly.
"To you it's which?" Tiflin snapped.
Nelson led him on. "Sometimes I think of all the dough in that bank," he said.
"Yeah," Tiflin snarled softly. "That old coot, Charlie Reynolds' grandpa, sitting by his vault door. Too obvious, though--here. Maybe in another bank--in another town. We could get the cash we need. Hell, though--be cavalier--it's just a thought."
"You damned fool!" Nelsen hissed slowly.
It was harder than ever to like Tiflin for anything at all. But he did have that terrible, star-reaching desperation. Nelsen had quite a bit of it, himself. He knew, now.
"Get up to Tech, Tif," he said like an order. "If you have a chance, tell my math prof I might be a little late..."
That was how Frank Nelsen happened to face J. John Reynolds, who, in a question of progress, would still approve of galley slaves. Nelsen had heard jokes like that laughed about, around Jarviston. J. John, by reputation, was all hard business.
Nelsen got past his secretary.
"Young man--I hope you have something very special to say."
There was a cold, amused challenge in the old man's tone, and an implication of a moment of casual audience granted generously, amid mountains of more important affairs.
Nelsen didn't waver. The impulse to do what he was doing had come too suddenly for nervousness to build up. He hadn't planned what to say, but his arguments were part of himself.
"Mr. Reynolds--I'm Frank Nelsen, born here in Jarviston. Perhaps you know me on sight. I believe you are acquainted with Paul Hendricks, and you must have heard about our group, which is aiming at space, as people like ourselves are apt to be doing, these days. We've made fair progress, which proves we're at least earnest, if not dedicated. But unless we wait and save for years, we've come about as far as we can, without a loan. Judging from the success of previous earnest groups, and the development of resources and industries beyond the Earth, we are sure that we could soon pay you back, with considerable interest."
J. John Reynolds seemed to doze, hardly listening. But at the end his eyes opened, and sparks of anger--or acid humor--seemed to dance in them.
"I know very well what sort of poetic tomfoolery you are talking about, Nelsen," he said. "I wondered how long it would be before one of you--other than my grandson with his undiluted brass, and knowing me far too well in one sense, anyway--would have the gall to come here and talk to me like this. You'd probably be considered a minor, too, in some states. Dealing with you, I could even get into trouble."
Nelsen's mouth tightened. "I came to make a proposition and get an answer," he responded. "Thank you for your no. It helps clear the view."
"Hold on, Nelsen," J. John growled. "I don't remember saying no. I said 'gall,' intending it to mean guts. That's what young spacemen need, isn't it? They've almost got to be young, so legal viewpoints about the age at which competence is reached are changing. Oh, there is plenty of brass among your generation. But it fails in peculiar places. I was waiting for one place where it didn't fail. Charlie, my grandson, doesn't count. It has never taken him any courage to talk to me any way he wants."
This whole encounter was still dreamlike to Frank Nelsen.
"Then you are saying yes?"
"I might. Do you foolishly imagine that my soul is so completely sour milk that in youth I couldn't feel the same drives that you feel, now, for the limited opportunity there was, then? But under some damnable pressure toward conformity, I took a desk job in a bank. I am now eighty-one years old... How much does your 'Bunch' need--at minimum, mind you--for the opportunity to ride in space-armor till the rank smell of their bodies almost chokes them, for developing weird allergies or going murdering mad, but, in the main, doing their best, anyway, pathfinding and building, if they've got the guts? Come on, Nelsen--you must know."
"Fifty thousand," Frank answered quickly. "There are still eleven in our group."
"Yes... More may quit along the way... Here is my proposition: I would make funds available for your expenses up to that amount--from my personal holdings, separate from this bank. The amount due from each individual shall be ten percent of whatever his gains or earnings are, off the Earth, over a period of ten years, but he will not be required to pay back any part of the original loan. This is a high-risk, high-potential profit arrangement for me--with an experimental element. I will ask for no written contract--only a verbal promise. I have found that people are fairly honest, and I know that, far in space, circumstances become too complicated to make legal collections very practical, anyway, even if I ever felt inclined to try them... Now, if--after I see your friends, whom you will send to me for an interview and to give me their individual word, also, I decide to make my proposition effective--will you, yourself, promise to abide by these terms?"
Nelsen was wary for a second. "Yes--I promise," he said.
"Good. I am glad you paused to think, Nelsen. I am not fabulously rich. But having more or less money hardly matters to me at this late date, so I am not likely to try to trap you. Yet there is still a game to play, and an outcome to watch--the future. Now get out of here before you become ridiculous by saying more than a casual thanks."
"All right--thanks. Thank you, sir..."
Nelsen felt somewhat numb. But a faint, golden glow was increasing inside his mind.
Tiflin hadn't gone up to Tech. He was still waiting on the street corner. "What the hell, Frank?" he said.
"I think we've got the loan, Tif. But he wants to see all of us. Can you go in there, be polite, say you're a Bunch member, make a promise, and--above all--avoid blowing your top? Boy--if you queer this...!"
Tiflin's mouth was open. "You kidding?"
"No!"
Tiflin gulped, and actually looked subdued. "Okay, Frank. Be cavalier. Hell, I'd croak before I'd mess this up...!"
By evening, everybody had visited J. John Reynolds, including Charlie Reynolds and Jig Hollins. Nelsen got the backslapping treatment.
Charlie sighed, rubbed his head, then grinned with immense relief. "That's a load off," he said. "Glad to have somebody else fix it. Congrats, Frank. I wonder if Otto has got any champagne to go with the hotdogs...?"
Otto had a bottle--enough for a taste, all around. Eileen kissed Frank impulsively. "You ought to get real smart," she said.
"Uh-huh," he answered. "Now let's get some beer--more our speed."
But none of them overdid the beer either...
Just after New Year's they had eight bubbs completed, tested, folded carefully according to government manuals, and stowed in an attic they had rented over Otto's place. They had seven ionics finished and stored. More parts and materials were arriving. The air-restorers were going to be the toughest and most expensive to make. They were the really vital things to a spaceman. Every detail had to be carefully fitted and assembled. The chlorophane contained costly catalytic agents.
A winter of hard work was ahead, but they figured on a stretch of clear sailing, now. They didn't expect anyone to shake their morale, least of all a nice, soft-spoken guy in U.S.S.F. greys. Harv Diamond was the one man from Jarviston who had gotten into the Space Force. He used to hang around Hendricks'.
He dropped in on a Sunday evening, when the whole Bunch was in the shop. They were around him at once, like around a hero, shouting and questioning. There were mottled patches on his hands, and he wore dark glasses, but he seemed at ease and happy.
"There have been some changes in the old joint, huh, Paul?" he said. "So you guys are one of the outfits building its own gear... Looks pretty good... Of course you can get some bulky supplies cheaper on the Moon, because everything from Earth has to be boosted into space against a gravity six times as great as the lunar, which raises the price like hell. Water and oxygen, for instance. Peculiar, on the dry, almost airless Moon. But roasting water out of lunar gypsum rock is an easy trick. And oxygen can be derived from water by simple electrolysis."
"Hell, we know all that, Harv," Ramos laughed.
So Harv Diamond gave them the lowdown on the shortage of girls--yet--in Serenitatis Base, on the Moon. Just the same, it was growing like corn in July, and was already a pretty good leave-spot, if you liked to look around. Big vegetable gardens under sealed, stellene domes. Metal refineries, solar power plants, plastic factories and so forth, already in operation... But there was nothing like Pallastown, on little Pallas, out in the Asteroid Belt... Mars? That was the heebie-jeebie planet.
Gimp asked Harv how much leave he had on Earth.
"Not long, I guess," Harv laughed. "I've got to check back at the Force Hospital in Minneapolis tomorrow..."
But right away it was evident that his thoughts had been put on the wrong track. His easy smile faded. He gasped and looked kind of surprised. He hung onto Paul's old swivel chair, in which he was sitting, as if he was suddenly terribly afraid of falling. His eyes closed tight, and there was a funny gurgle in his throat.
The Bunch surrounded him, wanting to help, but he half recovered.
"Even a good Space Force bubb, manufactured under rigid government specifications, can tear," he said in a thick tone. "If some jerk, horsing around with another craft, bumps you even lightly. Compartmentation helps, but you can still be unlucky. I was fortunate--almost buttoned into my Archer Six, already. But did you ever see a person slowly swell up and turn purple, with frothy bubbles forming under the skin, while his blood boils in the Big Vacuum? That was my buddy, Ed Kraft..."
Lieutenant Harvey Diamond gasped. Huge, strangling hiccups came out of his throat. His eyes went wild. The Kuzaks had to hold him, while Mitch Storey ran to phone Doc Miller. A shot quieted Diamond somewhat, and an ambulance took him away.
That incident shook up the Bunch a little. A worse one came on a Tuesday evening, when not everybody was at the shop.
The TV was on, showing the interior of the Far Side, one of those big, comparatively luxurious tour bubbs that take rubbernecks that can afford it on a swing around the Moon. The Far Side was just coming into orbit, where tending skip gliders would take off the passengers for grounding at the New Mexico spaceport. Aboard the big bubb you could see people moving about, or sitting with drinks on curved benches. A girl was playing soft music on a tiny, lightweight piano.
There wasn't any sign of trouble except that the TV channel went dead for a second, until a stand by commercial with singing cartoon figures cut in.
But Frank Nelsen somehow put his hands to his head, as if to protect it.
Mitch Storey, with a big piece of stellene in his brown mitts, stood up very straight.
Gimp, at a bench, handed a tiny capacitor to Eileen, and started counting, slow and even. "One--two--three--four--five--"
"What's with you slobs?" Jig Hollins wanted to know.
"Dunno--we're nuts, maybe," Gimp answered. "Ten--eleven--twelve--"
Charlie Reynolds and Paul Hendricks were alert, too.
Then a big, white light trembled on the thin snow beyond the windows, turning the whole night landscape into weird day. The tearing, crackling roar was delayed. By the time the sound arrived, all of the stellene in the Far Side must have been consumed. It had no resistance to atmospheric friction at five miles per second, or faster. There were just the heavier metallic details left to fall and burn. Far off, there was a thumping crash that seemed to make the ground sag and recover.
"Here we go!" Charlie Reynolds yelled.
In his and Hollins' cars, they got to the scene of the fragment's fall, two miles out of town, by following a faint, fading glow. They were almost the first to reach the spot. Tiflin and Ramos, who had been working on their jobs, came with their boss, along with a trailing horde of cars from town.
Flashlights probed into the hot impact pit in the open field, where the frozen soil had seemed to splash like a liquid. Crumpled in the hole was a lump of half-fused sheet steel, wadded up like paper. It was probably part of the Far Side's central hub. Magnesium and aluminum, of which the major portions had certainly been made, were gone; they could never have endured the rush through the atmosphere.
Ramos got down into the pit. After a minute, he gave a queer cry, and climbed out again. His mitten smoked as he opened it, to show something.
"It must have been behind a heavy object," he said very seriously, not like his usual self at all. "That broke the molecular impact with the air--like a ceramic nose cone. Kept it from burning up completely."
The thing was a lady's silver compact, from which a large piece had been fused away. A bobbypin had gotten welded to it.
Old Paul Hendricks cursed. Poor Two-and-Two moved off sickly, with a palm clamped over his mouth.
Eileen Sands gasped, and seemed about to yell. But she got back most of her poise. Women have nursed the messily ill and dying, and have tended ghastly wounds during ages of time. So they know the messier side of biology as well as men.
Ramos gave the pathetic relic to a cop who was trying to take charge.
"Somebody must have goofed bad on the Far Side, for it to miss orbit like that," Ramos grated. "Or was something wrong, beforehand? Their TV transmitter went out--we were watching, too, at the garage... You can see the aurora--the Northern Lights... Those damn solar storms might have loused up instruments...! But who'll ever know, now...?"
The Kuzaks, who had been to an Athletic Association meeting at Tech, had grabbed a ride out with the stream of cars from town. Both looked grim. "No use hanging around here, Charlie," Art urged. "Let's get back to the shop."
Before he drove off, Jig Hollins tried to chuckle mockingly at everybody, especially Charlie Reynolds. "Time to think about keeping a nice safe job in the Jarviston powerhouse--eh, Reynolds? And staying near granddad?"
"We're supposed not to be children, Hollins," Charlie shot back at him from his car window. "We're supposed to have known long ago that these things happen, and to have adjusted ourselves to our chances."
"Ninnies that get scared first thing, when the facts begin to show!" Tiflin snarled. "Cripes--let's don't be like soft bugs under boards!"
"You're right, Tif," Frank Nelsen agreed, feeling that for once the ne'er-do-well--the nuisance--might be doing them all some good. Frank could feel how Tiflin shamed some of the quiver out of his own insides, and helped bring back pride and strength.
The Far Side disaster had been pretty disturbing, however. And next day, Thursday, the blue envelopes came to the members of the Bunch. A printed card with a typed-in date, was inside each: "Report for space-fitness tests at Space-Medicine Center, February 15th..."
"Just a couple of weeks!" Two-and-Two was moaning that night. "How'll I get through, with my courses only half-finished. You've gotta help me some more, people! With that stinking math...!"
So equipment building was almost suspended, while the Bunch crammed and sweated and griped and cursed. But maybe now some of them wouldn't care so very much if they flunked.
Two loaded automobiles took off for Minneapolis on the night before the ordeal. The Bunch put up at motels to be fresh the next morning. Maybe some of them even slept.
At the Center, there were more forms to fill out. Then complete physicals started the process. Next came the written part. Right off, Frank Nelsen knew that this was going a familiar way, which had happened quite often at Tech: Struggle through a tough course, hear dire promises of head-cracking questions and math problems in the final quiz. Then the switch--the easy letdown.
The remainder of the tests proceeded like assembly-line operations, each person taking each alone, in the order of his casual position in the waiting line.
First there was the dizzying, mind-blackening centrifuge test, to see if you could take enough Gs of acceleration, and still be alert enough to fit a simple block puzzle together.
Then came the free fall test, from the top of a thousand foot tower. A parachute-arrangement broke your speed at the bottom of the track. As in the centrifuge, instruments incorporated into the fabric of a coverall suit with a hood, were recording your emotional and bodily reactions. The medics wanted to be sure that your panic level was high and cool. Nelsen didn't find free fall very hard to take, either.
Right after that came the scramble to see how fast you could get into an Archer, unfold and inflate a bubb and rig its gear.
"That's all, Mister," the observer with the camera told Nelsen in a bored tone.
"Results will be mailed to your home within twelve hours--Mr. Nelsen," a girl informed him as she read his name from a printed card.
So the Bunch returned tensely to Jarviston, with more time to sweat out. Everybody looked at Gimp Hines--and then looked away. Even Jig Hollins didn't make any comments. Gimp, himself, seemed pretty subdued.
The small, green space-fitness cards were arriving at Jarviston addresses in the morning.
Near the end of the noon hour, Two-and-Two Baines was waving his around the Tech campus, having gone home to look, as of course everybody else who could, had also done. "Cripes!--Hi-di-ho--here it is!" he was yelling at the frosty sky, when Frank came with his own ticket.
The Kuzaks had theirs, and were calm about it. Eileen Sands' card was tucked neatly into her sweater pocket, as she joined those who were waiting for the others on the front steps of Tech's Carver Hall.
Ramos had to make a noise. "See what Santa brought the lady! But he didn't forget your Uncle Miguel, either--see! We're in, kid--be happy. Yippee!"
He tried to whirl her in some crazy dance, but Gimp was swinging along the slushy walk on his crutches. His grin was a mile wide. Mitch Storey was with him, looking almost as pleased.
"Guess legs don't count, Out There," Gimp was saying. "Or patched tickers, either, as long as they work good! I kind of figured on it... Hey--I don't want to ride anybody's shoulders, Ramos--cut it out...! We won't know about Charlie and Jig till tonight, when they come to Paul's from their jobs. But I don't think that there's any sweat for them, either... Only--where's Tif? He should be back by now from where he lives with his father..."
Tiflin didn't show up at Hendricks' at all that evening, or at his garage job either. Ramos phoned from the garage to confirm that.
"And he's not at home," Ramos added. "The boss sent me to check. His Old Man says he doesn't know where Tif is and cares less."
"Just leave Tif be," Mitch Storey said softly.
"Maybe that's best, at that," old Paul growled. "Only I hope the darned idiot doesn't cook himself up another jam..."
They all knew then, for sure, what had happened. Right now, Glen Tiflin was wandering alone, somewhere, cursing and suffering. As likely as not, he'd start hitchhiking across the country, to try to get away from himself... Somewhere the test instruments--which had seemed so lenient--had tripped him up, spotting the weakness that he had tried to fight. Temper, nerves--emotional instability. So there was no green card for Tif, to whom space was a kind of Nirvana...
The Bunch worked on with their preparations. Things got done all right, but the fine edge of enthusiasm had dulled. Jig Hollins flung his usual remarks, with their derisive undertone, around for a couple of weeks. Then he came into the shop with a girl who had a pretty, rather blank face, and a mouth that could twist with stubborn anger.
"Meet Minnie," Jig said loudly. "She is one reason why I have decided that I've had enough of this kid stuff. I gave it a whirl--for kicks. But who, with any sense, wants to go batting off to Mars or the Asteroids? That's for the birds, the crackpots. Wife, house, kids--right in your own home town--that's the only sense there is. Minnie showed me that, and we're gonna get married!"
The Bunch looked at Jig Hollins. He was swaggering. He was making sour fun of them, but in his eyes there were other signs, too. A pleading: Agree with me--back me up--quit! Don't see through me--it's not so, anyhow! Don't say I'm hiding behind a skirt... Above all, don't call me yellow! I'm not yellow, I tell you! I'm tough Jig Hollins! You're the dopes!...
Frank Nelsen spoke for the others. "We understand, Jig. We'll be getting you a little wedding present. Later on, maybe we'll be able to send you something really good. Best of luck..."
They let Jig Hollins and his Minnie go. They felt their contempt and pity, and their lifting, wild pride. Maybe Jig Hollins, wise guy and big mouth, boosted their own selves quite a bit, by contrast.
"Poor sap," Joe Kuzak breathed. "Who's he kidding--us or himself, or neither...?"
Soon Eileen began to show symptoms: Sighs. A restlessness. Sudden angry pouts that would change as quickly to the secret smiles of reverie, while she hummed a soft tune to herself, and rose on her toes, dancing a few steps. Speculative looks at Nelsen, or the other guys around her. Maybe she envied men. Her eyes would narrow thoughtfully for a second. Then she might look scared and very young, as if her thoughts frightened her. But the expression of determined planning would return.
After about ten days of this, Gimp asked, "What's with you, Eileen? You don't usually say much, but now there must be something else."
She tossed down a fistful of waste with which she had been wiping her hands--she had been cementing segments of the last of the ten bubbs they would make--more than they needed, now, but spares might be useful.
"Okay, all," she said briskly. "You should hear this, without any further delay. I'm clearing out, too. Reasons? Well--at least since Tif flunked his emotional I've been getting the idea that possibly I've been playing on a third-rate team. No offense, please--I don't really believe it's so, and if it isn't so you're tough enough not to be hurt. Far worse--I'm a girl. So why am I trying to do things in a man's way, when there are means that are made for me? I'm all of twenty-two. I've got nobody except an aunt in Illinois. Meanwhile, out in New Mexico, there's a big spaceport, and a lot of the right people who can help me. I'll bet I can get where you want to go, before you do. Tell Mr. J. John Reynolds that he can have my equipment--most of which he paid for. But perhaps I'll still be able to give him his ten percent."
"Eileen! Cripes, what are you talking about?" This was Ramos yelping, as if the clown could be hurt, after all.
"I don't mean anything so bad, Fun Boy," she said more gently. "Lots of men are remarkably chivalrous. But no arguments. Now that I have declared my intentions, I'll pick up and pull out of here this minute--taking some pleasant memories with me, as well as a space-fitness card. You're all good, plodding joes--honest. But there'll be a plane west from Minneapolis tomorrow."
She was getting into her blazer. Even Ramos saw that arguments would be futile. Frank Nelsen's throat ached suddenly, as if at sins of omission. But that was wrong. Eileen Sands was too old for him, anyhow.
"So long, you characters," she said. "Good luck. Don't follow me outside. Maybe I'll see you, someplace."
"Right, Eileen--we'll miss yuh," Storey said. "And we better sure enough see you that someplace!"
There were ragged shouts. "Good luck, kid. So long, Eileen..."
She was gone--a small, scared, determined figure, dressed like a boy. On her wrist was a watch that might get pawned for a plane ticket.
Ramos was unbelievably glum for days. But he worked harder building air-restorers than most of the Bunch had ever worked before. "We're hardcore, now--we'll last," he would growl. "Final, long lap--March, April and May--with no more interruptions. In June, when our courses at Tech are finished, we'll be ready to roll..."
That was about how it turned out. Near the end of May, the Bunch lined up in the shop, the ten blastoff drums they had made, including two spares. The drums were just large tubes of sheet magnesium, in which about everything that each man would need was compactly stowed: Archer Five, bubb, sun-powered ionic drive motor, air-restorer, moisture-reclaimer, flasks of oxygen and water, instruments, dehydrated foods, medicines, a rifle, instruction manuals, a few clothes, and various small, useful items. Everything was cut to minimum, to keep the weight down. The lined up drums made a utilitarian display that looked rather grim.
The gear was set out like this, for the safety inspectors to look at during the next few days, and provide their stamp of approval.
The blastoff tickets had also been purchased--for June tenth.
"Well, how do you think the Bunch should travel to New Mexico, Paul?" Frank Nelsen joshed.
"Like other Bunches, I guess," Paul Hendricks laughed. "A couple of moving vans should do the trick..."
III
On June first, ten days before blastoff, David Lester came back to the shop, sheepishness, pleasure and worry showing in his face.
"I cleared up matters at home, guys," he said. "And I went to Minneapolis and obtained one of these." He held up the same kind of space-fitness card that the others had.
"The tests are mostly passive," he explained further. "Anybody can be whirled in a centrifuge, or take a fall. That is somewhat simpler, in its own way, than clinging to a careening motor scooter. Though I do admit that I was still almost rejected...! So, I'll join you, again--if I'm permitted? I understand that my old gear has been completed, as a spare? Paul told me. Of course I'm being crusty, in asking to have it back, now?"
"Uh-uh, Les--I'm sure that's okay," Ramos grunted. "Right, fellas?"
The others nodded.
A subdued cheerfulness seemed to possess Lester, the mamma's boy, as if he had eased and become less introverted. The Bunch took him back readily enough, though with misgivings. Still, the mere fact that a companion could return, after defeat, helped brace their uncertain morale.
"I'll order you a blastoff ticket, Les," Frank Nelsen said. "In one of the two GOs--ground-to-orbit rockets--reserved for us. The space is still there..."
David Lester had won a battle. He meant to win through, completely. Perhaps some of this determination was transmitted to the others. Two-and-Two Baines, for example, seemed more composed.
There wasn't much work to do during those last days, after the equipment had been inspected and approved, the initials of each man painted in red on his blastoff drum, and all the necessary documents put in order.
Mitch Storey rode a bus to Mississippi, to say goodbye to his folks. The Kuzaks flew to Pennsylvania for the same reason. Likewise, Gimp Hines went by train to Illinois. Ramos rode his scooter all the way down to East Texas and back, to see his parents and a flock of younger brothers and sisters. When he returned, he solemnly gave his well-worn vehicle to an earnest boy still in high school.
"No dough," Ramos said. "I just want her to have a good home."
Those of the Bunch who had families didn't run into any serious last minute objections from them about their going into space. Blasting out was getting to be an accepted destiny.
There was a moment of trouble with Two-and-Two Baines about a kid of eight years named Chippie Potter, who had begun to hang around Hendricks' just the way Frank Nelsen had done, long ago. But more especially, the trouble was about Chippie's fox terrier, Blaster.
"The lad of course can't go along with us, Out There, on account of school and his Mom," Two-and-Two said sentimentally, on one of those final evenings. "So he figures his mutt should go in his place. Shucks, maybe he's right! A lady mutt first made it into orbit, ahead of any people, remember? And we ought to have a mascot. We could make a sealed air-conditioned box and smuggle old Blaster. Afterwards, he'd be all right, inside a bubb."
"You try any stunt like that and I'll shoot you," Frank Nelsen promised. "Things are going to be complicated enough."
"You always tell me no, Frank," Two-and-Two mourned.
"I know something else," said Joe Kuzak--he and his tough twin had returned to Jarviston by then, as had all the others who had visited their homes. "There's a desperate individual around, again. Tiflin. He appealed his test--and lost. Kind of a good guy--someways..."
The big Kuzaks, usually easy and steady and not too comical, both had a certain kind of expression, now--like amused and secretive gorillas. Frank wasn't sure whether he got the meaning of this or not, but right then he felt sort of sympathetic to Tiflin, too.
"I didn't hear anything; I won't say or do anything," he laughed.
Afterwards, under the pressure of events, he forgot the whole matter.
It would take about thirty-six hours to get to the New Mexico spaceport. Calculating accordingly, the Bunch hoisted their gear aboard two canvas-covered trucks parked in the driveway beside Hendricks', just before sundown of their last day in Jarviston.
People had begun to gather, to see them off. Two-and-Two's folks, a solid, chunky couple, looking grave. David Lester's mother, of course, seeming younger than the Bunch remembered her. Make-up brought back some of her good-looks. She was more Spartan than they had thought, too.
"I have made up a basket of sandwiches for you and your comrades, Lester," she said.
Otto Kramer was out with free hotdogs, beer and Pepsi, his face sad. J. John Reynolds, backer of the Bunch, had promised to come down, later. Chief of Police, Bill Hobard, was there, looking grim, as if he was half glad and half sorry to lose this passel of law-abiding but worrisome young eccentrics. There were various cynical and curious loafers around, too. There were Chippie Potter and his mutt--a more wistful and worshipping pair would have been hard to imagine.
Sophia Jameson, one of Charlie Reynolds' old flames, was there. Charlie had sold his car and given away his wardrobe, but he still managed to look good in a utilitarian white coverall.
"Well, we had a lot of laughs, anyway, you big ape!" Sophia was saying to Charlie, when Roy Harder, the mailman with broken-down feet, shuffled up, puffing.
"One for you, Reynolds," he said. "Also one for you, Nelsen. They just came--ordinarily I wouldn't deliver them till tomorrow morning. But you see how it is."
A long, white envelope was in Frank Nelsen's hands. In its upper left-hand corner was engraved:
UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE RECRUITING SECTION WASHINGTON, D.C.
"Jeez, Frankie--Charlie--you made it--open 'em, quick!" Two-and-Two said.
Frank was about to do so. But everybody knew exactly what was inside such an envelope--the only thing that was ever so enclosed, unless you were already in the Force. An official summons to report, on such and such a date and such and such a place, for examination.
For a minute Frank Nelsen suffered the awful anguish of indecision over a joke of circumstance. Like most of the others, he had tried to get into the Force. He had given it up as hopeless. Now, when he was ready to move out on his own, the chance came. Exquisite irony.
Frank felt the lift of maybe being one of--well--the Chosen. To wear the red, black and silver rocket emblem, to use the finest equipment, to carry out dangerous missions, to exercise authority in space, and yet to be pampered, as those who make a mark in life are pampered.
"Que milagro!--holy cow!" Ramos breathed. "Charlie--Frankie--congratulations!"
Frank saw the awed faces around them. They were looking up to him and Charlie in a friendly way, but already he felt that he had kind of lost them by being a little luckier. Or was this all goof ball sentiment in his own mind, to make himself feel real modest?
So maybe he got sentimental about this impoverished, ragtag Bunch that, even considering J. John Reynolds' help, still were pulling themselves up into space almost literally by their own bootstraps. He had always belonged to the Bunch, and he still did. So perhaps he just got sore.
Charlie's and his eyes met for a second, in understanding.
"Thanks, Postman Roy," Charlie said. "Only you were right the first time. These letters shouldn't be delivered until your next trip around, tomorrow morning."
They both handed the envelopes back to Roy Harder.
The voices of their Bunch-mates jangled in a conflicting chorus.
"Ah--yuh damfools!" Two-and-Two bleated.
"Good for them!" Art Kuzak said, perhaps mockingly.
"Hey--they're us--they'll stay with us--shut up--didn't we lose enough people, already?" Gimp said.
Frank grinned with half of his mouth. "We always needed a name," he remarked. "How about The Planet Strappers? Hell--if the chairborne echelon of the U.S.S.F. is so slow and picky, let 'em go sit on a sunspot."
"I need some white paint and a brush, Paul," Ramos declared, running into the shop.
In a couple of minutes more, the name for the Bunch was crudely and boldly lettered on the sides of both trucks.
"Salute your ladies, shake hands with your neighbors, and then let's get moving," Charlie Reynolds laughed genially.
And so they did. Old Paul Hendricks, born too soon, blinked a little as he grinned, and slapped shoulders. "On your way, you lucky tramps...!"
There were quick movements here and there--a kiss, a touch of hands, a small gesture, a strained glance.
Frank Nelsen blew a kiss jauntily to Nance Codiss, the neighbor girl, who waved to him from the background. "So long, Frank..." He wondered if he saw a fierce envy showing in her face.
Miss Rosalie Parks, his high school Latin teacher, was there, too. Old J. John Reynolds appeared at the final moment to smile dryly and to flap a waxy hand.
"So long, sir... Thanks..." they all shouted as the diesels of the trucks whirred and then roared. J. John still had never been around the shop. It was only Frank who had seen him regularly, every week. It might have been impertinent for them to say that they'd make him really rich. But some must have hoped that they'd get rich, themselves.
Frank Nelsen was perched on his neatly packed blastoff drum in the back of one of the trucks, as big tires began to turn. Near him, similarly perched, were Mitch Storey, dark and thoughtful, Gimp Hines with a triumph in his face, Two-and-Two Baines biting his lip, and Dave Lester with his large Adam's apple bobbing.
So that was how the Bunch left Jarviston, on a June evening that smelled of fresh-cut hay and car fumes--home. Perhaps they had chosen this hour to go because the gathering darkness might soften their haunting suspicions of complete folly before an adventure so different from the life they knew--neat streets, houses, beds, Saturday nights, dances, struggling for a dream at Hendricks'--that even if they survived the change, the difference must seem a little like death.
Seeking the lifting thread of magical romance again, Frank Nelsen looked up at the ribbed canvas top of the truck. "Covered wagon," he said.
"Sure--Indians--boom-boom," Two-and-Two chuckled, brightening. "Wild West... Yeah--wild--that's a word I kind of like."
Up ahead, in the other truck, Ramos and Charlie Reynolds had begun to sing a funny and considerably ribald song. They made lots of lusty, primitive noise. When they were finished, Ramos, still in a spirit of humor, corned up an old Mexican number about disappointed love.
"Adios, Mujer--
Adios para siempre--
Adios..."
Ramos wailed out the last syllable with lugubrious emphasis.
"Always it's girls," Dave Lester managed to chuckle. "I still don't see how they expect to find many, Out There."
"If our Eileen has--or will--make it, she won't be the first--or last," Frank offered, almost mystically.
"Hey--I was right about the word, wild," Two-and-Two mused. "Yeah--we're all just plum-full of wanting to be wild. Not mean wild, mostly--constructive wild, instead. And, damn, we'll do it...! Cripes--we ought to come back to old Paul's place in June, ten years from now, and tell each other what we've accomplished."
"Damn--that's a fine idea, Two-and-Two!" David Lester piped up. "I'll suggest it to the other guys, first chance I get...!"
Of course it was another piece of callow whistling in the dark, but it was a buildup, too. Coming home at a fixed, future time, to compare glittering successes. Eldorados found and exploited, cities built, giant businesses established, hearts won, real manhood achieved past staggering difficulties. But they all had to believe it, to combat the icy sliver of dread concerning an event that was getting very near, now.
Mitch Storey sat with his mouth organ cupped in his hands. He began to make soft, musing chords, tried a fragment of Old Man River, shifted briefly to a spiritual, and wound up with some eerie, impromptu fragments, partly like the drums and jingling brass of old Africa, partly like a joyful battle, partly like a lonesome lament, and then, mysteriously like absolute silence.
Storey stopped, abashed. He grinned.
"Reaching for Out There, Mitch?" Frank Nelsen asked. "Music of your own, to tell about space? Got any words for it?"
"Nope," Mitch said. "Maybe it shouldn't have any words. Anyhow, the tune doesn't come clear, yet. I haven't been--There."
"Maybe some more of Otto's beer will help," Frank suggested. "Here--one can, each, to begin." For once, Frank had an urge to get slightly pie-eyed.
"High's a good word," he amended. "High and sky! Mars and stars!"
"Space and race, nuts and guts!" Lester put in, trying to belong, and be light-minded, like he thought the others were, instead of a scared, pedantic kid. He slapped the blastoff drum under him, familiarly, as if to draw confidence from its grim, cool lines.
The whole Bunch was quite a bit like that, for a good part of the night, shouting lustily back and forth between the two trucks, laughing, singing, wise-cracking, drinking up Otto Kramer's Pepsi and beer.
But at last, Gimp Hines, remembering wisdom, spoke up. "We're supposed to be under mild sedation--a devil-killer, a tranquilizer--for at least thirty hours. It's in the rules for prospective ground-to-orbit candidates. We're supposed to be sleeping good. Here goes my pill--down, with the last of my beer..."
Faces sobered, and became strained and careful, again. The guys on the trucks bedded down as best they could, among their gaunt equipment. Soon there were troubled snores from huddled figures that quivered with the motion of the vehicles. The mottled Moon rode high. Big tires whispered on damp concrete. Lights blinked past. The trucks curved around corners, growled up grades, highballed down. There were pauses at all-night drive-ins, coffees misguidedly drunk in a blurred, fur-tongued half wakefulness that seemed utterly bleak. Oh, hell, Frank Nelsen thought, wasn't it far better to be home in bed, like Jig Hollins?
At grey dawn, there was a breakfast stop, the two truck drivers and their relief man grinning cynically at the Bunch. Then there was more country, rolling and speeding past. Wakefulness was half sleep, and vice-versa. And the hours, through the day and another night, dwindled toward blastoff time, at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.
When the second dawn came, the Bunch were all tautly and wearily alert again, peering ahead, across dun desert. There wasn't much fallout from the carefully developed hydrogen-fusion engines of the GO rockets, but maybe there was enough to distort the genes of the cacti a little, making their forms more grotesque.
Along the highway there were arrows and signs. When the trucks had labored to the top of a ridge, the spaceport installations came into view all at once:
Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored entrances and exits. Inside it were visible neat bungalows, lawns, gardens, supermarket, swimming pools, swings, a kid's bike left casually here or there.
The first sunshine glinted on the two rockets and their single, attendant gantry tower, waiting on the launching pad. The rockets were as gaunt as sharks. They might almost have been natural spires on the Moon, or ruined towers left by the extinct beings of Mars. At first they were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers, ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, were noticed: GO-11 and GO-12.
"They're us--up the old roller coaster!" Charlie Reynolds shouted.
Then everybody was checking his blastoff ticket, as if he didn't remember the number primly typed on it. Frank Nelsen had GO-12. GO--Ground-to-Orbit. But it might as well mean go! glory, or gallows, he thought.
The trucks reached the gate. The Bunch met the bored and cynical reception committee--a half-dozen U.S.S.F. men in radiation coveralls.
Each of the Bunch held his blastoff ticket, his space-fitness and his equipment-inspection cards meekly in sweaty fingers. It was an old story--the unknowing standing vulnerable before the knowing and perhaps harsh.
Nelsen guessed at some of the significance of the looks they all received: Another batch of greenhorns--to conquer and develop and populate the extra-terrestrial regions. They all come the same way, and look alike. Poor saps...
Frank Nelsen longed to paste somebody, even in the absence of absolute impoliteness.
The blastoff drums were already being lifted off the trucks, weighed, screened electronically, and moved toward a loading elevator on a conveyor. The whole process was automatic.
"Nine men--ten drums--how come?" one of the U.S.S.F. people inquired.
"A spare. Its GO carriage charge is paid," Reynolds answered.
He got an amused and tired smirk. "Okay, Sexy--it's all right with us. And I hope you fellas were smart enough not to eat any breakfast. Of course we'd like to have you say--tentatively--where you'll be headed, on your own power, after we toss you Upstairs. Toward the Moon, huh, like most fledglings say? It helps a little to know. Some new folks start to scream and get lost, up there. See how it is?"
"Sure--we see--thanks. Yes--the Moon." This was still Charlie Reynolds talking.
"No problem, then, Sexy. We mean to be gentle. Now let's move along, in line. Never mind consulting wristwatches--we've got over four hours left. Final blood pressure check, first. Then the shot, the devil-killer, the wit-sharpener. And try to remember some of what you're supposed to have learned. Relax, don't talk too much, and try not to swallow any live butterflies."
The physician, looking them over, shook his head and made a wry face of infinite sadness, when he came to Gimp and Lester, but he offered no comment except a helpless shrug.
The U.S.S.F. spokesman was still with them. "All right--armor up. Let's see how good you are at it."
They scrambled to it grimly, and still a little clumsily. Gimp Hines had, of course, long ago tailored his Archer to fit that shrunken right leg. Then they just sat around in the big locker room, trying to get used to being enclosed like this, much of the time, checking to see that everything was functioning right, listening to the muffled voices that still reached them from beyond their protecting encasement. They could still have conversed, by direct sound or by helmet-radio, but the devil-killer seemed to subdue the impulse, and for a while caused a dreaminess that shortened the long wait...
"Okay--time to move!"
Heavy with their Archies, they filed out into desert sun-glare that their darkened helmets made feeble. They arose in the long climb of the gantry elevator and split into two groups, for the two rockets, according to their GO numbers. It didn't seem to matter, now, who went with whom. Each man had his own private sweating party. The padded passenger compartments were above the blastoff drum freight sections.
"Helmets secure? Air-restorer systems on? Phones working? Answer roll call if you hear me. Baines, George?"
"Here!" Two-and-Two responded, loud and plain in Frank Nelsen's phone, from the other rocket.
"Hines, Walter?"
One by one the names were called... "Kuzak, Arthur?... Kuzak, Joseph?..."
"Okay--the Mystic Nine, eh? Lash down!"
They lay on their backs on the padded floors, and fastened the straps. Gimp Hines, next to Frank, seemed to have discarded his crutches, somewhere.
The inspector swaggered around among them, jerking straps, and tapping shoulders and buttocks straight on the floor padding with a boot toe.
"All right--not good, not too bad. Ease off--shut your eyes, maybe. The next twenty minutes are ours. The rest are yours, except for orders. I hope you remember your jump procedures. Also that there are a lot of wooden nickels Upstairs--in orbit, on the Moon, anyplace. We'll call some of your shots from the ground. Good luck--and Glory help you..."
The growl in their phones died away with the muffled footsteps. Doors closed on their gaskets and were dogged, automatically.
Then it was like waiting five minutes more, inside a cannon barrel. There was a buzzing whisper of nuclear exciters. The roar of power cut in. A soft lurch told that the rockets were off the ground--fireborne. The pressure of acceleration mounted. You closed your eyes to make the blackness seem natural, instead of a blackout in your optic nerves, and the threadiness of your mind seem like sleep. But you felt smothered, just the same. Somebody grunted. Somebody gave a thick cry.
Frank Nelsen had the strange thought that, by his body's mounting velocity, enough kinetic energy was being pumped into it to burn it to vapor in an instant, if it ever hit the air. But it was the energy of freedom from gravity, from the Earth, from home--for adventure. Freedom to wander the solar system, at last! He tried, still, to believe in the magnificence of it, as the thrust of rocket power ended, and the weightlessness of orbital flight came dizzily.
He didn't consciously hear the order to leave the orbiting GO-12, which was moving only about five hundred feet from it's companion, GO-11. But, like most of the others, he worked his way with dogged purpose through what seemed a fuzzy nightmare.
The doors of the passenger compartments had opened; likewise the blastoff drums had been ejected automatically, and were orbiting free.
Maybe it was Gimp who moved ahead of him. Looking out, Frank saw what was certainly Ramos, already straddling a drum marked with a huge red M.R., riding it like a jaunty troll on a seahorse. He saw the Kuzaks dive for their initialled drums, big men not yet as apt in this new game as in football, but grimly determined to learn fast. The motion was all as silent as a shadow.
Then Frank jumped for his own drum, and found himself turning slowly end-over-end, seeing first the pearl-mist curve that was the Earth, then the brown-black, chalk-smeared sky, with the bright needle points and the corona-winged sun in it. Instinct made him grab futilely outward, for the sense of weightlessness was the same as endless fall. He was falling, around the Earth, his forward motion exactly balancing his downward motion, in a locked ellipse, a closed trajectory.
His mind cleared very fast--that must have been another phase of the devil-killer shot coming into action. Controlling panic, he relocated his drum, marked by a splashed red F.N., set his tiny shoulder ionic in operation, and reached back to move its flexible guide, first to stop his spin, then to produce forward motion. He got to the drum, and just clung to it for a moment.
But in the next instant he was looking into the embarrassed, anguished face of a person, who, like a drowning man, had come to hang onto it for dear life, too.
"Frank, I--I even dirtied myself..."
"So what? Over there is your gear, Two-and-Two--go get it!" Frank shouted into his phone, the receiver of which was now full of sounds--a moaning grunt, a vast hiccuping, shouts, exhortations.
"Easy, Les," Reynolds was saying. "Can you reach a pill from the rack inside your chest plate, and swallow it? Just float quietly--nothing'll happen. We've got work to do for a few minutes... We'll look after you later... Cripes, Mitch--he can't take it. Jab the knockout needle right through the sleeve of his Archer, like we read in the manuals. The interwall gum will seal the puncture..."
Just then the order came, maddeningly calm and hard above the other sounds in Frank's phone: "All novices disembarked from GOs-11 and -12 must clear four-hundred mile take-off orbital zone for other traffic within two hours."
At once Frank was furiously busy, working the darkened stellene of his bubb from the drum, letting it spread like a long wisp of silvery cobweb against the stars, letting it inflate from the air-flasks to a firm and beautiful circle, attaching the rigging, the fine, radial spokewires--for which the blastoff drum itself now formed the hub. To the latter he now attached his full-size, sun-powered ionic motor. Then he crept through the double sealing flaps of the airlock, to install the air-restorer and the moisture-reclaimer in the circular, tunnel-like interior that would now be his habitation.
He wasn't racing anything except time, but he had worked as fast as he could. Still, Gimp Hines had finished rigging his bubb, minutes ahead of Frank, or anybody else. On second thought, maybe this was natural enough. Here, where there was no weight, his useless leg made no difference--as the space-fitness examiners must have known. Besides, Gimp had talented fingers and a keen mechanical sense, and had always tried harder than anybody.
Ramos was almost as quick. Frank wasn't much farther behind. The Kuzaks were likewise doing all right. Two-and-Two was trailing some, but not very badly.
"Spin 'em!" Gimp shouted. "Don't forget to spin 'em for centrifuge-gravity and stability!"
And so they did, each gripping the rigging at their bubb rims, and using the minute but accumulative thrust of the shoulder ionics of their Archers, to provide the push. The inflated rings turned like wheels with perfect bearings. In the all but frictionless void, they could go on turning for decades, without additional impetus.
"We've made it--we're Out Here--we're all right!" Ramos was shouting with a fierce exultation.
"Shut up, Ramos!" Frank Nelsen yelled back. "Don't ever say that, too soon. Look around you!"
Storey and Reynolds were still struggling with their bubbs. They had been delayed by trying to quiet Dave Lester, who now floated in a drugged stupor, lashed to his blastoff drum.
Slowly, pushed by their shoulder ionics, Gimp, Ramos and Frank Nelsen drifted over to see what they could do for Lester.
He was vaguely conscious, his eyes were glassy, his mouth drooled watery vomit.
"What do you want us to do, Les?" Frank asked gently. "We could put you back in one of the rockets. You'd be brought back to the spaceport, when they are guided back by remote control."
"I don't know!" Lester wailed in a hoarse voice. "Fellas--I don't know! A little falling is all right... But it goes on all the time. I can't stand it! But if I'm sent back--I can't ever live with myself!..."
Frank felt the intense anguish of trying to decide somebody else's quandary that might be a life or death matter which would surely involve them all. Damn, weak-kneed kid! How had he ever gotten so far?
"We should have set up his bubb first, put him inside, and spun it to kill that sense of fall!" Gimp said. "We'll do it, now! He should be all right. He did pass his space-fitness tests, and the experts ought to know."
With the three of them at it, and with the Kuzaks joining them in a moment, the job was quickly finished.
Meanwhile, the sharp, commanding voice of Ground Control sounded in their phones, again: "GOs-11 and -12 returning to port. Is all in order among delivered passengers? Sound out if true. Baines, George?..."
David Lester's name was called just before Frank Nelsen's, and he managed to say, "In order!" almost firmly, creating a damnable illusion, Frank thought. But for a moment, mixed with his anger, Frank felt a strange, almost paternal gentleness, too.
At the end of the roll call, the doors of the GO rockets closed. Stubby wings, useful for the ticklish operation of skip-glide deceleration and re-entry into the atmosphere, slid out of their sheaths. Little, lateral jets turned the vehicles around. Their main engines flamed lightly; losing speed, they dipped in their paths, beginning to fall.
Watching the rockets leave created a tingling sense of being left all alone, at an empty, breathless height from which you could never get down--a height full of dazzling, unnatural sunshine, that in moments would become the dreadful darkness of Earth's shadow.
"Hey--our spare drum--it'll drift off!" Ramos shouted.
The Kuzaks dived to retrieve the cylinder. Others followed. But there was a peculiar circumstance. The friction cover at one of its ends hung open. There was a trailing wisp of stellene--part of the bubb packed inside--and a thin, angry face with rather hysterical eyes, within the helmet of an Archer Five.
"Shhh--it ain't safe for me to come out yet," Glen Tiflin hissed threateningly. "Damn you all--if you dare queer me...!"
"Cripes--another Jonah!" Charlie Reynolds growled.
Frank Nelsen looked at the Kuzaks, floating near.
"Well--what could we do?" Joe Kuzak, the gentler twin, whispered. "He came back to Jarviston, to our rooming house, one night. We promised to help him a little. What are you going to do with a character nuts enough about space to armor up and stuff himself inside a blastoff drum? Of course he didn't come that way from home. There's that electronic check of drum contents at the gate of the port. But he was there on a visitor's pass, waiting--having hitchhiked all the way to here. After the electronic check, he figured on stowing away, while the drums were waiting to be loaded. The only thing we did to help was to take a little of the stuff out of the spare drum and stow it in our two drums, to leave him some room. We thought sure he'd be caught, quick. But you can see how he got away with it. Those U.S.S.F. boys at the port don't really give a damn who gets Out Here."
"Okay--I'll buy it," Reynolds sighed heavily. "Good luck with the stunt, Tif."
Tiflin only gave him a poisonous glare, as the nine fragile, gleaming rings, the drifting men and the spare drum, orbited on into the Earth's shadow, not nearly as dark as it might have been because the Moon was brilliant.
"We'd better rig the parabolic mirrors of the ionics to catch the first sunshine in about forty minutes, so we can start moving out of orbit," Ramos said. "We'll have to think of food, sometime, too."
"Food, yet--ugh!" Art Kuzak grunted.
Frank felt the fingers of spasm taking hold of his stomach. Most everybody was getting fall-sick, now, their insides not finding any up or down direction. But the guys wavered back to their bubbs. The shoulder ionics of their Archers, though normally sun-energized, could draw power from the small nuclear batteries of the armor during the rare moments when there could be darkness anywhere in solar space.
The Planet Strappers stood in the rigging of their fragile vehicles, setting the full-sized ionics to produce increased acceleration which would gradually push the craft beyond orbit. Joe Kuzak ran a steel wire from a pivot bolt at the hub of his ring, to tow Tiflin and his drum.
Then everybody crawled into their respective bubbs, most of them needing the centrifugal gravity to help straighten out their fall-sickness.
"My neck is swelling, too," Frank Nelsen heard Charlie Reynolds say. "Lymphatic glands sometimes bog down in the absence of weight. Don't worry if it happens to some of you. We know that it straightens out."
For a few minutes it seemed that they had a small respite in their struggle for adjustment to a fantastic environment.
"Well--I got cleaned up, some--that's better," Two-and-Two said. "But look at the fuzzy lights down on Earth. Hell, is it right for a fella to be looking down on the lights of Paris, Moscow, Cairo, and Rangoon--when he hasn't ever been any farther than Minneapolis?" Two-and-Two sounded fabulously befuddled.
David Lester started screaming again. They had left him alone and apparently unconscious, inside his ring, because all ionics, including his, had had to be set. Then, in the pressure of events, they had almost forgotten him.
"I'll go look," Frank Nelsen said.
Mitch Storey was there ahead of him. Mitch's helmet was off; his dark face was all planes and hollows in the moonlight coming through the thin, transparent walls of the vehicle. "Should we call the U.S.S.F. patrol, Frank?" he asked anxiously. "Have them take him off? 'Cause he sure can't stand another devil-killer."
"We'd better," Frank answered quickly.
But now Tiflin, having deserted his blastoff drum, was coming through the airlock flaps, too. He stepped forward gingerly, along the spinning, ring-shaped tunnel.
"Poor bookworm," he growled in a tone curiously soft for Glen Tiflin. "Think I don't understand how it is? And how do you know if he wants to get sent back?"
Mitch had removed Lester's helmet, too. Tiflin knelt. His arm moved with savage quickness. There was the crack of knuckles, in a rubberized steel-fabric space glove, against Lester's jaw. His hysterical eyes glazed and closed; his face relaxed.
For a second of intolerable fury, Frank wanted to tear Tiflin apart.
But Mitch half-grinned. "That might be an answer," he said.
They plopped where they were, and tried to rest until the orbiting cluster of rings emerged from Earth's shadow into blazing sunshine, again. Then Mitch and Frank returned to their own bubbs to check on the acceleration.
It was soon plain that Joe Kuzak's bubb, towing Tiflin's drum, would lag.
"Hell!" Art Kuzak snapped. "Get that character out here to help us inflate and rig his own equipment! We did enough for him! So if the Force notices that there are ten bubbs instead of nine, the extra is still just our spare... Hey--Tiflin!"
"Nuts--I'm looking after Pantywaist," Tiflin growled back.
"Awright," Art returned. "So we just cast your junk adrift! Come on, boy!" There was no kidding in the dry tone.
Tiflin snarled but obeyed.
Ions jetting from the Earthward hub-ends of the rotating rings, yielded their steady few pounds of thrust. The gradual outward spiral began.
"Cripes--I'm not sure I can even astrogate to the Moon," Two-and-Two was heard to complain.
"I'll check your ionic setting for you, Two-and-Two," Gimp answered him. "After that the acceleration should continue properly without much attention. So how about you and me taking first watch, while the others ease off a little...?"
Frank Nelsen crept carefully back into his own rotating ring, still half afraid that an armored knee or elbow might go right through the thin, yielding stellene. Prone, and with his helmet still sealed, he slipped into the fog which the tranquilizer now induced in his brain, while the universe of stars, Moon, sun and Earth tumbled regularly around him.
He dreamed of yelling in endless fall, and of climbing over metal-veined chunks of a broken world, where once there had been air, sea, desert and forest, and minds not unlike those of men, but in bodies that were far different. Gurgling thickly, he awoke, and snapped on his helmet phone to kill the utter silence.
Someone muttered a prayer in a foreign tongue:
"... Nuestra Dama de Guadalupe--te pido, por favor... Tengo miedo--I'm scared... Pero pienso mas en ella--I think more of her. Mi chula, mi linda... My beautiful Eileen... Keep her--"
The prayer broke off, as if a switch was turned. It had been brash Ramos... Now there were only some fragments of harmonica music...
Frank slipped into the blur, again, awakening at last with Two-and-Two shaking his shoulder. "Hey, Frankie--we're five hours out, by the chronometers--look how small the Earth has got...! We're all gonna have brunch in Ramos' vehicle... Know what that goof ball Mex was doing, before? Stripped down to his shorts, and with the spin stopped for zero-G, he was bouncing back and forth from wall to wall inside his bubb! The sun makes it nice and warm in there. Think I might try it, myself, sometime. Shucks, I feel pretty good, now... Frankie, ain't you hungry?"
Frank felt limp as a rag, but he felt much better than before, and he could stand some nourishment. "Lead on, Two-and-Two," he said.
Ramos' bubb was spinning once more, but he was wearing just dungarees. The Bunch--the Planet Strappers--with only their helmets off, were crouched, evenly spaced, around the circular interior of the ring. Dave Lester was there, too--staring, but fairly calm, now. In this curious place, there was a delicious and improbable aroma of coffee--cooked by mirror-reflected sunlight on a tiny solar stove.
"So that's the way it goes," Charlie Reynolds commented profoundly. "We reach out for strangeness. Then we try to make it as familiar as home."
"Stew, warmed in the cans, too," Ramos declared. "Enough for a light one-time-around. I brought the stew along. Hope you birds remember. Then we're back on dehydrates. Hell, except for that weight problem and consequent cost of stuff from Earth, we'd have it made, Out Here. The Big Vacuum ain't so tough--no storms in it, even, to tear our bubbs apart. I guess we won't ever have a bigger adventure than finding out for ourselves that we can get along with space."
"If we had a beef roast, we'd put it in a sealed container of clear plastic," Gimp laughed. "Set it turning, outside the bubb, on a swiveled tether wire. It would rotate for hours like on a spit--almost no friction. Rig some mirrors to concentrate the sun's heat. Space Force men do things like that."
"Shut up--I'm getting hong-gry!" Art Kuzak roared.
Ramos poured the coffee in the thin magnesium cups that each of the Bunch had brought. Their squeeze bottles, for zero-G drinking, were not necessary, here. Their skimpy portions of stew were spooned on magnesium plates. Knife and fork combinations were brought out. An apple purée which had been powder, followed the stew. Brunch was soon over.
"That's all for now, folks," Ramos said ruefully.
Tiflin snaked a cigarette out from inside the collar of his Archer.
"Hey!" Reynolds said mildly. "Oxygen, remember? Shouldn't you ask our host, first?"
Ramos had eased up on ribbing Tiflin months ago. "It's okay," he said. "The air-restorers are new."
But Tiflin's explosive nerves, under strain for a long time, didn't take it. He threw down the unlighted fag. He snicked his switch blade from a thigh pocket. For an instant it seemed that he would attack Reynolds. Then the knife flew, and penetrated the thin, taut wall, to its handle. There was a frightening hiss, until the sealing gum between the double layers, cut off the leak.
The Kuzaks had Tiflin helpless and snarling, at once.
"Get a patch, somebody--fix up the hole," Joe, the mild one, growled. "Tiflin--me and my brother helped you. Now we're gonna sit on you--just to make sure your funny business doesn't kill us all. Try anything just once, and we'll feed you all that vacuum--without an Archer. If you're a good boy, maybe you'll live to get dumped on the Moon as we pass by."
"Nuts--let's give this sick rat to the Space Force right now." Art Kuzak hissed. "Here comes their patrol bubb."
The glinting, transparent ring with the barred white star was passing at a distance.
"All is well with you novices?" The enquiring voice was a gruff drawl, mingled with crunching sounds of eating--perhaps a candy bar.
"No!" Tiflin whispered, pleading. "I'll watch myself!"
The United Nations patrol was out, too, farther off. Another, darker bubb, with other markings, passed by, quite close. It had foreign lines, more than a bit sinister to the Bunch's first, startled view. It was a Tovie vehicle, representing the other side of the still--for the most part--passively opposed forces, on Earth, and far beyond. But through the darkened transparency of stellene, the armored figures--again somewhat sinister--only raised their hands in greeting.
In a minute, Frank Nelsen emerged from Ramos' ring. Floating free, he stabilized himself, fussed with the radio antenna of his helmet-phone for a moment, making its transmission and reception directional. On the misty, shrinking Earth, North America was visible.
"Frank Nelsen to Paul Hendricks," he said. "Frank Nelsen to Paul Hendricks..."
Paul was waiting, all right. "Hello, Frankie. Some of the guys talked already--said you were asleep."
"Hi, Paul--yeah! Terra still looks big and beautiful. We're okay. Amazing, isn't it, how just a few watts of power, beamed out in a thin thread, will reach this far, and lots farther? Hey--will you open and shut your front door? Let's hear the old customer's bell jingle... Best to you, to J. John, to Nance Codiss, Miss Parks--everybody..."
The squeak of hinges and the jingling came through, clear and nostalgically.
"Come on, Frank," Two-and-Two urged. "Other guys would like to talk to Paul... Hey, Paul--maybe you could get my folks down to the store to say hello to me on your transmitter. And I guess Les would appreciate it if you got his mother..."
When the talk got private, Frank went to Mitch Storey's bubb.
"I wanted to show you," Mitch said. "I brought seeds, and these little plastic tubes with holes in them, that you can string around inside a bubb. The weight is next to nothing. Put the seeds in the tubes, and water with plant food in solution. The plants come up through the holes. Hydroponics. Gotta almost do it, if I'm going way out to Mars without much supplies. Maybe, before I get there, I'll have even ripe tomatoes! 'Cause, with sun all the time, the stuff grows like fury, they say. I'll have string beans and onions and flowers, anyhow! Helps keep the air oxygen-fresh, too. Wish I had a few bumble bees! 'Cause now I'll have to pollenate by hand..."
Nope--Mitch couldn't get away from vegetation, even in space.
The Planet Strappers soon established a routine for their journey out as far as the Moon. There were watches, to be sure that none of the bubbs veered, while somebody was asleep or inattentive. Always at hand were loaded rifles, because you never knew what kind of space-soured men--who might once have been as tame as neighbors going for a drive on Sundays with their families--might be around, even here.
Neither Kuzak slept, if the other wasn't awake. They were watching Tiflin, whose bubb rode a little ahead of the others. He was ostracized, more or less.
Everybody took to Ramos' kind of exercise, bouncing around inside a bubb--even Lester, who was calmer, now, but obviously strained by the vast novelty and uncertainty ahead.
"I gave you guys a hard time--I'm sorry," he apologized. "But I hope there won't be any more of that. The Bunch will be breaking up, soon, I guess--going here and there. And if I get a job at Serenitatis Base, I think I'll be okay."
Frank Nelsen hoped that he could escape any further part of Lester, but he wasn't sure that he had the guts to desert him.
It wasn't long before the ionics were shut off. Enough velocity had been attained. Soon, the thrust would be needed in reverse, for braking action, near the end of the sixty hour journey into a circumlunar orbit.
Sleep was a fitful, dream-haunted thing. Food was now mostly a kind of gruel, rich in starches, proteins, fats and vitamins--each meal differently flavored, up to the number of ten flavors, in a manufacturer's attempt to mask the sameness. Add water to a powder--heat and eat. The spaceman's usual diet, while afield...
One of the functions of the moisture-reclaimers was a rough joke, or a squeamishness. A man's kidneys and bowels functioned, and precious water molecules couldn't be wasted, here in the dehydrated emptiness. But what difference did it really make, after the sanitary distillation of a reclaimer? Accept, adjust...
Decision about employment or activity in the immediate future, was one thing that couldn't be dismissed. And announcements, beamed from the Moon, emphasized it:
"Serenitatis Base, seventeenth month-day, sixteenth hour. (There was a chime) Lunar Projects Placement is here to serve you. Plastics-chemists, hydroponics specialists, machinists, mechanics, metallurgists, miners, helpers--all are urgently needed. The tax-free pay will startle you. Free subsistence and quarters. Here at Serene, at Tycho Station or at a dozen other expanding sites..."
Charlie Reynolds sat with Frank Nelsen while he listened. "The lady has a swell voice," said Charlie. "Otherwise, it sounds good, too. But I'm one that's going farther. To Venus--just being explored. All fresh, and no man-made booby traps, at least. Maybe they'll even figure out a way to make it rotate faster, give it a reasonably short day, and a breathable atmosphere--make a warmer second Earth out of it... Sometimes, when you jump farther, you jump over a lot of trouble. Better than going slow, with the faint-hearts. Their muddling misfortunes begin to stick to you. I'd rather be Mitch, headed for heebie-jeebie Mars, or the Kuzaks, aiming for the crazy Asteroid Belt."
That was Charlie, talking to him--Frank Nelsen--like an older brother. It made a sharp doubt in him, again. But then he grinned.
"Maybe I am a slow starter," he said. "The Moon is near and humble, but some say it's good training--even harsher than space. And I don't want to bypass and miss anything. Oh, hell, Charlie--I'll get farther, soon, too! But I really don't even know what I'll do, yet. Got to wait and see how the cards fall..."
Several hours before the rest of the Bunch curved into a slow orbit a thousand miles above the Moon, Glen Tiflin set the ionic of his bubb for full acceleration, and arced away, outward, perhaps toward the Belt.
"So long, all you dumb slobs!" his voice hissed in their helmet-phones. "Now I get really lost! If you ever cross my path again, watch your heads..."
Art Kuzak's flare of anger died. "Good riddance," he breathed. "How long will he last, alone? Without a space-fitness card, the poor idiot probably imagines himself a big, dangerous renegade, already."
Joe Kuzak's answering tone almost had a shrug in it. "Don't jinx our luck, twin brother," he said. "For that matter, how long will we last...? Mex, did you toss Tiflin back his shiv?"
"A couple of hours ago," Ramos answered mildly.
Everybody was looking down at the Moon, whose crater-pocked ugliness and beauty was sparsely dotted with the blue spots of stellene domes, many of them housing embryo enterprises that were trying to beat the blastoff cost of necessities brought from Earth, and to supply spacemen and colonists with their needs, cheaply.
The nine fragile rings were soon in orbit. One worker-recruiting rocket and several trader-rockets--much less powerful than those needed to achieve orbit around Earth--because lunar gravity was only one-sixth of the terrestrial--were floating in their midst. On the Moon it had of course been known that a fresh Bunch was on the way. Even telescopes could have spotted them farther off than the distance of their 240,000 mile leap.
Frank Nelsen's tongue tasted of brassy doubt. He didn't know where he'd be, or what luck, good or bad, he might run into, within the next hour.
The Kuzaks were palavering with the occupants of two heavily-loaded trader rockets. "Sure we'll buy--if the price is right," Art was saying. "Flasks of water and oxygen, medicines, rolls of stellene. Spare parts for Archies, ionics, air-restorers. Food, clothes--anything we can sell, ourselves..."
The Kuzaks must have at least a few thousand dollars, which they had probably managed to borrow when they had gone home to Pennsylvania to say goodbye.
Out here, free of the grip of any large sphere, there was hardly a limit to the load which their ionics could eventually accelerate sufficiently to travel tremendous distances. Streamlining, in the vacuum, of course wasn't necessary, either.
Now a small, sharp-featured man in an Archie, drifted close to Ramos and Frank, as they floated near their bubbs. "Hello, Ramos, hello, Nelsen," he said. "Yes--we know your names. We investigate, beforehand, down on terra firma. We even have people to snap photographs--often you don't even notice. We like guys with talent who get out here by their own efforts. Shows they got guts--seriousness! But now you've arrived. We are Lunar Projects Placement. We need mechanics, process technicians, administrative personnel--anything you can name, almost. Any bright lad with drive enough to learn fast, suits us fine. Five hundred bucks an Earth-week, to start, meals and lodging thrown in. Quit any time you want. Plenty of different working sites. Mines, refineries, factories, construction..."
"Serenitatis Base?" Ramos asked almost too quickly, Frank thought. And he sounded curiously serious. Was this the Ramos who should be going a lot farther than the Moon, anyway?
"Hell, yes, fella!" said the job scout.
"Then I'll sign."
"Excellent... You, too, guy?" The scout was looking at Frank. "And your other friends?"
"I'm thinking about it," Frank answered cagily. "Some of them aren't stopping on the Moon, as you can see."
Mitch Storey was lashing a few flasks of oxygen and water to the rim of his bubb, being careful to space them evenly for static balance. He didn't have the money to buy much more, even here.
The Kuzaks were preparing two huge bundles of supplies, which they intended to tow. Reynolds was also loading up a few things, with Two-and-Two helping him.
"I'm all set, Frank!" Two-and-Two shouted. "I'm going along with Charlie, maybe to crash the Venus exploration party!"
"Good!" Frank shouted back, glad that this large, unsure person had found himself a leader.
Now he looked at Gimp Hines, riding the spinning rim of his ring with his good and bad leg dangling, an expectant, quizzical, half-worried look on his freckled face.
But Dave Lester was more pathetic. He had stopped the rotation of his bubb. He looked down first at the pitted, jagged face of the Moon, with an expression in which rapture and terror may have been mingled, glanced with the hope of desperation toward the job scout, and then distractedly continued dismantling the rigging of his vehicle, as if to repack it in the blastoff drum for a landing.
"Hey--hold on, Les!" Two-and-Two shouted. "You gotta know where you're going, first!"
"Make up your mind, Nelsen," said the job scout, getting impatient. "We handle just about everything lunar--except in the Tovie areas. Without us, you're just a lost, fresh punk!"
But another man had approached from another lunar GO rocket, which had just appeared. He had a thin intellectual face, dark eyes, trap mouth, white hair, soft speech that was almost shy.
"I'm Xavier Rodan," he said. "I search out my own employees. I do minerals survey--for gypsum, bauxite--anything. And site survey, for factories and other future developments. I also have connections with the Selenographic Institute of the University of Chicago. It is all interesting work, but in a rather remote region, I'm afraid--the far side of the Moon. And I can pay only three hundred a week. Of course you can resign whenever you wish. Perhaps you'd be interested--Mr. Nelsen, is it?"
Frank had an impulse to jump at the chance--though there was a warning coming to him from somewhere. But how could you ever know? You would always have to go down to that devils' wilderness to find out.
"I'll try it, Mr. Rodan," he said.
"Selenography--that's one of my favorite subjects, sir!" David Lester burst out, making a gingerly leap across the horrible void of spherical sky--stars in all directions except where the Moon's bulk hung. "Could I--too?" His trembling mouth looked desperate.
"Very well, boy," Rodan said at last. "A hundred dollars for a week's work period."
Frank was glad that Lester had a place to go--and furious that he would probably have to nursemaid him, after all.
Gimp Hines kept riding the rim of his ring like a merry-go-round, his face trying to show casual humor and indifference over ruefulness and scare. "Nobody wants me," he said cheerfully. "It's just prejudice and poor imagination. Well--I don't think I'll even try to prove how good I am. Of course I could shoot for the asteroids. But I'd like to look around Serenitatis Base--some, anyway. Will fifty bucks get me and my rig down?"
"Talk to our pilot, Lame Fella," said the job scout. "But you must be suicidal nuts to be around here at all."
The others leapt to help Nelsen, Ramos, Gimp and Lester strip and pack their gear. Ramos' and Gimp's drums were loaded into the job scout's rocket. Nelsen's and Lester's went into Rodan's.
Gloved hands clasped gloved hands all around. The Bunch, the Planet Strappers, were breaking up.
"So long, you characters--see you around," said Art Kuzak. "It won't be ten years, before you all wind up in the Belt."
"Bring back the Mystery of Mars, Mitch!" Frank was saying.
"When you get finished Mooning, come to Venus, Lover Lad," Reynolds told Ramos. "But good luck!"
"Jeez--I'm gonna get sentimental," Two-and-Two moaned. "Luck everybody. Come on, Charlie--let's roll! I don't want to slobber!"
"I'll catch up with you all--watch!" Gimp promised.
"So long, Frank..."
"Yeah--over the Milky Way, Frankie!"
"Hasta luego, Gang." This was all Ramos, the big mouth, had to say. He wasn't glum, exactly. But he was sort of preoccupied and impatient.
The five remaining rings--a wonderful sight, Frank thought--began to move out of orbit. Ships with sails set for far ports. No--mere ships of the sea were nothing, anymore. But would all of the Bunch survive?
Charlie Reynolds, the cool one, the most likely to succeed, waved jauntily and carelessly from his rotating, accelerating ring. Two-and-Two wagged both arms stiffly from his.
Mitch Storey's bubb, lightest loaded, was jumping ahead. But you could hear him playing Old Man River on his mouth organ, inside his helmet.
The Kuzaks' bubbs, towing massive loads, were accelerating slowest, with the ex-gridiron twins riding the rigging. But their rings would dwindle to star specks before long, too.
The job scout's rocket, carrying Ramos and Gimp, began to flame for a landing at Serene.
In the airtight cabin of Xavier Rodan's vehicle, Frank Nelsen and David Lester had read and signed their contracts and had received their copies.
Rodan didn't smile. "Now we'll go down and have a look at the place I'm investigating," he said.
IV
Frank Nelsen's view of empire-building on the Moon was brief, all encompassing, and far too sketchy to be very satisfying, as Rodan--turned about in his universal-gimbaled pilot seat--spiralled his battered rocket down backwards, with the small nuclear jets firing forward in jerky, tooth-cracking bursts, to check speed further.
It was necessary to go around the abortive sub-planet that had always accompanied the Earth, almost once, to reduce velocity enough for a landing.
Thus, Nelsen glimpsed much territory--the splashed, irregular shape of Serenitatis, the international base on the mare, the dust sea of the same name; the radiating threads of trails and embryo highways, the ever-widening separation of isolated domes and scattered human diggings and workings faintly scratched in the lunar crust, as, at a still great height, Frank's gaze swept outward from the greatest center of human endeavor on the Moon.
It was much the same around Tycho Station, except that this base was smaller, and was built in a great, white-rayed crater, whose walls were pierced by tunnels for exit and entry.
The Tovie camp, glimpsed later, and only at the distant horizon, seemed not very different from the others, except for the misleading patterns of camouflage. That the Tovies should have an exclusive center of their own was not even legal, according to U.N. agreements. But facts were facts, and what did anyone do about them?
Frank was not very concerned with such issues just then, for there was an impression that was overpowering: The slightness of the intrusion of his kind on a two thousand-something miles-in-diameter globe of incredible desert, overlapping ring-walls, craters centered in radiating streaks of white ash, mountain ranges that sank gradually into dust, which once, two billion years ago, after probable ejection from volcanoes, had no doubt floated in a then palpable atmosphere. But now, to a lone man down there, they would be bleak plains stretching to a disconcertingly near horizon.
Frank Nelsen's view was one of fascination, behind which was the chilly thought: This is my choice; here is where I will have to live for a short while that can seem ages. Space looks tame, now. Can I make it all right? Worse--how about Lester?
Frank looked around him. Like Rodan, Lester and he had both pivoted around in their gimbaled seats--to which they had safety-strapped themselves--to face the now forward-pointing stern jets.
Rodan, looking more trap-mouthed than before, had said nothing further as he guided the craft gingerly lower. Lester was biting his heavy lip. His narrow chin trembled.
A faint whisper had begun. As far back as the 1940s, astronomers had begun to suspect that the Moon was, after all, not entirely airless. There would be traces of heavy gases--argon, neon, xenon, krypton, and volcanic carbon dioxide. It would be expanded far upward above the surface, because the feeble lunar gravity could not give it sufficient weight to compress it very much. So it would thin out much less rapidly with altitude than does the terrestrial atmosphere. From a density of perhaps 1/12,000th of Earth's sea level norm at the Moon's surface, it would thin to perhaps 1/20,000th at a height of eighty miles, being thus roughly equivalent in density to Earth's gaseous envelope at the same level! And at this height was the terrestrial zone where meteors flare!
This theory about the lunar atmosphere had proven to be correct. The tiny density was still sufficient to give the Moon almost as effective an atmospheric meteor screen as the Earth's. The relatively low velocity needed to maintain vehicles in circumlunar orbits, made its danger to such vehicles small. It could help reduce speed for a landing; it caused that innocuous hiss of passage. But it could sometimes be treacherous.
Frank thought of these things as the long minutes dragged. Perhaps Rodan, hunched intently over his controls, had reason enough, there, to be silent...
The actual landing still had to be made in the only way possible on worlds whose air-covering was so close to a complete vacuum as this--like a cat climbing down a tree backwards. With flaming jets still holding it up, and spinning gyros keeping it vertical, the rocket lowered gradually. The seats swung level, keeping their occupants right side up. There was a hovering pause, then the faint jolt of contact. The jet growl stopped; complete silence closed in like a hammer blow.
"Do you men know where you are?" Rodan asked after a moment.
"At the edge of Mare Nova, I think," Frank answered, his eyes combing the demons' landscape beyond the thick, darkened glass of the cabin's ports.
The dazzling sun was low--early morning of two weeks of daylight. The shadows were long, black shafts.
"Yes--there's Tower Rock," Lester quavered. "And the Arabian Range going down under the dust of the plain."
"Correct," Rodan answered. "We're well over the rim of the Far Side. You'll never see the Earth from here. The nearest settlement is eight hundred miles away, and it's Tovie at that. This is a really remote spot, as I intimated before."
He paused, as if to let this significant information be appreciated. "So that's settled," he went on. "Now I'll enlighten you about what else you need to know... Come along."
Frank Nelsen felt the dust crunch under the rubberized boot-soles of his Archer. There was a brief walk, then a pause.
Rodan pointed to a pit dynamited out of the dust and lava rock, and to small piles of greyish material beside six-inch borings rectangularly spaced over a wide area.
"There is an extensive underlying layer of gypsum, here," he said. "The water-bearing rock. A mile away there's an ample deposit of graphite--carbon. Thus, there exists a complete local source of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, ideal for synthesizing various hydrocarbonic chemicals or making complicated polyethylene materials such as stellene, so useful in space. Lead, too, is not very far off. Silicon is, of course, available everywhere. There'll be a plant belonging to Hoffman Chemicals here, before too long. I was prospecting for them, for a site like this. Actually I was very lucky, locating this spot almost right away--which is fortunate. They think I'm still looking, and aren't concerned..."
Rodan was quiet for a moment before continuing. The pupils of his eyes dilated and contracted strangely.
"Because I found something else," he went on. "It was luck beyond dreams, and it must be my very own. I intend to investigate it thoroughly, even if it takes years! Come along, again!"
This time the walk was about three hundred yards, past three small stellene domes, the parabolic mirrors of a solar-power plant, a sun-energized tractor, and onward almost to the mountain wall, imbedded in the dust of the mare. There Frank noticed a circular, glassy area.
Strips of magnesium were laid like bridging planks across chunks of lava, and in the dust all around were countless curious scrabbled marks.
Rodan stood carefully on a magnesium strip, and looked back at Nelsen and Lester, his brows crinkling as if he was suspicious that he had already told them too much. Frank Nelsen became more aware of the heavy automatic pistol at Rodan's hip, and felt a tingling urge to get away from here and from this man--as if a vast mistake had been made.
"It is necessary for you to be informed about some matters," Rodan said slowly. "For instance, unless it is otherwise disturbed, a footprint, or the like, will endure for millions of years on the Moon--as surely as if impressed in granite--because there is no weather left to rub it out. You will be working here. I am preserving some of these markings. So please walk on these strips, which Dutch and I have laid down."
Rodan indicated a large, Archer-clad man, who also carried an automatic. He had the face of a playful but dangerous mastiff. He was hunkered down in a shallow pit, scanning the ground with a watch-sized device probably intended for locating objects hidden just beneath the surface, electronically. Beside him was a screen-bottomed container, no doubt meant for sifting dust.
"Greetings, Novices!" he gruffed with genial contempt. But his pale eyes, beyond the curve of his helmet, had a masked puzzlement, as if something from the lunar desolation had gotten into his brain, leaving the realization of where he was, permanently not altogether clear to him.
Rodan pulled a shiny object from his thigh pouch, and held it out in a gloved palm for his new employees to peer at.
"One of the things we found," he remarked. "Incomplete. If we could, for instance, locate the other parts..."
Frank saw a little cylinder, with grey coils wrapped inside it--a power chamber, perhaps, to be lined with magnetic force, the only thing that could contain what amounted to a tiny twenty-million degree piece of a star's hot heart. It was a familiar principle for releasing and managing nuclear power. But the device, perhaps part of a small weapon, was subtly marked by the differences of another technology.
"I believe I have said enough," Rodan stated with a thin smile. "Though some facts will be unavoidably obvious to you, working here. But at least I will let you figure them out for yourselves, since you are well-informed young men, by your own statement." Here Rodan looked hard at the pale, unsteady Lester. "We will go back, now, so I can show you the camp, its routine, and your place in it. We have three domes--garden and living quarters, with a workshop and supply dome between them..."
Quarters proved to be okay--two bunks and the usual compact accessories.
"Leave your Archers in the lockers outside your door--here are your keys," Rodan suggested. "Helen will have a meal ready for you in the adjacent dining room. Afterwards, take a helpful tranquilizer, and sleep. No work until you awaken. I shall leave you, now..."
It was a good meal--steak cultured and grown in a nourishing solution, on the Moon, perhaps at Serene, much as Dr. Alexis Carrel had long ago grown and kept for years a living fragment of a chicken's heart. Potatoes, peas and tomatoes, too--all had become common staples in hydroponic gardens off the Earth.
"What do you make of what Rodan was talking about, Les?" Frank asked conversationally.
But David Lester was lost and vague, his food almost untouched. "I--I don't know!" he stammered.
Scared and embittered further by this bad sign, Frank turned to Helen. "And how are you?" he asked hopefully.
"I am all right," she answered, without a trace of encouragement.
She was in jeans, maybe she was eighteen, maybe she was Rodan's daughter. Her face was as reddened as a peasant's. It was hard to tell that she was a girl at all. She wasn't a girl. It was soon plain that she was a zombie with about ten words in her vocabulary. How could a girl have gotten to this impossible region, anyway?
Now Frank tried to delay Lester's inevitable complete crackup by encouraging his interest in their situation.
"It's big, Les," he said. "It's got to be! An expedition came here to investigate the Moon--it couldn't be any more recently than sixty million years ago, if it was from as close as Mars, or the Asteroid Planet! Two adjacent worlds were competing, then, the scientists know. Both were smaller than the Earth, cooled faster, bore life sooner. Which sent the party? I saw where there rocket ship must have stood--a glassy, spot where the dust was once fused!... From all the markings, they must have been around for months. Nowhere else on the Moon--that I ever heard of--is there anything similar left. So maybe they did most of their survey work by gliding, somehow, above the ground, not disturbing the dust... I think the little indentations we saw look Martian. That would be a break! Mars still has weather. Archeological objects wouldn't stay new there for millions of years, but here they would! Rodan is right--he's got something that'll make him famous!"
"Yes--I think I'll have a devil-killer and hit the sack, Frank," Lester said.
"Oh--all right," Frank agreed wearily. "Me, likewise."
Frank awoke naturally from a dreamless slumber. After a breakfast of eggs that had been a powder, Lester and he were at the diggings, sifting dust for the dropped and discarded items of an alien visitation.
Thus Frank's job began. In the excitement of a hunt, as if for ancient treasure, for a long time, through many ten hour shifts, Frank Nelsen found a perhaps unfortunate Lethe of forgetfulness for his worries, and for the mind-poisoning effects of the silence and desolation in this remote part of the Moon.
They found things, thinly scattered in the ten acre area that Rodan meant tediously to sift. The screws and nuts, bright and new, were almost Earthly. But would anyone ever know what the little plastic rings were for? Or the sticks of cellulose, or the curved, wire device with fuzz at the ends? But then, would an off-Earth being ever guess the use of--say--a toothbrush or a bobbypin?
The metal cylinders, neatly cut open, might have contained food--dried leaf-like dregs still remained inside. There were small bottles made of pearly glass, too--empty except for gummy traces. They were stoppered with a stuff like rubber. There were also crumpled scraps, like paper or cellophane, most of them marked with designs or symbols.
After ten Earth-days, in the lunar afternoon, Frank found the grave. He shouted as his brushing hands uncovered a glassy, flexible surface.
Rodan took charge at once. "Back!" he commanded. Then he was avidly busy in the pit, working as carefully as a fine jeweller. He cleared more dust away, not with a trowel, not with his gloved fingers, but with a little nylon brush.
The thing was like a seven-pointed star, four feet across. And was the ripped, transparent casing of its body and limbs another version of a vacuum armor? The material resembled stellene. As in an Archer, there were metal details, mechanical, electronic, and perhaps nuclear.
In the punctured covering, the corpse was dry, of course--stomach, brain sac, rough, pitted skin, terminal tendrils--some coarse, some fine, almost, as thread, for doing the most delicate work, half out of protecting sheaths at the ends of its arms or legs.
In the armor, the being must have walked like a toe dancer, on metal spikes. Or it might even have rolled like a wheel. The bluish tint of its crusty body had half-faded to tan. Perhaps no one would ever explain the gaping wound that must have killed the creature, unless it had been a rock fall.
"Martian!" Lester gasped. "At least we know that they were like this!"
"Yes," Rodan agreed softly. "I'll look after this find."
Moving very carefully, even in the weak lunar gravity, he picked up the product of another evolution and bore it away to the shop dome.
Frank was furious. This was his discovery, and he was not even allowed to examine it.
Still, something warned him not to argue. In a little while, his treasure hunter's eagerness came back, holding out through most of that protracted lunar night, when they worked their ten hour periods with electric lamps attached to their shoulders.
But gradually Frank began to emerge from his single line of attention. Knowing that Lester must soon collapse, and waiting tensely for it to happen, was part of the cause. But there was much more. There was the fact that direct radio communication with the Earth, around the curve of the Moon, was impossible--the Tovies didn't like radio-relay orbiters, useful for beamed, short-wave messages. They had destroyed the few unmanned ones that had been put up.
There were the several times when he had casually sent a slender beam of radio energy groping out toward Mars and the Asteroid Belt, trying to call Storey or the Kuzaks, and had received no answer. Well, this was not remarkable. Those regions were enormous beyond imagining; you had to pinpoint your thread of tiny energy almost precisely.
But once, for an instant, while at work, he heard a voice which could be Mitch Storey's, call "Frank! Frankie!" in his helmet phone. There was no chance for him to get an instrument-fix on the direction of the incoming waves. And of course his name, Frank, was a common one. But an immediate attempt to beam Mars--yellow in the black sky--and its vicinity, produced no result.
His trapped feeling increased, and nostalgia began to bore into him. He had memories of lost sounds. Rodan tried to combat the thick silence with taped popular music, broadcast on very low power from a field set at the diggings. But the girl voices, singing richly, only made matters worse for Frank Nelsen. And other memories piled up on him: Jarviston, Minnesota. Wind. Hay smell, car smell. Home... Cripes...! Damn...!
Lester's habit of muttering unintelligibly to himself was much worse, now. Frank was expecting him to start screaming at any minute. Frank hadn't tried to talk to him much, and Lester, more introverted than ever, was no starter of conversations.
But now, at the sunrise--S.O.B., was it possible that they had been here almost a month?--Frank at the diggings, indulged in some muttering, himself.
"Are you all right, Frank?" Lester asked mildly.
"Not altogether!" Frank Nelsen snapped dryly. "How about you?"
"Oh, I believe I'm okay at last," Lester replied with startling brightness. "I was afraid I wouldn't be. I guess I had an inferiority complex, and there was also something to live up to. You see, my dad was here with the original Clifford expedition. We always agreed that I should become a space-scientist, too. Mom went along with that--until Dad was killed, here... Well, I'm over the hump, now. You see, I'm so interested in everything around me, that the desolation has a cushion of romance that protects me. I don't see just the bleakness. I imagine the Moon as it once was, with volcanoes spitting, and with thundrous sounds in its steamy atmosphere. I see it when the Martians were here--they surely visited Earth, too, though there all evidence weathered away. I even see the Moon as it is, now, noticing details that are easy to miss--the little balls of ash that got stuck together by raindrops, two billion years ago. And the pulpy, hard-shelled plants that you can still find, alive, if you know where to look. There are some up on the ridge, where I often go, when offshift. Carbon dioxide and a little water vapor must still come out of the deep crack there... Anyhow, they used to say that a lonesome person--with perhaps a touch of schizophrenia--might do better off the Earth than the more usual types."
Frank Nelsen was surprised as much by this open, self-analytical explanation, and the clearing up of the family history behind him, as by the miracle that had happened. Cripes, was it possible that, in his own way, Lester was more rugged than anybody else of the old Bunch? Of course even Lester was somewhat in wonder, himself, and had to talk it all out to somebody.
"Good for you, Les," Nelsen enthused, relieved. "Only--well, skip it, for now."
Two work periods later, he approached Rodan. "It will take months to sift all this dust," he said. "I may not want to stay that long."
The pupils of Rodan's eyes flickered again. "Oh?" he said. "Per contract, you can quit anytime. But I provide no transportation. Do you want to walk eight hundred miles--to a Tovie station? On the Moon it is difficult to keep hired help. So one must rely on practical counter-circumstances. Besides, I wouldn't want you to be at Serenitatis Base, or anywhere else, talking about my discovery, Nelsen. I'm afraid you're stuck."
Now Nelsen had the result of his perhaps incautious test statement. He knew that he was trapped by a dangerous tyrant, such as might spring up in any new, lawless country.
"It was just a thought, sir," he said, being as placating as he dared, and controlling his rising fury.
For there was something that hardened too quickly in Rodan. He had the fame-and-glory bug, and could be savage about it. If you wanted to get away, you had to scheme by yourself. There wasn't only Rodan to get past; there was Dutch, the big ape with the dangling pistol.
Nelsen decided to work quietly, as before, for a while... There were a few more significant finds--what might have been a nuclear-operated clock, broken, of course, and some diamond drill bits. Though the long lunar day dragged intolerably, there was the paradox of time seeming to escape, too. Daylight ended with the sunset. Two weeks of darkness was no period for any moves. At sunup, a second month was almost finished! And ten acres of dust was less than half-sifted...
In the shop and supply dome, David Lester had been chemically analyzing the dregs of various Martian containers for Rodan. In spare moments he classified those scarce and incredibly hardy lunar growths that he found in the foothills of the Arabian Range. Some had hard, bright-green tendrils, that during daylight, opened out of woody shells full of spongy hollows as an insulation against the fearsome cold of night. Some were so small that they could only be seen under a microscope. Frank's interest, here, however, palled quickly. And Lester, in his mumbling, studious preoccupation, was no companionable antidote for loneliness.
Frank tried a new approach on Helen, who really was Rodan's daughter.
"Do you like poetry, Helen? I used to memorize Keats, Frost, Shakespeare."
They were there in the dining room. She brightened a little. "I remember--some."
"Do you remember clouds, the sound of water? Trees, grass...?"
She actually smiled, wistfully. "Yes. Sunday afternoons. A blue dress. My mother when she was alive... A dog I had, once..."
Helen Rodan wasn't quite a zombie, after all. Maybe he could win her confidence, if he went slow...
But twenty hours later, at the diggings, when Dutch stumbled over Frank's sifter, she reverted. "I'll learn you to leave junk in my way, you greenhorn squirt!" Dutch shouted. Then he tossed Frank thirty feet. Frank came back, kicked him in his thinly armored stomach, knocked him down, and tried to get his gun. But Dutch grabbed him in those big arms. Helen was also pointing a small pistol at him.
She was trembling. "Dad will handle this," she said.
Rodan came over. "You don't have much choice, do you, Nelsen?" he sneered. "However, perhaps Dutch was crude. I apologize for him. And I will deduct a hundred dollars from his pay, and give it to you."
"Much obliged," Frank said dryly.
After that, everything happened to build his tensions to the breaking point.
At a work period's end, near the lunar noon, he heard a voice in his helmet-phone. "Frank--this is Two-and-Two...! Why don't you ever call or answer...?"
Two-and-Two's usually plaintive voice had a special quality, as if he was maybe in trouble. This time, Frank got a directional fix, adjusted his antenna, and called, "Hey, Two-and-Two...! Hey, Pal--it's me--Frank Nelsen...!"
Venus was in the sky, not too close to the sun. But still, though Nelsen called repeatedly, there was no reply.
He got back to quarters, and looked over not only his radio but his entire Archer. The radio had been fiddled with, delicately; it would still work, but not in a narrow enough beam to reach millions of miles, or even five hundred. An intricate focusing device had been removed from a wave guide.
That wasn't the worst that was wrong with the Archer. The small nuclear battery which energized the moisture-reclaimer, the heating units, and especially the air-restorer--not only for turning its pumps but for providing the intense internal illumination necessary to promote the release of oxygen in the photosynthetic process of the chlorophane when there was no sun--had been replaced by a chemical battery of a far smaller active life-span! The armor locker! Rodan had extra keys, and could tamper and make replacements, any time he considered it necessary.
Lester had wandered afield, somewhere. When he showed up, Nelsen jarred him out of his studious preoccupations long enough for them both to examine his armor. Same, identical story.
"Rodan made sure," Frank gruffed. "That S.O.B. put us on a real short tether!"
David Lester looked frightened for a minute. Then he seemed to ease.
"Maybe it doesn't make any difference," he said. "Though I'd like to call my mother... But I'm doing things that I like. After a while, when the job is finished, he'll let us go."
"Yeah?" Frank breathed.
There was the big question. Nelsen figured that an old, corny pattern stuck out all over Rodan. Personal glory emphasized to a point where it got beyond sense. And wouldn't that unreason be more likely to get worse in the terrible lunar desert than it ever would on Earth?
Would Rodan ever release them? Wouldn't he fear encroachment on his archeological success, even after all his data had been made public? This was all surmise-prediction, of course, but his extreme precautions, already taken, did not look good. On the Moon there could easily be an arranged accident, killing Lester, and him--Frank Nelsen--and maybe even Dutch. Rodan's pupils had that nervous way of expanding and contracting rapidly, too. Nelsen figured that he might be reading the signs somewhat warpedly himself. Still...?
At the end of another shift, Nelsen took a walk, farther than ever before, up through a twisted pass that penetrated to the other side of the Arabian Mountains. He still had that much freedom. He wanted to think things out. In bitter, frustrating reversal of all his former urges to get off the Earth, he wanted, like a desperate weakling, to be back home.
Up beyond the Arabians, he saw the tread marks of a small tractor vehicle in a patch of dust. There was a single boot print. A short distance farther on, there was another. He examined them with a quizzical excitement. But there weren't any more. For miles, ahead and behind, unimpressable lava rock extended.
Another curious thing happened, only minutes later. A thousand miles overhead, out of reach of his sabotaged transmitter, one of those around the Moon tour bubbs, like the unfortunate Far Side, was passing. He heard the program they were broadcasting. A male voice crooned out what must be a new, popular song. He had heard so few new songs.
"Serene...
Found a queen...
And her name is Eileen..."
Nelsen's reaction wasn't even a thought, at first; it was only an eerie tingle in all his flesh. Then, realizing what his suspicion was, he listened further, with all his nerves taut. But no explanation of the song's origin was given... He even tried futilely to radio the pleasure bubb, full of Earth tourists. In minutes it had sunk behind the abrupt horizon, leaving him with his unanswered wonder.
Girls, he thought, in the midst of his utter solitude. All girls, to love and have ... Eileen? Cripes, could it be little old Eileen Sands, up on her ballet-dancing toes, sometimes, at Hendricks', and humming herself a tune? Eileen who had deserted the Bunch, meaning to approach space in a feminine way? Holy cow, had even she gotten that far, so fast?
Suddenly the possibility became a symbol of what the others of the Bunch must be accomplishing, while here he was, trapped, stuck futilely, inside a few bleak square miles on the far side of Earth's own satellite!
So here was another force of Frank Nelsen's desperation.
He made up his mind--which perhaps just then was a bit mad.
With outward calm he returned to camp, slept, worked, slept and worked again. He decided that there was no help to be had from Lester, who was still no man of action. Better to work alone, anyway.
Fortunately, on the Moon, it was easy to call deadly forces to one's aid. Something as simple as possible, the trick should be. Of course all he wanted to do was to get the upper hand on Rodan and Dutch, take over the camp, get the missing parts of his radio and Archer, borrow the solar tractor, and get out of here. To Serenitatis Base--Serene.
His only preparation was to sharpen the edges of a diamond-shaped trowel used at the diggings, with a piece of pumice. Then he waited.
Opportunity came near sundown, after a shift. Rodan, Dutch, and he had come into the supply and shop dome, through its airlock. Lester and Helen--these two introverts had somehow discovered each other, and were getting along well together--were visible through the transparent wall, lingering at the diggings.
Nelsen saw Rodan and Dutch unlatch the collars of their helmets, preparatory for removing them, as they usually did if they stayed here a while, to pack new artifacts or stow tools. Nelsen made as if to unlatch his collar, too. But if he did it, the gasket would be unsealed, and his helmet would no longer be airtight.
Now!--he told himself. Or would it be better to wait fourteen more Earth-days, till another lunar dawn? Hell no--that would be chickenish procrastination. Rodan and Dutch were a good ten feet away from him--he was out of their reach.
With the harmless-looking trowel held like a dagger, he struck with all his might at the stellene outer wall of the dome, and then made a ripping motion. Like a monster gasping for breath, the imprisoned air sighed out.
Taking advantage of the moment when Rodan's and Dutch's hands moved in life-saving instinct to reseal their collars, Frank Nelsen leaped, and then kicked twice, as hard as he could, in rapid succession. At Dutch's stomach, first. Then Rodan's.
They were down--safe from death, since they had managed to re-latch their collars. But with a cold fury that had learned to take no chances with defeat, Nelsen proceeded to kick them again, first one and then the other, meaning to make them insensible.
He got Dutch's pistol. He was a shade slow with Rodan. "You won't get anything that is mine!" he heard Rodan grunt.
Frank managed to deflect the automatic's muzzle from himself. But Rodan moved it downward purposefully, lined it up on a box marked dynamite, and fired.
Nelsen must have thrown himself prone at the last instant, before the ticklish explosive blew. He saw the flash and felt the dazing thud, though most of the blast passed over him. Results far outstripped the most furious intention of his plan, and became, not freedom, but a threat of slow dying, an ordeal, as the sagging dome was torn from above him, and supplies, air-restorer equipment, water and oxygen flasks, the vitals and the batteries of the solar-electric plant--all for the most part hopelessly shattered--were hurled far and wide, along with the relics from Mars. The adjacent garden and quarters domes were also shredded and swept away.
Dazed, Nelsen still got Rodan's automatic, picked himself up, saw that Dutch and Rodan, in armor, too, had apparently suffered from the explosion no worse than had he. He glanced at the hole in the lava rock, still smoking in the high vacuum. Most of the force of the blast had gone upward. He looked at Helen's toppled tomatoes and petunias--yes, petunias--where the garden dome had been. Oddly, they didn't wilt at once, though the little water in the hydroponic troughs was boiling away furiously, making frosty rainbows in the slanting light of the sun. Fragments of a solar lamp, to keep the plants growing at night, lay in the shambles.
Rodan and Dutch were pretty well knocked out from Frank Nelsen's footwork. Now Dave Lester and Helen Rodan came running. Lester's face was all stunned surprise. Helen was yelling.
"I saw you do it--you--murderer!"
When she kneeled beside her father, Frank got her gun, too. He felt an awful regret for a plan whose results far surpassed his intentions, but there was no good in showing it, now. Someone had to be in command in a situation which already looked black.
"Frank--I didn't suppose--" Lester stammered. "Now--what are we going to do?"
"All that we can do--try to get out of here!" Frank snapped back at him.
With some shreds of stellene, he tied Dutch's arms behind his back, and lashed his feet together. Then he pulled Helen away from Rodan.
"Hold her, Les," he ordered. "Maybe I overplayed my hand, but just the same, I still think I'm the best to say what's to be done and maybe get us out of a jam, and I can't have Helen or Rodan or anybody else doing any more cockeyed things to screw matters up even worse than they are."
Nelsen trussed Rodan up, too, then searched Rodan's thigh pouch and found a bunch of keys.
"You come along with me, Les and Helen," he said. "First we'll find out what we've got left to work with."
He investigated the rocket. That the blast had toppled it over, wasn't the worst. When he unlocked its servicing doors, he found that Rodan had removed a vital part from the nuclear exciters of the motors. His and Lester's blastoff drums were still in the freight compartment, but the ionics and air-restorers had been similarly rendered unworkable. Their oxygen and water flasks were gone. Only their bubbs were intact, but there was nothing with which to inflate them.
When Frank examined the sun-powered tractor, he found that tiny platinum plates had been taken from the thermocouple units. It was clear that, with paranoid thoroughness, Rodan had concentrated all capacity to move from the camp's vicinity in himself. He had probably locked up the missing items in the supply dome, and now the exploding dynamite had ruined them.
Exploring the plain, Nelsen even found quite a few of the absent parts, all useless. Only one oxygen flask and one water flask remained intact. Here was a diabolical backfiring of schemes, all around.
Returning to Rodan and Dutch, he examined their Archers through their servicing ports. Rodan's was as the manufacturer intended it. But Dutch's was jimmied the same as his and Lester's.
Nelsen swung Helen around to face him, and unlatched a port at her Archer's shoulder.
"He put even you on a short string, kid," he pronounced bitterly, after a moment. "Well, at least we can give you his nuclear battery for a while, and let him have his chemical cell back."
Helen seemed about to attack him. But then her look wavered; confusion and pain came into her face.
Nelsen was aware that he was doing almost all of the talking, but maybe this had to be.
"So we've got a long walk," he said. "Toward the Tovie settlement. In Archers of mostly much-reduced range. Whose fault the situation is, can't change anything a bit. This is a life-or-death proposition, with lasting-time the most important factor. So let's get started. Has anybody got any suggestions to increase our chances?"
Both Rodan and Dutch had come to. Rodan said nothing. His look was pure poison.
Dutch sneered. "Smart damn kid you are, huh, Nelsen? You think! Wait till you and your mumblin' crackpot pal get out there! I'll watch both of you go bust, squirt!"
Lester seemed not to hear these remarks. "All that gypsum, Frank," he said. "The water-and-oxygen mineral. But this is for real. There's no gimmick--no energy-source--to release it and save us..."
Frank Nelsen untied Rodan's and Dutch's feet, and, at pistol point, ordered them to move out ahead. From the charts he knew the bearing--straight toward the constellation Cassiopeia, at this hour, across an arm of Mare Nova, then along a pass that cut through the mountains. Eight hundred hopeless miles...! Well, how did he know, really? How much could a human body take? How fast could they go? How long would the chemical batteries actually last? What breaks might appear?
They loped along, even Rodan hurrying. They made a hundred miles in the hours before darkness. With just Helen's shoulder lamp showing the way, they continued onward through the mountains.
Was there truly much to tell, in that slow, losing struggle? Nelsen attached the oxygen flask to his air system for a while, relieving the drain on his battery. Then he gave the flask to Lester. Later he began to move the nuclear battery around to all the Archers, to conserve all of the other batteries a little. Soon they filled the drinking-water tanks of their armor, so that they could discard the flask, whose slight weight seemed to have tripled.
After twenty hours, the power of the chemical batteries began to wane. David Lester, hovering close to Helen, muttered to himself, or to her. Rodan, still marching quite strongly, retreated into an unreality of his own.
"Have another scotch on the rocks, Ralph," he said genially. "I knew I'd make it... Nobel Prize... Oh, you have no idea what I went through... Most of my staff dead... But it's over, now, Ralph... Another good, stomach-warming scotch..."
"Damn, loony squirt's crackin' up!" Dutch screamed suddenly.
He began to run, promptly falling into a volcanic crack, the bottom of which couldn't even be found with the light. Fortunately he wasn't wearing the nuclear battery just then.
Somehow, Lester remained cool. It was as if, with everyone else scared, too, and nobody to show superior courage, he had found himself.
The batteries waned further. The cold of the inky lunar night--much worse than that of interplanetary space, where there is practically always sunshine, began to bite through the insulation of the Archers, and power couldn't be wasted on the heating coils.
Worst was the need for rest. They all lay down at last, except Frank Nelsen, who moved around, clipping the nuclear battery into one Archer for a minute, to freshen the air, and then into another. It was the only trick--or gimmick--that they found. After a while, Lester made the rounds, while Nelsen rested.
They got a few more miles by swapping batteries in quick succession. But the accumulating carbon dioxide in the air they breathed, made them sleepier. They had to sit down, then lie down. Frank figured that they had come something over a quarter of the eight hundred miles. This was about the end of Frank Nelsen, would-be Planet Strapper from Jarviston, Minnesota. Well--his coffin would be a common one--an Archer Five... Somehow, he thought of a line from Kipling: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."
He tried to clip the nuclear battery back in Helen's armor, again. She might make the remaining five hundred-something miles, alone...! He just barely managed to accomplish it... There was still a little juice, from his chemical cell, feeding his helmet phone... Now, he thought he heard someone singing raucously one of those improvised doggerel songs of spacemen and Moonmen... Folklore, almost...
"If this goddam dust
Just holds its crust,
I'll get on to hell
If my gear don't bust..."
"Hey!" Nelsen gurgled thickly into his phone. "Hey..." Then it was as if he sort of sank...
Hell was real, all right, because, with needles in his eyes and all through his body, Nelsen seemed to be goaded on by imps to crawl, in infinite weariness, through a hot steel pipe, to face Old Nick himself--or was it somebody he'd met before?
Maybe he asked, because he got an answer--from the grinning, freckled face bending over him, as he lay, armorless, on a sort of pallet, under the taut stellene roof of a Moontent.
"Sure Frankie--me, Gimp Hines, the itinerant trader and repairman of the lunar wilderness... What a switch--didn't think you'd goof! The Bunch--especially Two-and-Two--couldn't contact you. So I was sort of looking, knowing about where you'd be. Just made it in time. Les and the girl, and that ornery professor-or-whatever, are right here, too--still knocked out with a devil-killer. You've been out twenty hours, yourself. I'll fill you in on the news. Just shut up and drink up. Good Earth whiskey--a hundred bucks just to shoot a fifth into orbit."
Frank gulped and coughed. "Thanks, Gimp." His voice was like pumice.
"Shut up, I said!" Gimp ordered arrogantly. "About me--first. When I got to Serene, I could have convinced them I was worth a job. But I'm independent. I hocked my gear, bought some old parts, built myself a tractor and trailer, loaded it with water, oxygen, frozen vegetables, spare parts, cigarettes, pin-up pictures, liquor and so forth, and came travelling. I didn't forget tools. You'd be astonished by what you can sell and fix--and for what prices--out in the isolated areas, or what you can bring back. I even got a couple of emeralds as big as pigeon eggs. I'm getting myself a reputation, besides. What difference does just one good leg make--at only one-sixth Earth grav? You still hop along, even when you don't ride. And everywhere I go, I leave that left boot print behind in the dust, like a record that could last a thousand ages. I'm getting to be Left Foot, the legend."
Nelsen cleared his throat, found his voice. "Cocky, aren't you, Pal?" he chuckled. So another thing was happening in reverse from what most people had expected. Gimp Hines was finding a new, surer self, off the Earth.
"It's all right, Gimp," Nelsen added. "I figured that I saw your tracks and your tractor tread marks, up in the hills, just before I decided to break away from Rodan..."
Then he was telling the whole story.
"Yes, I was there," Gimp said at the end. "I missed you on the first pass, prospected for a couple of Earth-days, found a small copper deposit. High ground gave me a good position to receive short-wave messages--thought I heard your voices a couple of times. So I doubled back, and located what is left of Rodan's camp, and yours and Les' initialed blastoff drums, which I've brought along in my trailer. Lucky a trader needs an atom-powered tractor that can move at night. I followed your tracks, though going through rough country, you were screened from my radio calls until I was almost on you. Though on my first pass, when you were still in camp, I guess I could have reached you by bouncing a beam off a mountain top, had I known... Well, it doesn't matter, now. I'm out of stock, again, and full of money--got to head back to Serene... You were trying for the Tovie station, eh?"
"What else could we do?"
"I see what you mean, Frank. If you could have made it, and missed getting shot by some trigger-happy guard--where a frontier isn't even supposed to exist--they probably would have held you for a while, and then let you go."
"About the rest of the Bunch?" Frank Nelsen prompted.
"The Kuzaks got to the Belt okay--though they had to fight off some rough and humorous characters. Storey reached his Mars. Charlie Reynolds and Two-and-Two got to Venus, and hooked up with the exploring expedition. Tiflin? Who knows?"
"Ramos?"
"Ah--a real disappointing case, Frank. Darn wild idiot who ought to be probing the farther reaches of the solar system, got himself a job in a chemical plant in Serene. A synthesizing retort exploded. He was burned pretty bad. Just out of the hospital when I last left. It was on account of a woman that he was on the Moon at all."
"Eileen, the Queen of Serene? Gimp!--is that so, too?"
"Yep--sort of. Our Eileen. Back in Jarviston, Ramos found out that she was there. She's a good kid. Even admits that she hasn't got much competition, on a mostly--yet--masculine world... Well, I guess we start rolling, eh? I didn't want to jolt any of you poor sick people, so I camped. Let's get you all into Archers, for which I have a few spare parts left. Then, after we roll up this sealed, air-conditioned tent of a familiar material, we can be on our way."
"Just let's watch Rodan--that's all," Frank Nelsen warned.
"Sure--we'll keep him good and dopey with a tranquilizer..."
They aroused Dave Lester and Helen Rodan, helped them armor up, explained briefly what the situation was, stuffed Xavier Rodan into his Archer, and climbed with him into the sealable cab of the tractor. Here they could all remove their helmets.
After several hours of bumping over rugged country, with the tractor's headlights blazing through the star-topped blackness, they reached a solid trail over a mare. Then they could zip along, almost like on a highway. There were other rough stretches, but most of the well selected route was smooth. Half the time, Nelsen drove, while Gimp rested or slept. They ate spaceman's gruel, heated on a little electric stove. And after a certain number of hours, they climbed over the side of the Moon, and made their own sunrise. After that, the going seemed easier.
Gimp and Frank were just about talked out, by then. Helen Rodan looked after her slumbering father. Otherwise, she and Lester seemed wrapped up in each other. Frank hardly listened to the few words they exchanged. They kept peering eagerly and worriedly along the trail, that wound past fantastic scenery.
Nelsen was eager and tense, himself. Serene, he was thinking with gratitude. Back to some of civilization. Back to freedom--if there wasn't too much trouble on account of all that had happened. Speeding along, they passed the first scattered domes, a hydroponic garden, an isolated sun-power plant.
It was another hour before they reached the checking-gate of one of the main airlocks. Frank Nelsen didn't try any tricks before the white-armored international guards.
"There have been some difficulties," he said. "I think you will want all of our names."
"I am Helen Rodan," Helen interrupted. "My father, Xavier Rodan, here, is sick. He needs a hospital. I will stay with him. These are our friends. They brought us all the way from Far Side."
Within the broad airlock compartment, Lester also got down from the tractor. "I'll stay, too," he said. "Go ahead, Frank. You and Gimp have had enough."
"A moment," gruffed one of the guards with a slight accent. "We shall say who shall do what--passing this lock. Difficulties? Very well. Names, and space-fitness cards, please, from everybody. And where you will be staying, here in Serene..."
Gimp and Frank got permission to pass the lock after about fifteen minutes. Without Helen and Les agreeing to stay, it might have been tougher. They spoke their thanks. For the time being, Frank was free to breathe open air under big, stellene domes. But he didn't know in what web of questioning and accusation he might soon be entangled.
Looking back to his first action against Rodan--with a sharpened trowel that had pierced the wall of a stellene dome--eventually leading up to Dutch's death, and very nearly precipitating his own demise and that of his other companions, he wondered if it wouldn't be regarded as criminal. Now he wasn't absolutely sure, himself, that it hadn't been criminal--or Moonmad. Yet he didn't hate Xavier Rodan any less.
"The S.O.B. might just get sent to a mental hospital--at the worst," Gimp growled loyally. "Well, come on, Frank--let's forget it, ditch our Archies at the Hostel, get a culture steak, and look around to see what you've missed..."
So that was how Frank Nelsen began to get acquainted with Serene--fifteen thousand population, much of it habitually transient; a town of vast aspirations, careful discipline, little spotless cubicles for living quarters, pay twenty dollars a day just for the air you breathe, Earth-beer twenty dollars a can, a dollar if synthesized locally. Hydroponic sunflowers, dahlias, poppies, tomatoes, cabbages, all grown enormous in this slight gravity. New chemical-synthesis plants, above ground and far below; metal refineries, shops making electronic and nuclear devices, and articles of fabric, glass, rubber, plastic, magnesium. A town of supply warehouses and tanks around a great space port; a town of a thousand unfinished enterprises, and as many paradoxes and inconveniencies. No water in fountains, water in toilets only during part of an Earth-day. English, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Arabic spoken, to mention a few of the languages. An astronomical observatory; a selenographic museum, already open, though less than half completed. And of course it was against the law not to work for more than seventy-two consecutive hours. And over the whole setup there seemed to hang the question: Can Man really live in space, or does his invasion of it signal his final downfall?
At a certain point, Nelsen gave up trying to figure out all of the aspects of Serene. Of course he and Gimp had one inevitable goal. There was a short walk, Gimp hopping along lightly; then there was an elevator ride downward, for the place, aggressively named The First Stop, was nestled cosily in the lava-rock underlying the dust of Mare Serenitatis.
It had an arched interior, bar, stage, blaring jukebox, tables, and a shoulder-to-shoulder press of tough men, held in curious orderliness in part by the rigid caution needed in their dangerous and artificial existences, in part by the presence of police, and in part perhaps by a kind of stored-up awe and tenderness for girls--all girls--who had been out of their lives for too long. In a way, it was a crude, tawdry joint; but it was not the place that Frank and Gimp--or even many of the others--had come to see.
Eileen Sands was there, dancing crazy, swoopy stuff, possible at lunar gravity, as Frank and Gimp entered. Her costume was no feminine fluff; cheesecake, of which she presumably didn't have much, was not on display, either. Dungarees, still? No, not quite. Slender black trousers, like some girls use for ballet practice, instead.
Maybe she wasn't terribly good, or sufficiently drilled, yet, in her routines. But she had a pert, appealing face, a quick smile; her hair was brushed close to her head. She was a cute, utterly bold pixy to remember smiling at you--just you--like a spirit of luck and love, far out in the thick silence.
Her caper ended. She was puffing and laughing and bowing--and maybe sweating, some, besides. The clapping was thunderous. She came out again and sang Fire Streak in a haunting, husky voice.
Meanwhile, a barman touched Frank's and Gimp's shoulders. "Hines and Nelsen? She has spotted you two. She wants to see you in her quarters."
"Hi, lads," she laughed. "Beer for old times?... You look like hell, Frank. Brief me on the missing chapter. You had everybody scared."
"Uh-uh--you first, Your Majesty," Nelsen chuckled in return.
She wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, I got here. There was a need. Somebody decided that I was the best available talent. This is the first step. Maybe I'll have my own spot--bigger and better. Or get back to my own regular self, working Out There with the men."
Maybe it was bad taste, but Nelsen felt like teasing. "Ever hear of a person named Miguel Ramos?"
That didn't bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, your chapter, Frank."
He told her the story, briefly.
At last she said, "Frank, you must be spiritually all jammed up. Gimp is set, I know..."
In a few minutes more, Eileen introduced him to a girl. Jennie Harper had large dark eyes, and a funny, achy sort of voice. Gimp disappeared discreetly with his date. Frank and Jennie sat at a table in a private booth, high up in the arches of The First Stop, and watched Eileen do another number.
Jennie explained herself. "I'm another one. I've got to go where the heroes go. That's me--Frankie, is it? So I'm here..."
She had a perfume. While he was Rodan's prisoner for two and a half months, there were special things that had driven him almost wild. Now he made hints, inevitably.
"I don't need Eileen to tell me you're a good guy, Frank," she said with a small, warm smile. "We're just entertainers. They wouldn't let us be anything else--here..."
It hardly mattered what else they said. Maybe it was fifteen hours later that Frank Nelsen found himself walking along a stellene-covered causeway, looking for Left Foot Gimp Hines. He had memories of a tiny room, very neat and compact, with even a single huge rose in a vase on the bed table. But the time had a fierce velvet-softness that tried to draw him to it forevermore. It was like the grip of home, and the lost Earth, and the fear that he would chicken out and return.
He found Gimp, who seemed worried. "You might get stuck, here, on account of Rodan," he said. "Even I might. We'd better go see."
Nelsen had bitter, vengeful thoughts of Rodan being set at liberty--with himself the culprit.
The official at the police building was an American--a gruff one, but human. "I got the dope from the girl, Nelsen," he said. "And from Lester. You're lucky. Rodan confessed to a murder--another employee--just before he hired you. Apparently just before he made his discovery. He was afraid that the kid would try to horn in. Oh, he's not insane--not enough to escape punishment, anyhow. Here the official means of execution is simple exposure to the vacuum. Now, if you want to leave Serene, you'd better do so soon, before somebody decides to subpoena you as a witness..."
Frank felt a humbled wonder. Was Rodan really accountable, or was it the Moon and space, working on people's emotions?
Leaving the building, Frank and Gimp found Dave Lester and Helen Rodan entering. They talked for a moment. Then Lester said:
"Helen's had lots of trouble. And we're in love. What do we do, guys?"
"Dunno--get married?" Nelsen answered, shrugging. "It must happen here, too. Oh, I get it--living costs, off the Earth, are high. Well--I've got what Helen's father paid me. Of course I have to replace the missing parts of my equipment. But I'll loan you five hundred. Wish it could be more."
"Shucks, I can do better," Gimp joined in. "Pay us sometime, when you see us."
"I--I don't know..." Lester protested worriedly, like an honest man.
But Gimp and Frank were already shelling out bills, like vagabonds who happened to be flush.
"Poor simpletons," Gimp wailed facetiously afterwards, when they had moved out of earshot. "Even here, it happens. But that's worse. And if her Daddy had stayed human, she might almost have been an heiress... Well, come on, Frank. I've got my space gear out of hock, and my tractor sold. And an old buddy of ours is waiting for us at a repair and outfitting shop near the space port. I hope we didn't jump the gun, assuming you want to get out into the open again, too?"
"You didn't," Nelsen answered. "You sure you don't want to look at Rodan's site--see if we can find any more Martian stuff?"
Gimp looked regretful for a second. "Uh-uh--it's jinxed," he said.
Ramos, scarred, somewhat, along the neck and left cheek, and a bit stiff of shoulder, was rueful but very eager. Frank's gutted gear was out of the blastoff drum, and spread around the shop. Most of it was already fixed. Ramos had been helping.
"Well, Frankie--here's one loose goose who is really glad to be leaving Luna," he said. "Are the asteroids all right with you for a start?"
"They are," Nelsen told him.
"Passing close to Mars, which is lined up orbitally along our route," Gimp put in. "Did you beam Two-and-Two and Charlie on Venus?"
"Uh-huh--they're just kind of bored," Ramos said. "I even got Storey at the Martian Survey Station. But he's going out into those lousy thickets, again. Old Paul, in Jarviston, sounds the same. Can't get him right now--North America is turned away... I couldn't pinpoint the Kuzaks in the Belt, but that's not unusual."
"I'll finance a load of trade stuff for them," Gimp chuckled. "We ought to be able to move out in about five hours, eh?"
"Should," Ramos agreed. "Weapons--we might need 'em this trip--and everything else is about ready."
"So we'll get a good meal, and then buy our load," Frank enthused.
He felt the texture of his deflated bubb. The hard lines of deep-space equipment quickened his pulses. He forgot the call of Earth. He felt as free and easy as a hobo with cosmic dust in his hair.
Blastoff from Serene's port, even with three heavily loaded trader rockets, was comparatively easy and inexpensive.
Out in orbit, three reunited Bunch members inflated and rigged their bubbs. For Nelsen it seemed an old, splendid feeling. They lashed the supplies from the trader rockets into great bundles that they could tow.
Before the rockets began to descend, the trio of beautiful, fragile rings, pushed by ions streaming from their centers, started to accelerate.
V
"It's the life of Reilly, Paul," Ramos was beaming back to Jarviston, Minnesota, not many hours after Frank Nelsen, Gimp Hines and he started out from the Moon, with their ultimate destination--after the delivery of their loads of supplies to the Kuzaks--tentatively marked in their minds as Pallastown on Pallas, the Golden Asteroid.
Ramos was riding a great bale, drawn by his spinning and still accelerating ring, to the hub of which it was attached by a thin steel cable, passed through a well-oiled swivel bolt. One of his booted feet was hooked under a bale lashing, to keep him from drifting off in the absence of weight. He held a rifle casually, but at alert, across his knees. Its needle-like bullets were not intended to kill. They were tiny rockets that could flame during the last second of a long flight, homing in on a target by means of a self-contained and marvelously miniaturized radar guidance system. Their tips were anesthetic.
The parabolic antenna mounted on the elbow of Ramos' Archer, swung a tiny bit, holding the beam contact with Paul Hendricks automatically, after it was made. Yet Ramos kept his arm very still, to avoid making the slender beam swing wide. Meanwhile, he was elaborating on his first statement:
"... Not like before. No terrestrial ground-to-orbit weight problem to beat, this trip, Paul. And we've got some of about everything that the Moon could provide, thanks to Gimp, who paid the bill. Culture steak in the shadow refrigerators. That's all you need, Out Here, to keep things frozen--just a shadow... We've got hydroponic vegetables, tinned bread, chocolate, beer. We've got sun stoves to cook on. We've got numerous luxury items not meant for the stomach. We're living high for a while, anyhow. Of course we don't want to use up too much of the fancy stuff. Tell Otto Kramer about us..."
Frank Nelsen and Gimp Hines, who were riding the rigging of their respective bubbs, which were also hauling big bales of supplies, were part of the trans-spatial conversation, too. There was enough leakage from Ramos' tightened beam, here at its source, for them to hear what he said.
But when, after a moment, Paul Hendricks answered from the distance, "Easy with the talk, fella--overinterested people might be listening," they suddenly forgot their own enthusiasms. They realized. Their hides tingled unpleasantly.
Ramos' dark face hardened. Still he spoke depreciatingly. "Shucks, Paul, this is a well-focused beam. Besides it's pointing Earthward and sunward; not toward the Belt, where most of the real mean folks are..." But he sounded defensive, and very soon he said, "'Bye for now, Paul."
A little later, Frank Nelsen contacted Art Kuzak, out in the Asteroid Belt, across a much greater stretch of space. He thought he was cautious when he said, "We're riding a bit heavy--for you guys..." But after the twenty minute interval it took to get an answer back over ten light-minutes of distance traversed twice--186,000 miles for every second, spanned by slender threads of radio energy which were of low-power but of low-loss low-dispersal, too, explaining their tremendous range--Art Kuzak's warning was carefully cryptic, yet plain to Nelsen and his companions.
"Thanks for all the favors," he growled dryly. "Now keep still, and be real thoughtful, Frankie Boy. That also goes for you other two naive boneheads..."
Open space, like open, scarcely touched country, had produced its outlaws. But the distances were far greater. The pressures of need were infinitely harsher.
"Yeah, there's a leader named Fessler," Gimp rasped, with his phone turned low so that only his companions could hear him. "But there are other names... Art's right. We'd better keep our eyes open and our mouths shut."
Asteroid miners who had had poor luck, or who had been forced to kill to win even the breath of life; colonists who had left Mars after terrible misfortunes, there; adventurers soured and maddened by months in a vacuum armor, smelling the stench of their own unwashed bodies; men flush with gains, and seeking merely to relieve the tensions of their restrained, artificial existences in a wild spree; refugees from rigid Tovie conformism--all these composed the membership of the wandering, robbing, hijacking bands, which, though not numerous, were significant. Once, most of these men had been reasonably well-balanced individuals, easily lost in a crowd. But the Big Vacuum could change that.
Ramos, Hines, and Nelsen had heard the stories. Now, their watchfulness became almost exaggerated. They felt their inexperience. They made no more radio beam contacts. One of them was always on lookout, clutching a rifle, peering all around, glancing every few seconds at the miniaturized radar screen set inside the collar of his helmet. But the spherical sky remained free of any unexplained blip or luminous speck. Fragments of conversations picked up in their phones--widely separated asteroid-miners talking to each other, for the most part--obviously came from far away. There was a U.S.S.F. bubb cruising a few million miles off. Otherwise, the enormous emptiness was safely and perversely empty, all around.
They kept accelerating. For a planned interval, they enjoyed all the good things. They found that masculine guardedness and laziness went well together. They ate themselves full. Like Mitch Storey had once done, they all started hydroponic gardens inside their bubbs. In the pleasant, steamy sun-warmth of those stellene interiors, they bounced back and forth from elastic wall to elastic wall, with gravity temporarily at zero because they had stopped the spin of their bubbs. Thus they loosened their muscles, worked up a sweat. Afterwards they dozed, slept, listened to beamed radio music or taped recordings of their own. They smiled at pin-up pictures, read microfilmed books through a viewer, looked at the growing plants around them.
There was an arrogance in them, because they had succeeded in bringing so much of home out here. There was even a mood like that of a lost, languid beach in the tropics. And how was that possible, with only a thin skin of stellene between them and frigid nothing?
Ramos said just about what he had said--long ago, it seemed, now. "Nuts--the Big Vacuum ain't so tough." But he amended quickly, "Yeah, I know, Frank--don't scowl. When you aren't looking, it can up and kill you. Like with my Uncle José, only worse. He was a powder monkey in Mexico. It got so he thought dynamite was his friend. Well, there wasn't even anything to put in his coffin..."
The luxurious interlude passed, and they reverted mostly to Spartan meals of space-gruel, except for some fresh-grown lettuce. Mars became an agate bead, then a hazy sphere with those swirled, almost fluid markings, where the spores of a perhaps sentient vegetable life followed the paths of thin winds, blowing equatorward from the polar caps of hoarfrost.
The three stellene rings bumped lightly on the ten mile chunk of captured asteroidal rock and nickel-iron that was Phobos, Mars' nearer moon. Gravitation was almost nil. There was no need, here, for rockets, to land or take off. The sun-powered ionics were more than enough.
A small observatory, a U.N.-tended between ground-and-orbit rocket port, and a few hydroponic garden domes nestled in the jaggedness were about all that Phobos had--other than the magnificent view of the Red Planet, below.
Gimp Hines' freckled face shone in the ruddy light. "I'm going down," he declared. "Just for a few days, to look around near the Survey Station. You guys?"
Ramos shrugged, almost disinterested. "People have been there--some still are. And what good is poking around the Station? But who wants to goof up, going into the thickets? Others have done that, often enough. Me for Pallastown, and maybe lots farther, pal."
Frank Nelsen wasn't that blasé. On the Moon, he had seen some of the old Mars of advanced native technology, now long extinct. But there was also the recent Mars of explorers and then footloose adventurers, wondering what they could find to do with this quiet, pastel-tinted world of tremendous history. Then had come the colonists, with their tractors and their rolls of stellene to make sealed dwellings and covered fields in that thin, almost oxygenless atmosphere.
But their hopes to find peace and isolation from the crowded and troubled Earth by science and hard work even in so harsh a place, had come into conflict with a third Mars that must have begun soon after the original inhabitants had been destroyed. Though maybe it had had its start, billions of years before, on the planets of another star. The thickets had seemed harmless. Was this another, different civilization, that had risen at last in anger, using its own methods of allergy, terrible repellant nostalgia, and mental distortions?
Frank felt the call of mystery which was half dread. But then he shrugged. "Uh-uh, Gimp. I'd like to go down, too. But the gravity is twice that of the Moon--getting up and down isn't so easy. Besides, once when I made a stopover in space, after a nice short hop, I got into trouble. I'll pass this one up. I'd like to talk to Mitch Storey, though."
They all tried to reach him, beaming the Survey Station at the edge of Syrtis Major, the great equatorial wedge of blue-green growths on the floor of a vanished ocean, first.
"Mitchell Storey is not around right now," a young man's voice informed them. "He wandered off again, three days ago. Does it often... No--we don't know where to reach him..."
Widening their beams over the short range of considerably less than four thousand miles, they tried to call Mitch directly. No luck. Contact should have been easy. But of course he could be wandering with his Archer helmet-phone turned off.
Considering the reputation of Mars, Nelsen was a bit worried. But he had a perhaps treacherous belief that Mitch was special enough to take care of himself.
Ramos was impatient. "We'll hook old Mitch on our party line, sometime, Frank," he said. "Right now we ought to get started. Space is still nice and empty ahead, toward the Kuzaks and Pallastown. That condition might not last... Gimp, are you honest-to-gosh set on going down to this dried-up, museum-world?"
"Umhmm. See you soon, though," Gimp answered, grinning. "I'll leave my bubb and my load of supplies up here on Phobos. Be back for it probably in a week. And there'll be a freight-bubb cluster, or something, for me to join up with, and follow you Out..."
Nelsen and Ramos left Gimp Hines before he boarded the winged skip-glide rocket that would take him below. Parting words flew back and forth. "See you... Take care... Over the Milky Way, suckers..."
Then they were standing off from Mars and its two moons. During the next several Earth-days of time, they accelerated with all the power that their bubb ionics could wring out of the sunshine, weakened now, with distance. They knew about where to find the Kuzaks. But contact was weeks off. When they were close enough, they could radio safely, checking the exact position of Art's and Joe's supply post. And they knew enough to steer clear of Ceres, the largest Asteroid, which was Tovie-occupied. All the signs were good. They were well-armed and watchful. They should have made the trip without trouble.
Ahead, dim still with distance, but glinting with a pinkish, metallic shine which made it much brighter than it would otherwise have been, was Pallas, which Ramos watched like a beacon.
"Eldorado," he said once, cockily, as if he remembered something from the Spanish part of his background.
They got almost three-quarters across that unimaginable stretch of emptiness before there was a bad sign. It was a catcall--literally--in their helmet phones. "Meow!" It was falsely plaintive and innocuous. It was a maliciously childish promise of trouble.
A little later, there was a chuckle. "Be cavalier, fellas. Watch yourselves. I mean it." The tone had a strange intensity.
Ramos was on lookout, then, with eyes, radar and rifle. But the spoken message had been too brief to get a fix on the direction of its radio waves.
Ramos stiffened. With his phone power turned very low, he said, "Frank--lots of people say 'Be cavalier', nowadays. But that includes one of the old Bunch. The voice might match, too."
"Uh-huh--Tiflin, the S.O.B.," Nelsen growled softly.
For ten hours, nothing else happened. Then there were some tiny radar-blips, which could have indicated meteors. Nelsen and Ramos changed the angle of the ion guides of their ionic motors to move their bubbs from course, slightly, and dodge. During the first hour, they were successful. But then there were more blips, in greater numbers.
Fist-sized chunks flicked through their vehicles almost simultaneously. Air puffed out. Their rings collapsed under them--the sealer was no good for holes of such size. At once, the continued spin of the bubbs wound them, like limp laundry, into knots.
While Nelsen and Ramos were trying to untangle the mess, visible specks appeared in the distance. They fired at them. Then something slammed hard into the fleshy part of Nelsen's hip, penetrating his armor, and passing on out, again. The sealing gum in the Archer's skin worked effectively on the needle-like punctures, but the knockout drug had been delivered.
As his awareness faded, Nelsen fired rapidly, and saw Ramos doing the same--until his hand slapped suddenly at his side...
After that there was nothing, until, for a few seconds, Frank Nelsen regained a blurred consciousness. He was lying, unarmored, inside a bubb--perhaps his own, which had been patched and reinflated. All around him was loud laughter and talk, the gurgle of liquor, the smells of cooked meat, a choking concentration of tobacco smoke. Music blared furiously.
"Busht out shummore!" somebody was hollering. "We got jackpot--the whole fanshy works! I almost think I'm back in Sputtsberg--wherever hell that is... But where's the wimmin? Nothing but dumb, prissy pitchers! Not even good pitchers...!"
There were guys of all sizes, mostly young, some armored, some not. One with a pimply face stumbled near. Frank Nelsen choked down his fury at the vandalism. He had a blurred urge to find a certain face, and almost thought he succeeded. But everything, including his head, was a fuzzy jumble.
"Hey!" the pimply guy gurgled. "Hey--Boss! Our benefactors--they're half awake! You should shleep, baby greenhorns...!"
A large man with shovel teeth ambled over. Frank managed half to rise. He met the blow and gave some of it back. Ramos was doing likewise, gamely. Then Nelsen's head zeroed out again in a pyrotechnic burst...
He awoke to almost absolute silence, and to the turning of the whole universe around him. But of course it was himself that was rotating--boots over head. There was a bad smell of old sweat, and worse.
His hip felt numb from the needle puncture. In all except the most vital areas, those slim missiles would not usually cause death, or even serious injury; but soon the wound would ache naggingly.
First, Frank Nelsen hardly knew where he was. Then he understood that he was drifting free in space, in an armor. He thought it was his own until he failed to recognize the scuffed, grimy interior. Even the workshirt he was wearing wasn't the new blue one he had put on, it seemed only hours ago. It was a greasy grey.
Etched into the scratched plastic of the helmet that covered his head, he saw "Archer III--ser. no. 828211." And casually stuck into the gasketted rim of the collar, was a note, pencilled jaggedly on a scrap of paper:
"Honest, Greenie, your a pal. All that nice stuff. Thanks a 1,000,000! Couple of my boys needed new Archies, bad. Thanks again. You and your buddie are not having so bad a brake. These old threes been all over hell. They will show you all about Asteroid hopping and mining. So will the load-hauling net and tools. Thanks for the little dough, too. Find your space fitness card in shirt pocket. We don't need it. Have lots of fun. Just remember me as The Stinker."
Frank Nelsen was quivering with anger and scare. He saw that a mended steel net, containing a few items, had got wrapped around him with his turning. He groped for the ion-guide of the ancient shoulder-ionic, and touched a control. Slowly his spin was checked. Meanwhile he untangled himself, and saw what must be Ramos, adrift like himself in a battered Archer Three, doing the same.
Gradually they managed to ion glide over to each other. Their eyes met. They were the butts of a prank that no doubt had been the source of many guffaws.
"Did you get a letter, too, Frank?" Ramos asked. For close communication, the old helmet-phones still worked okay.
"I did," Nelsen breathed. "Why didn't they just knock us off? Alive, we might tell on them."
"Not slow and funny enough, maybe," Ramos answered dolefully. "In these broken-down outfits, we might not live to tell. Besides, even with these notes for clues, who'd ever find out who they are, way out here?"
Nelsen figured that all this was probably the truth. In the Belt, life was cheap. Death got to be a joke.
"There was an ox of a guy with big teeth!" he hissed furiously. "Thought I saw Tiflin, too--the S.O.B.! Cripes, do I always land in the soup?"
"The bossman with the teeth, I remember," Ramos grated. "Tiflin I don't know about. Could be... Hell, though--what now? I suppose we're going in about the same direction and at the same speed as before? Have to watch the sun and planets to make sure. Did they leave us any instruments? Meanwhile, we might try to decelerate. I'd like to get out to Pluto sometime, but not equipped like this."
"We'll check everything--see how bad off they left us," Nelsen said.
So that was what they did, after they had set their decrepit shoulder-ionics to slow them down in the direction of the Belt.
Each of their hauling nets contained battered chisels, hammers, saws for metal, a radiation counter, a beaten-up-looking pistol, some old position-finding instruments, including a wristwatch that had seen much better days to be used as a chronometer. There were also two large flasks of water and two month-supply boxes of dehydrated space-gruel--these last items obviously granted them from their own, now vanished stores. Here was weird generosity--or perhaps just more ghoulish fun to give them the feeble hope of survival.
Now they checked each other's Archer Threes as well as they could while they were being worn. No use even to try to communicate over any distance with the worn-out radio transmitters. The nuclear batteries were ninety-percent used up, which still left considerable time--fortunately, because they had to add battery power to the normally sun-energized shoulder-ionics, in order to get any reasonable decelerating effect out of them. Out here, unlike on the Moon at night, the air-restorers could also take direct solar energy through their windows. They needed current only for their pumps. But the green chlorophane, key to the freshening and re-oxygenation of air, was getting slightly pale. The moisture-reclaimers were--by luck--not as bad as some of the other vital parts.
Ramos touched his needled side. His wry grin showed some of his reckless humor. "It's not utterly awful, yet," he said. "How do you feel?"
Nelsen's hip hurt. And he found that he had an awful hangover from the knockout drug, and the slapping around he had received. "Bad enough," he answered. "Maybe if we ate something..."
They took small, sealed packets of dehydrated food in through their chest airlocks, unsleeved their arms, emptied the packets into plastic squeeze bottles from the utensil racks before them, injected water from the pipettes which led to their shoulder tanks, closed the bottles and let the powdered gruel swell as it reabsorbed moisture. The gruel turned out hot all by itself. For it was a new kind which contained an exothermic ingredient. They ate, in the absence of gravity, by squeezing the bottles.
"Guess we'll have to become asteroid-hoppers--miners--like the slob said," Nelsen growled. "Well--I did want to try everything..."
This was to become the pattern of their lives. But not right away. They still had an incomplete conception of the vast distances. They hurtled on, certainly decelerating considerably, for days, yet, before they were in the Belt. Even that looked like enormous emptiness.
And the brightened speck of Pallas was too far to one side. Tovie Ceres was too near on the other side--left, it would be, if they considered the familiar northern hemisphere stars of Earth as showing "up" position. The old instruments had put them off-course. Still, they had to bear even farther left to try to match the direction and the average orbital speed--about twelve miles per second--of the Belt. Otherwise, small pieces of the old planet, hurtling in another direction--and/or at a different velocity--than themselves, could smash them.
Maybe they thought that they would be located and picked up--the gang that had robbed and dumped them had found them easily enough. But there, again, was a paradox of enormity. Bands might wait for suckers somewhere beyond Mars. Elsewhere, there could be nobody for millions of miles.
They saw their first asteroid--a pitted, mesoderm fragment of nickel-iron from middle-deep in the blasted planet. It was just drifting slightly before them. So they had achieved the correct orbital speed. They ion-glided to the chunk, and began to search clumsily for worthwhile metal. It was fantastic that somebody had been there before them, chiselling and sawing out a greyish material, of which there was a little left that made the needles of their radiation counters swing wildly.
They got a few scraps of the stuff to put into the nets which they were towing.
"For luck," Ramos laughed. "Without it we'll never pay J. John."
"Shut up. Big deal," Nelsen snapped.
"Okay. Shut up it is!" Ramos answered him.
So they stayed silent until they couldn't stand that, either. Everything was getting on their nerves.
Their next asteroids were mere chips a foot long--core fragments of the planet, heavy metals that had sunk deep. No crust material of any normally formed world could ever show such wealth. It gleamed with a pale yellow shine, and made Ramos' sunken eyes light up with an ancient fever, until he remembered, and until Nelsen said:
"Not for the gold, anymore, pal. Common, out here. So it's almost worthless, everywhere. Not much use as an industrial metal. But the osmium and uranium alloyed with it are something else. One hunk for each of our nets. Too bad there isn't more."
The uranium was driving their radiation-counters wild.
"Could we drag it, if there was more?" Ramos growled. "With just sun-power on these lousy shoulder-ionics?"
Everything was going sour, even Ramos. After a long deceleration they were afraid to draw any more power for propulsion from their weakened batteries. They needed the remaining current for the moisture-reclaimers and the pumps of the air-restorers--a relatively much lighter but vital drain. The sunlight was weak way out here. Worse, the solar thermocouples to power the ionics were almost shot. They tried to fix them up, succeeding a little, but using far more time than they had expected. Meanwhile, the changed positions of the various large asteroids, moving in their own individual orbits, lost them any definite idea of where the Kuzaks' supply post was, and the dizzying distance to Pallas, with only half-functioning ionics to get them there, fuddled them in their inexperience.
Soon their big hope was that some reasonable asteroid-hoppers would come within the few thousand mile range of their weakened transmitters. Then they could call, and be picked up.
Mostly to keep themselves occupied, they hunted paymetal, taking only the very best that they could find, to keep the towage mass down. Right from the start they cut their food ration--a good thing, because one month went, and then two, as near as they could figure. Cripes, how much longer could they last?
Often they actually encouraged their minds to create illusions. Frank would hold his body stiff, and look at the stars. After a while he would get the soothing impression that he was swimming on his back in a lake, and was looking up at the night sky.
Mostly, they were out of the regular radio channels. But sometimes, because of the movement of distant bubb clusters that must be kept in touch, they heard music and news briefly, again. They heard ominous reports from the ever more populous Earth. Now it was about areas of ocean to become boundaried and to be "farmed" for food. Territorial disputes were now extending far beyond the land. Once more, the weapons were being uncovered. Of course there were repercussions out here. Ceres Station was beaming pronouncements, too--rattling the saber.
Nelsen and Ramos listened avidly because it was life, because it was contact with lost things, because it was not dead silence.
Their own tribulations deepened.
"Cripes but my feet stink!" Ramos once laughed. "They must be rotten. They're sore, and they itch something awful, and I can't scratch them, or change my socks, even. The fungus, I guess. Just old athlete's foot."
"The stuff is crawling up my legs," Nelsen growled.
They knew that the Kuzaks, maybe Two-and-Two, Reynolds, Gimp, Storey, must be trying to call them. They kept listening in their helmet-phones. But this time Frank Nelsen knew that he'd gotten himself a real haystack of enormity in which to double for a lost needle. The slender beams could comb it futilely and endlessly, in the hope of a fortunate accident. Only once they heard, "Nelsen! Ra..." The beam swept on. It could have been Joe Kuzak's voice. But inevitably, somewhere, there had to be a giving up point for the searchers.
"This is where I came in," Nelsen said bitterly. "Damn these beam systems that are so delicate and important!"
They did pick up the voices of scattered asteroid-hoppers, talking cautiously back and forth to each other, far away. "... Got me pinpointed, Ed? Coming in almost empty, this trip. Not like the last... Stake me to a run into Pallastown...?" Most of such voices sounded regular, friendly.
Once they heard wild laughter, and what could have been a woman's scream. But it could have been other things, too.
On another occasion, they almost believed that they had their rescue made. Even their worn-out direction and distance finders could place the ten or so voices as originating not much over a hundred miles away. But they checked their trembling enthusiasm just in time. That was sheerest luck. The curses, and the savage, frightened snarls were all wrong. "If we don't catch us somebody, soon..."
Out here, the needs could get truly primitive. Oxygen, water, food, repair parts for vital equipment. Cannibalism and blood-drinking could also be part of blunt necessity.
Nelsen and Ramos were fortunate. Twenty miles off was a haze against the stars--a cluster of small mesoderm fragments. Drawing power for their shoulder-ionics from their almost spent nuclear batteries, they glided toward the cluster, and got into its midst, doubling themselves up to look as much like the other chunks as possible. They were like hiding rats for hours, until long after the distant specks moved past.
While he waited, Frank Nelsen's mind fumbled back to the lost phantom of Jarviston, Minnesota, again. To a man named Jig Hollins who had got married, stayed home. Yellow? Hell...! Nelsen imagined the comforts he might have had in the Space Force. He coaxed up a dream girl--blonde, dark, red-headed--with an awful wistfulness. He thought of Nance Codiss, the neighbor kid. He fumbled at the edge of a vast, foggy vision, where the wanderlust and spacelust of a man, and needs of the expanding race, seemed to blend with his home-love and love-love, and to become, impossibly, a balanced unit...
Later--much later--he heard young, green asteroid-hoppers yakking happily about girls and about how magnificent it was, out here.
"Haw-haw," he heard Ramos mock.
"Yeah," Nelsen said thickly. "Lucky for them that they aren't near us--being careless with their beams, that way..."
Frank Nelsen sneered, despising these innocent novices, sure that he could have beaten and robbed them without compunction. That far he had come toward understanding the outlaws, the twisted men of the Belt.
Ramos and he seemed to go on for an indefinite period longer. In a sense, they toughened. But toward the last they seemed to blunder slowly in the mind-shadows of their weakening body forces. They had a little food left, and water from the moisture-reclaimers. At zero-gravity, where physical exertion is slight, men can get along on small quantities of food. The sweetish, starchy liquid that they could suck through a tube from the air-restorers--it was a by-product of the photosynthetic process--might even have sustained them for a considerable interval.
But the steady weakening of their nuclear batteries was another matter. The pumps of their air-restorers and moisture-reclaimers were dependent on current. Gradually the atmosphere they breathed was getting worse. But from reports they had read and TV programs they had seen long ago, they found themselves another faint hope, and worked on it. With only solar power--derived through worn-out thermocouple units--to feed their uncertain ionics, they could change course only very slowly, now.
Yet maybe they had used up their bad luck. At last they came to a surface-fragment a couple of hundred yards long. They climbed over its edge. The thin sunshine hit dried soil, and something like corn-stubble in rows. Ahead was a solid stone structure, half flattened. Beside it a fallen trunk showed its roots. Vegetation was charred black by the absolute dryness of space. There was a fragment of a road, a wall, a hillside.
Here, there must have been blue sky, thin, frosty wind. The small, Mars-sized planet had been far from the sun. Yet perhaps the greenhouse effect of a high percentage of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and the radioactive heat of its interior had helped warm it. At least it had been warm enough to evolve life of the highest order, eons ago.
Poof had gone the blue sky and this whole world, all in a moment, the scattered pieces forming the asteroids. Accident? More likely it was a huge, interplanetary missile from competing Mars. The Martians had died, too--as surely, though less spectacularly. Radioactive poison, perhaps... Here, there had been an instant of unimaginable concussion, and of swift-passing flame. The drying out was soon ended. Then, what was left had been preserved in a vacuum through sixty millions of years.
Frank Nelsen had glimpsed ancient Mars, preserved on the Moon. Now he glimpsed its opponent culture, about which more was generally known.
"It's real," Ramos grunted. "Hoppers find surface-fragments like this, quite often."
Nelsen hardly cared about the archeological aspects just then. Excitement and hope that became certainty, enlivened his dulled brain.
"An energy source," he grated joyfully. "The Big Answer to Everything, out here! And it's always self-contained in their buildings..."
They pushed the collapsed and blackened thing with the slender bones, aside. They crept into the flat, horizontal spaces of the dwelling--much more like chinks than the rooms that humans would inhabit. They shoved away soft, multi-colored fabrics spun from glass-wool, a metal case with graduated dials and a lens, baubles of gold and glinting mineral.
In a recess in the masonry, ribboned with glazed copper strips that led to clear globes and curious household appliances, they found what they wanted. Six little oblong boxes bunched together. Their outsides were blue ceramic.
Frank Nelsen and Miguel Ramos began to work gingerly, though the gloves of their old Archer Threes were insulated. Here, sixty million years of stopped time had made no difference to these nuclear batteries, that, because of the universal character of physical laws, almost had to be similar in principle to their own. They had almost known that it would make no difference. There had been no drain of power through the automatic safety switches.
"DC current, huh?" Ramos said, breathing hard of the rotten air in his helmet.
"Yeah--gotta be," Frank answered quickly. "Same as from a thermocouple. Voltage about two hundred. Lots of current, though. Hope these old ionics'll take it."
"We can tap off lower, if we have to... Here--I'll fix you, first... Grab this end..."
They had a sweating two hours of rewiring to get done.
With power available, they might even have found a way to distill and collect the water, usually held in the form of frost, deep-buried in the soil of any large surface-fragment. They might have broken down some of the water electrolytically, to provide themselves with more oxygen to breathe. But perhaps now such efforts were not necessary.
When they switched in the new current, the pumps of their equipment worked better at once. The internal lights of their air-restorers could be used again, augmenting the action of the pale sunshine on the photosynthetic processes of the chlorophane. The air they breathed improved immediately. They tested the power on the shaky ionics, and got a good thrust reaction.
"We can make it--I think," Frank Nelsen said, speaking low and quick, and with the boldness of an enlivened body and brain. "We'll shoot up, out of the Belt entirely, then move parallel to it, backwards--contrary to its orbital flow, that is. But being outside of it, we won't chance getting splattered by any fragments. Probably avoid some slobs, too. We'll decelerate, and cut back in, near Pallas. There'll be a way to find the Kuzak twins."
Ramos chuckled recklessly. "Let's not forget to pack these historical objects in our nets. Especially that camera, or whatever it is. Money in the bank at last, boy..."
But after they set out, it wasn't long before they knew that two people were following them. There was no place to hide. And a mocking voice came into their phones.
"Hey, Nelsen... Oh, Mex... Wait up... I've been looking for you for over three months..."
They tried first to ignore the hail. They tried to speed up. But their pursuers still had better propulsion. Nelsen gritted his teeth. He felt the certainty of disaster closing in.
"There's just two of them--so far," Ramos hissed. "Maybe here's our chance, Frank, to really smear that rat!" Ramos' eyes had a battlelight. "All right, Tiflin--approach. These guns are lined up and loaded."
"Aw--is that friendship, Mex?" the renegade seemed to wheedle. But insolently, he and his larger companion came on.
"Toss us your pistols," Ramos commanded, as they drifted close, checking speed.
Tiflin flashed a smirk that showed that his front teeth were missing. "Honest, Mex--do you expect us to do that? Be cavalier--I haven't even got a pistol, right now. Neither has Igor, here. Come look-see... Hi, Frankie!"
"Just stay there," Nelsen gruffed.
Tiflin cocked his head inside the helmet of a brand-new Archer Six, in a burlesqued pose for inspection. He looked bad. His face had turned hard and lean. There were scars on it. The nervous, explosive-tempered kid, who couldn't have survived out here, had been burned out of him. For a second, Nelsen almost thought that the change could be for the good. But it was naive to hope that that could happen. Glen Tiflin had become passive, yielding, mocking, with an air of secret knowledge withheld. What did an attitude like that suggest? Treachery, or, perhaps worse, a kind of poised--and poisonous--mental judo?
Nelsen looked at the other man, who wore a Tovie armor. Tall, starvation-lean. Horse-faced, with a lugubrious, bumpkinish smile that almost had a whimsical appeal.
"Honest--I just picked up Igor--which ain't his real name--in the course of my travels," Tiflin offered lightly. "He used to be a comic back in Eurasia. He got bored with life on Ceres, and sort of tumbled away."
With his body stiff as a stick, Igor toppled forward, his mouth gaping in dismay. He turned completely over, his great boots kicking awkwardly. His angular elbows flapped like crow-wings. He righted himself, looked astonished, then beatifically self-approving. He burped delicately, patted his chest plate, then sniffed in sad protest at the leveled pistols.
Now Nelsen and Ramos cast off the loaded nets they had been towing, and closed in on this strange pair. Nelsen did the searching, while Ramos pointed the guns.
"Haven't even got my shiv anymore, Frankie," Tiflin remarked, casually. "Threw it at a guy named Fessler, once. Missed by an inch. Guess it's still going--round and round the sun, for millions of years. Longest knife throw there ever was."
"Fessler!" Frank snapped. "Now we're getting places, you S.O.B.! The funny character that robbed and dumped Ramos and me, I'll bet. Probably with your help! You know him, huh?"
"Knew--for a while--past tense," Tiflin chuckled wickedly. "Nope--it wasn't me that stripped off his armor in space. He wasn't even around, anymore, when you beauties got caught. They come and they go."
"But you were around, Tiflin!"
"Maybe not. Maybe I was twenty million miles off."
"Like hell!" Nelsen gritted his teeth, grabbed Tiflin's shoulder, and swung his gloved fist as hard as he could against the thin layer of rubber and wire over Tiflin's stomach. He struck three times.
"Damn you!" Nelsen snarled. "I promised myself I'd get you good, Tiflin! Now tell us what else you and your friends are cooking for us, or by the Big Silence, you'll be a drifting, explosively decompressed mummy!"
Frank Nelsen didn't know till now, after exerting himself, how weak privations had made him. He felt dizzy.
Tiflin's eyes had glazed slightly, as he and Frank did a slow roll, together. He gasped. But that insulting smirk came back.
"Haven't had your Wheaties lately, have you, Frank? Go ahead--hit, knock yourself out. You, too, Mex. I've been slugged before, by big men, in shape...! Could be I'm not cooking anything. Except I notice that you two have found yourselves some very interesting local objects of ancient history, worth a little money. Also, some good, raw metal... Well, I suppose you want to get the load and yourselves to the famous twins, Art and Joe. That's easy--with luck. Though the region is a trifle disturbed, right now. But I can tell you where they are. You won't have to fiddle around, hunting."
"Here, hold these guns, Frank. Lemme have a couple of pokes at the slob," Ramos snapped.
"Aw-right, aw-right--who's asking you guys to believe me?" Tiflin cut in. "I'll beam the twins for you--since I'd guess your transmitter won't reach. You can listen in, and talk back through my set. Okay?"
"Let's see what happens--just for kicks," Ramos said softly. "If you're calling some friends to come and get us, or anything, Tif--well, you've had it!"
They watched Tiflin spin and focus the antenna. "Kuzak... Kuzak... Kuzak... Kuzak..." he said into his phone. "Missing boys alive and coming to you. Mex and old Guess Which... Kicking and independent, but very hungry, I think... Put on the coffee pot, you storekeepers... Kuzak... Kuzak... Kuzak... Talk up, Frank and Miguel. Your voices will relay through my phone..."
"Hi, Art and Joe--it's us," Ramos almost apologized.
"Yeah--we don't quite know yet what Tiflin is pulling. But here we are--if it's you we're talking to..."
There was the usual long wait as impulses bridged the light-minutes.
Then Art Kuzak's voice snarled guardedly. "I hear you, Ram and Nel. Come in, if you can...! Tif, you garbage! Someday...! This is all. This is all..." The message broke off.
Tiflin smirked. "Third quadrant of the Belt," he said, giving a position in space almost like latitude and longitude on Earth. "About twenty minutes of the thirty-first degree. Three degrees above median orbital plane. Approximately two hundred hours from here. Can Igor and I leave you, now, or do you want us to escort you in?"
"We'll escort you," Ramos said.
So it was, until, near the end of a long ride, a cluster of bubbs was in view in the near distance, and Ramos and Nelsen could contact Art Kuzak themselves.
"We've got Tiflin and his Tovie pal with us, Art," Frank Nelsen said. "They showed us the way, more or less because we made them. But Tif did give us the right position at the start. A favor, maybe. I don't know. And now he's saying, 'Be cavalier--it might be awkward for me to meet Art and Joe just at present.' Do you want to fix this character's wagon bad enough? Your customers could get mean--if he ever did them dirt."
"Just one thing I've got against Tiflin!" Art snarled back. "Every time I hear his voice, it means trouble. But I've never seen the crumb face-to-face since that Moonhop. Okay, let's not spoil my stomach. Turn him loose. It can't make much difference. Or maybe I'm sentimental about the old Bunch. He was our cracked, space-wild punk."
"Thanks, Art," Tiflin laughed.
In a minute he, and his comic, scarecrow pal who originated from the dark side of trouble, on Earth and out here, too, were fading against the stars.
Nelsen and Ramos, the long-lost, glided in, past some grim hoppers. A bubb and sweet air were around them once more. They shed their stinking Archer Threes. Hot showers--miraculous luxury--played over them. They rubbed disinfectant salves into their fungus-ridden hides.
Then there was a clean, white table, with plates, knives, forks. They had to treat their shrunken stomachs gently--just a little of everything--beer, steak, vegetables, fruit... Somewhere during the past, unmarked days Frank Nelsen had gotten to be twenty years old. Only twenty? Well--maybe this was his celebration.
Ramos and he told their story very briefly. Little time was wasted on congratulations for survival or talk of losses long past. The Kuzaks looked leaner and tougher, now, and there were plenty of present difficulties to worry them. Joe Kuzak hurried out to argue with the miners at the raw metal receiving bins and at the store bubbs. Art stayed to explain the present situation.
"Three big loads of supplies were shipped through to us from the Moon," he growled. "We did fine, trading for metal. We sent J. John Reynolds his percentage--a fair fraction of his entire loan. We sent old Paul five thousand dollars. But the fourth and fifth loads of trade stuff got pirated en route. When there's trouble on Earth, it comes out here, too. Ceres, colonized by our socialist Tovie friends of northern Eurasia, helps stir up the bums, who think up plenty of hell on their own. It's a force-out attempt aimed at us or at anybody who thinks our way. After two lost shipments, and a lot of new installations here at the Post, we're about broke, again. Worse, we've got the asteroid-hoppers expecting us to come through with pay for the new metal in their nets, and with stuff they need. Back home, some people used to raise hell about a trifle like a delayed letter. How about a spaceman's reaction, when what is delayed may be something to keep him alive? They could get really annoyed, and kick this place apart."
Art Kuzak blew air up past his pug nose, and continued. "Finance--here we go again, Frank!" he chuckled. "Gimp Hines is helping us. After Mars, he came here without trouble. He's in Pallastown, now, trying to raise some fast cash, and to rush supplies through from there, under Space Force guard. You know he's got a head for commerce as well as science. But our post, here, perhaps isn't considered secure enough to back a loan, anymore."
Art grinned wryly at Nelsen and Ramos. His hint was plain. He had seen the museum pieces that they had brought in.
"Should we, Frank?" Ramos chuckled after a moment.
"Possibly... We've got some collateral, Art. Lots more valuable per unit mass than any raw metal, I should think."
"So you might want to work for us?" Art inquired blandly.
"Not 'for'," Nelsen chuckled. "We might say 'with'."
"Okay, Cuties," Art laughed.
Joe Kuzak had just come back into the dwelling and office bubb.
"Don't let my twin sell you any rotten apples, fellas," he warned lightly. "He might be expecting you to transport your collateral to Pallastown. Naturally anybody trying to strangle this Post will be blocking the route. You might get robbed again. Also murdered."
Ramos' gaunt face still had its daring grin. "Frank and I know that," he said. "I'm past bragging. But we've had experience. Now, we might be smart enough to get through. A few more days out there won't hurt. How about it, Frank?"
"Ten hours sleep and breakfast," Frank said. "Then a little camouflage material, new weapons, a pair of Archers in condition--got any left?"
"Five in stock," Joe answered.
"Settled, then?" Art asked.
"Here, it is," Ramos answered, and Nelsen nodded.
It would have been rough going for them to try to sleep in beds. They had lost the habit. They slept inside their new Archer Fives.
Afterwards they painted their armor a dark grey, like chunks of mesoderm stone. They did likewise to the two bundles in which they wrapped their relics.
They were as careful as possible to get away from the post without being observed, visually or by radar. But of course you could never be sure.
Huddled up to resemble stray fragments, they curved out of the Belt--toward the Pole Star, north of its orbital plane. Moving in a parallel course, they proceeded toward Pallastown. The only thing that would seem odd was that they were moving contrary to the general orbital rotation of most of the permanent bodies of the solar system. Of course they and their bundles might have been stray meteors from deep in space.
Four watchful, armored figures seemed to notice the peculiarity of their direction, and to become suspicious. These figures seemed too wary for honesty as they approached. They got within twenty-five miles.
Even without the memory that Tiflin might make guesses about what they meant to do, Nelsen and Ramos would have taken no chances. They had to be brutal. Homing darts pierced armor. The four went to sleep.
VI
The asteroid, Pallas, was a chunk of rich core material, two hundred-some miles in its greatest dimension. It had a mottled, pinkish shine, partly from untarnished lead, osmium, considerable uranium, some iron, nickel, silver, copper. The metals were alloyed, here; almost pure, there. There was even a little rock. But thirty-five percent of Pallas' roughly spherical mass was said to be gold.
Gold is not rare at the cores of the worlds, to which most of the heavy elements must inevitably sink, during the molten stage of planetary developments. On Earth it must be the same, though who could dig three thousand miles into a zone of such heat and pressure? But the asteroid world had exploded. Pallas was an exposed and cooled piece of its heart.
Pallas had a day of twenty-four hours because men, working with great ion jets angling toward the stars, had adjusted its natural rate of rotation for their own convenience to match the terrestrial. A greater change was Pallastown.
Frank Nelsen and Miguel Ramos made the considerable journey to it without further incident. Because he was tense with hurry, Nelsen's impressions were superficial: Something like Serene, but bigger and more fantastic. A man weighed only a few ounces, here. Spidery guidance towers could loom impossibly high. There were great storage bins for raw metal brought in from all over the Belt. There were rows of water tanks. As on the Moon, the water came mostly from gypsum rock or occasionally from soil frost, both found on nearby crustal asteroids. Beyond the refineries bulged the domes of the city itself, housing factories, gardens, recreation centers, and sections that got considerably lost and divergent trying to imitate the apartment house areas of Earth.
Frank Nelsen's wonder was hurried and dulled.
Gimp Hines and David Lester were waiting inside the stellene reception dome when Nelsen and Ramos landed lightly at the port on their own feet, with no more braking assistance than their own shoulder-ionics.
Greetings were curiously breathless yet casual, but without any backslapping.
"We'd about given you two up," Gimp said. "But an hour ago Joe Kuzak beamed me, and said you'd be along with some museum stuff... Les lives here, now, working with the new Archeological Institute."
"Hi-hi--good to see you guys," Ramos said.
"Likewise. Hello, Les," Frank put in.
While Frank was gripping David Lester's limp, diffident hand, which seemed almost to apologize for his having come so far from home, Gimp teased a little. "So you latched onto Art Kuzak, too. Or was it the other way around?"
Frank's smile was lopsided. "I didn't analyze motives. Art's a pretty good guy. I suppose we just wanted to help Joe and him out. Or maybe it was instinct. Anyhow, what's wrong with latching onto--or being latched onto by--somebody whom you feel will get himself and you ahead, and make you both a buck?"
"Check. Not a darn thing," Gimp laughed. "Now let's go to my hotel and have a look at what you brought in. Did you really examine it, yet?"
"Some--on the way. Not very much," Ramos said. "There's a camera."
In the privacy of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them rather wonderful, were exposed.
David Lester and Gimp Hines were both quietly avid. Lester knew the most about these things, but Gimp's hands, on the strange camera, were more skillful. The cautious scrutiny of dials and controls marked with cryptic numerals and symbols, and the probing of detail parts and their functions, took about an hour.
"What do you think, Les?" Gimp asked.
"I'm not an expert, yet," Lester answered. "But as far as I know, this is the first undamaged camera that has yet been found. That makes it unique. Of course by now, hoppers are bringing in quite a lot of artifacts from surface-asteroids. But there's not much in the way of new principle for our camera manufacturers to buy. Lens systems, shutters, shock mountings, self-developing, integral viewing, projecting and sonic features, all turn out to be similar to ours. It's usually that way with other devices, too. It's as if all their history, and ours, were parallel."
"Well, dammit--let's see what the thing can show!" Ramos gruffed.
In the darkened room, the device threw a rectangle of light on the wall. Then there was shape, motion, and color, kept crystallized from sixty million years before. A cloud, pinked by sunrise, floating high in a thin, expanded atmosphere. Did clouds everywhere in the universe always look much the same? Wolfish, glinting darts, vanishing away. Then a mountainside covered with spiny growths that, from a distance, seemed half cactus and half pine. A road, a field, a dull-hued cylinder pointing upward. Shapes of soft, bluish grey, topped like rounded roofs, unfolding out of a chink, and swaying off in a kind of run--with little clinkings of equipment, for there were sounds, too. Two eyelike organs projecting upward, the pupils clear and watchful. A tendril with a ridged, dark hide, waving what might have been a large, blue flower, which was attached to the end of a metal tube by means of a bit of fibre tied in a granny knot. A sunburst of white fire in the distance...
It could have gone on, perhaps for many hours. Reality, with every detail sharp. Parallels with Earthly life. Maybe even sentiment was there, if you only knew how it was shown. But in the differences you got lost, as if in a vivid dream that you couldn't fully understand. Though what was pictured here was certainly from the last beautiful days of a competing planet.
Frank Nelsen's mouth often hung open with fascination. But his own realities kept intruding. They prodded him.
"I hate to break this off," he said. "But a lot of asteroid-hoppers are out at the post, waiting for Ramos and me to bring stuff back. It's a long ride through a troubled region. There's plenty to get arranged beforehand... So first, what do we do to realize some quick funds out of these relics?"
Hines terminated the pictured sequence. "Frank--Ramos--I'd keep this camera," he said urgently. "It's a little bit special, at least. History is here, to be investigated. Offers--bids--could come up. Okay--I'm talking about dough, again. Still, who wants to detach himself, right away, from something pretty marvelous, by selling it? I'd dump most of the other things. Getting a loan--the hock-shop approach--is no good... Am I telling it right, Les?"
Lester nodded. "More of the same will be brought in. Prices will drop. Archeological Survey has a buying service for museums back home. I've been working for them for a month. I don't claim to love them entirely, but they'll give you the safest break. You should get enough, for your purposes, without the camera. With a load like this, you can see Doc Linford, the boss, any time."
"Right now, then," Frank said.
"Hey, you impolite slobs!" Ramos laughed. "When do you consult me, co-discoverer and -owner? Awright, skip it--you're the Wizards of Oz. I'll just grab out a few items for my Ma and the kids, and maybe a girl or two I'll meet someplace. You guys might as well do the same."
He took some squares of fabric, silken-soft, though spun from fibre of colored glass. And some wheeled devices, which might have been toys. Lester and Hines picked up only token pieces of the fabric. Frank took a three inch golden ring that glinted with mineral. Except that it looked decorative, he had no idea of its original purpose.
The broken, fine-boned mummy and the other items were appraised and bought in a large room across the city. It was already cluttered with queer fossils and objects. The numbers printed on the two equal checks, and on the cash in their hands, still looked slightly mythical to Nelsen and Ramos, to whom a thousand dollars had seemed a fortune.
Later, at the U.S.S.F. headquarters, he was prepared to argue grimly. Words were in his mind: A vital matter of supply... Without an escort, we'll still have to try to get through, alone. You have been informed, therefore, if anything happens, you will be responsible...
He didn't have to say anything like this. They knew. Maybe an old bitterness had made him misjudge the U.S.S.F. A young colonel smiled tiredly.
"This has been happening," he said. "We have limited facilities for this purpose. The U.N.S.F. even less. However, an escort is due in, now. We can move out again, with you, in seven hours."
"Thank you, sir," Nelsen responded.
Gimp Hines had the better part of the supplies to be purchased already lined up at the warehouses.
Nelsen counted the money he had left. "Figuring losses and gains, I have no idea how much I owe J. John--if anything," he laughed. "So I'll make it a grand--build up my ego... But we owe old Paul more than dough."
"All right, I'm another idiot--I'll mail J. John a similar draft," Ramos gruffed. "Paul's a problem. He can use money, but he never lived for it. And you can't buy a friend. We'll have to rig something."
"Yeah--we will," Gimp said. "Couple of times I forgot J. John. But I lost my shirt on those loads that were lifted off you boneheads. The Kuzaks reimbursed me for half. Do you two want to cover the other half? Aw--forget it! Who's got time to figure all this? That old coot doped himself out a nice catch-dollar scheme, making us promise. Or was it a leg pull on a highly elusive proposition, where big sums and the vastness of space seem to match? Hell--I'm getting mixed up again..."
Dave Lester had wandered off embarrassedly, there in the warehouse. But now he returned, clearing his throat for attention.
"Fellas," he said. "Helen and I want you to come out to our apartment, now, for dinner."
"Shucks, that's swell, Les," Ramos responded, suddenly curious.
"Here, also," Nelsen enthused.
"Sure," Gimp said. But his smile thinned.
In this gravity, going to Lester's place was a floating glide rather than a walk. Along a covered causeway, into a huge dome, up a wall with handholds, onto a wispy balcony. Nelsen and Ramos brought liquor and roses.
Much of what followed was painful and familiar--in a fantastic setting. Two young people, recently married, struggling with problems that they hadn't been able to plan for very well.
While his wife was out of earshot, Lester put his hand on the back of a chair constructed entirely of fine golden wire--later it developed that he had made it, do-it-yourself fashion, to be economical--and seemed more intent on holding it down than to rest his hand.
"Gimp... Frank..." he began nervously. "You helped Helen and me to get married and get set up out here. The Archeological Institute paid our way to Pallastown. But there were other expenses... Her--my father-in-law, died by his own hand while still awaiting trial... Everything he owned is still tied up... Now, well--you know human biology... I hope you can wait a little longer for us to begin paying back your loan..."
Nelsen had a vagrant thought about how money now had to stand on its own commercial value, rather than rely on the ancient witchcraft of a gold standard. Then he almost suspected that Lester was being devious and clever. But he knew the guy too well.
"Cripes, Les!" he burst out almost angrily. "How about your services, just now, as an archeological consultant? If you won't consider that we might have meant to make you a gift. Pretty soon you'll have us completely confused!"
"What a topic for an evening of fun," Gimp complained. "Hey, Helen--can I mix the drinks?"
"Yes--of course, Mr. Hines. I'll get you the things," she said with apology in her eyes and voice, as if fussy celebrities had descended on her small, unsettled, and poor household.
"On the Moon you were a swell cook, Helen," Frank reminded her.
She flashed a small smile. "It was different, there. Things weighed something, and stayed in place. Here--just breathe hard and you have a kitchen accident. Besides, I had a garden. We'd like one here, but there's no room... And in the market..."
"Shucks--it's new here to us, too," Ramos soothed. "Riding an Archer in space, at zero-G, is different from this..."
Things were a bit less strained, after that, through the skimpy meal, with its special devices, unique to the asteroids and their tiny gravity. Clamps to fasten plates to tables and victuals to plates. Drinking vessels that were half-squeeze bottles. Such equipment was now available in what might once have been called a dime store--but with another price-level.
The visitors made a game of being awkward and inept, together. It was balm for Helen's sensitivity.
"Somebody's got to keep the camera for us, Mex," Frank Nelsen said presently.
"Yeah--I know. Les'll do it for us," Ramos answered. "He's the best, there. He can run through all the pictures--make copies with an ordinary camera... See if he can market them. Twenty percent ought to be about right for his cut."
Lester tried to interrupt, but Frank got ahead of him. "We owe Gimp for those loads we lost. Got to cut him into this, as a consultant. You'll be around Pallastown for a while, helping out with this end of the Twin's enterprises, won't you, Gimp?"
Hines grinned. "Probably. Glad you slobs got memories. Glad to be of assistance, anytime. Les is no louse--he'll help old friends. I'll bring him the camera, out of the safe at my hotel, as soon as we leave here..."
Lester smiled doubtfully, and then happily. That was how they worked the fabulous generosity of spacemen in the chips on him.
Nelsen, Ramos and Hines escaped soon after that.
"Three hours left. I guess you guys want to get lost--separately," Gimp chuckled. "I'll say so long at the launching catapults, later. I've got some tough guards, fresh from the Moon, who will go along with you. Art and Joe need them..."
Frank Nelsen wandered alone in the recreation area. He heard music--Fire Streak, Queen of Serene... He searched faces, looking for an ugly one with shovel teeth. He thought, with an achy wistfulness, of a small hero-worshipping girl named Jennie Harper, at Serene.
He found no one he had ever seen before. In a joint he watched a girl with almost no clothes, do an incredible number of spinning somersaults in mid-air. He thought he ought to find himself a friend--then decided perversely, to hell with it.
He thought of the trouble on Earth, of Ceres, of Tiflin and Igor, of Fanshaw, the latest leader of the Asteroid Belt toughs--the Jolly Lads--that you heard about. He thought about how terribly vulnerable to attack Pallastown seemed, even with its encirclement of outriding guard stations. He thought of Paul Hendricks, Two-and-Two Baines, Charlie Reynolds, Otto Kramer, Mitch Storey, and Miss Rosalie Parks who was his old Latin teacher.
He thought of trying to beam some of them. But hell, they all seemed so long-lost, and he wasn't in the mood, now. He even thought about how it was, trying to give yourself a dry shave with a worn-out razor, inside an Archer. He thought that sometime, surely, perhaps soon, the Big Vacuum would finish him.
He wound up with a simple sentimental impulse, full of nostalgia and tenderness for things that seemed to stay steady and put. The way he felt was half-hearted apology for human moods in which murder would have been easy. He even had a strange envy for David Lester.
Into the synthetic cellulose lining of a small carton bought at a souvenir shop, he placed the sixty million-year old golden band with its odd arabesques and its glinting chips of mineral. Regardless of its mysterious intentional function, it could be a bracelet. To him, just then, it was only a trinket that he had picked up.
Before he wrapped and addressed the package, he put a note inside:
"Hi, Nance Codiss! Thinking about you and all the neighbors. This might reach you by Christmas. Remember me? Frank Nelsen."
Postage was two hundred dollars, which seemed a trifle. And he didn't quite realize how like a king's ransom a gift like this would seem in Jarviston, Minnesota.
On leaving the post office, he promptly forgot the whole matter, as hard, practical concerns took hold of him, again.
At the loading quays, special catapults hurled the gigantic bales of supplies clear of Pallas. To the Kuzaks, this shipment would now have seemed small, but it was much larger than the loads Ramos and Nelsen had handled before. Gimp and Lester saw them off. Then they were in space, with extra ionics pushing the bales. The guard of six new men was posted. Nelsen wasn't sure that they'd be any good, or whether he could trust them all, but they looked eagerly alert. Riding a mile off was the Space Force patrol bubb.
All through the long journey--beam calls ahead were avoided for added safety--Nelsen kept wondering if he'd find the post in ruins, with what was left of Art and Joe drifting and drying. But nothing like that happened yet, and the shipment was brought through. Business with the asteroid-hoppers was started at once.
When there was a lull, Art Kuzak talked expansively in his office bubb:
"Good work, Frank. Same to you, Ramos--except that I know you're itching with your own ideas, and probably won't be around long. Which is your affair... Never mind what anybody says about Venus, or any other place. The Belt, with its history, its metals, and its possibilities, is the best part of the solar system. Keep your defenses up, your line of communication covered, and you can't help but make money. There are new posts to set up, help to recruit and bring out, stellene plants and other factories to construct. There'll be garden bubbs, repair shops--everything. Time, work, and a little luck will do it. You listening, Frank?"
Nelsen got a bit cagy with Art, again. "Okay, Art--you seem like a formal fella. Mex and I joined up and helped out pretty much as informal company members. But as long as we've put in our dough, let's make it official, in writing and signed. The KRNH Enterprises--Kuzak, Ramos, Nelsen and Hines. The 'H' could also stand for Hendricks--Paul Hendricks."
"I like it that way, you suspicious slob," Art Kuzak chuckled.
So another phase began for Nelsen. Offices bored him. Amassing money, per se, meant little to him, except as a success symbol that came out of the life he had known. He figured that a man ought to be a success, even a rough-and-tumble romantic like Ramos, or Joe Kuzak. Or himself, with both distance and home engrained confusingly into his nature.
One thing that Nelsen was, was conscientious. He could choose and stick to a purpose for even longer than it seemed right for him.
Mostly, now, during the long grind of expansion, he was afield. Disturbances on Earth quieted for a while, as had always happened, so far. The Belt responded with relative peace. Tovie Ceres, the Big Asteroid, which, like the others, should have been open to all nations, but wasn't, kept mostly to its own affairs. There were only the constant dangers, natural, human, and a combination. There was always a job--a convoy to meet, a load of supplies to rush to a distant point, Jolly Lads to scare off. Reckless Ramos might be with Nelsen, or Joe Kuzak who usually operated separately, or a few guards, or several asteroid-hoppers, most of whom were tough and steady and good friends to know. Often enough, Nelsen was alone.
At first, KRNH just handled the usual supplies. But when factory and hydroponic equipment began to arrive, Joe Kuzak and Frank Nelsen might be out establishing a new post. There'd be green help, bubbing out from the Moon, to break in. Nelsen would see new faces that still seemed familiar, because they were like those of the old Bunch, as it had been. Grim, scared young men, full of wonder. But the thin stream of the adventurous was thickening, as more opportunities opened. Occasionally there was a young couple. Oh, no, you thought. Then--well, maybe. That is, if somebody didn't crack up, or get lymph node swellings that wouldn't reduce, and if you didn't have to try to play nursemaid.
Now and then Nelsen was in Pallastown--for business, for relief, for a bit of hell-raising; to see Gimp and the David Lesters. Pretty soon there was an heir in the Lester household. Red, healthy, and male. Cripes--Out Here, too? Okay--josh the parents along. The most wonderful boy in the solar system! Otherwise, matters, there, were much better than before. The camera was in a museum in Washington. The pictures it had contained were on TV, back home. Just another anti-war film, maybe. But impressive, and different. The earnings didn't change Nelsen's life much, nor Gimp's, nor Ramos'. But it sure helped the Lesters.
David Lester had resigned from Archeological Survey. He was getting actually sharp. He was doing independent research, and was setting up his own business in Belt antiques.
Frank Nelsen had another reason for coming to Pallastown. Afield, you avoided beam communication, nowadays, whenever you could. Someone might trace your beam to its source, and jump you for whatever you had. But Gimp Hines could tell Nelsen about the absent Bunch members and the old friends, while they both sat in the little KRNH office in Town.
"... Paul Hendricks is still the same, Frank. New bunch around him... Too bad we can't call him, now--because the Earth is on the far side of the sun. Mitch Storey just vanished into the Martian thickets, during one of his jaunts. Almost a year ago, now... I didn't see him when I stopped over on Mars, but he was back at the Station once, after that. Take it easy, Frank. They've looked with helicopters, and even on the ground; you couldn't do any more. I'll keep in touch, to see if anything turns up..."
After a minute, Nelsen relaxed, slightly. "Two-and-Two? I guess he's okay--with Charlie Reynolds looking after him?"
"Peculiar about Charlie," Gimp answered, looking awed and puzzled. "Got the news from old J. John, his granddad, when he acknowledged the receipt of our latest draft, by letter. Hold your hat. Charlie got himself killed... I'll dig the letter out of the file."
Nelsen sat up very straight. "Never mind," he said. "Just tell me more. Anything can happen."
"Our most promising member," Gimp mused. "He didn't get much. The Venus Expedition had to move some heavy equipment to the top of a mountain, to make some electrostatic tests before a storm. Charlie had just climbed down from the helicopter. A common old lightning bolt hit him. Somebody played Fire Streak on the bagpipes--inside a sealed tent--while they buried him. Otherwise, he didn't even get a proper spaceman's funeral. Venus' escape velocity is almost as high as Earth's. Boosting a corpse up into orbit, just for atmospheric cremation, would have been too much of a waste for the Expedition's rigid economy."
Nelsen had never really been very close to Charlie Reynolds, though he had liked the flamboyant Good Guy. Now, it was all a long ways back, besides. Nelsen didn't feel exactly grief. Just an almost mystical bitterness, a shock and an uncertainty, as if he could depend on nothing.
"So what about Two-and-Two?" he growled, remembering how he used to avoid any responsibility for the big, good-hearted lug; but now he felt surer about himself, and things seemed different.
"I guess the Expedition medic had to straighten him out with devil-killers," Hines answered. "He bubbed all the way back to Earth, alone, to see J. John about Charlie. I beamed him, there, before the Earth hid behind the sun. He was still pretty shaken up. Funny, too--Charlie's opportunity-laden Venus has turned out to be a bust, for two centuries, at least, unless new methods, which aren't in sight, yet, turn up. Sure--at staggering expense, and with efforts on the order of fantasy, reaction motors could be set up around its equator, to make it spin as fast as the Earth. Specially developed green algae have already been seeded all over the planet. They're rugged, they spread fast. But it will take the algae about two hundred years to split the carbon dioxide and give the atmosphere a breathable amount of free oxygen, to say nothing of cracking the poisonous formaldehyde."
"Two-and-Two's back in Jarviston, then?" Nelsen demanded.
"No--not anymore--just gimme breath," Hines went on. "He and Charlie had figured another destination of opportunity--Mercury, the planet nearest the sun, everlasting frozen night on one side, eternal, zinc-melting sunshine on the other. But there's the fringe zone between the two--the Twilight Zone. If you can live under stellene, you've got a better place there than Mars might have been. Colonists are going there, to quit the Earth, to get away from it all. Two-and-Two was about to leave for Mercury, when I last spoke to him. By now he's probably almost there. And even under the most favorable conditions, Mercury is hard to beam--too much solar magnetic interference."
"That poor sap," Nelsen gruffed.
"It probably isn't that bad, anymore," Hines commented. "Sometime I might go to Mercury, myself--when I get good and sick of sitting on my tail, here--when I always was a man of action! Mercury does have possibilities--plenty of solar power, certainly; plenty of frozen atmosphere on the dark face. Interesting, Frank... Oh, hell, I forgot--there's a letter here for you. And a package. Just arrived... I'll scram, now. Got to go down to the quays. Hold the fort, here, will you?"
Gimp Hines grinned as he left.
Nelsen was glad to be alone. The lonesomeness of the Big Vacuum was getting grimed into him. When he saw the return name and address on the package, and the two hundred-ten dollar postage sticker, he thought, Cripes--that poor kid--what did I start? Then the awful wave of nostalgia for Jarviston, Minnesota, hit him, as he fumbled to open the microfilmed letter capsule, and put it in the viewer.
"Hello, Frank--it has to be that, doesn't it, and not Mr. Nelsen, since you've sent me this miraculous bracelet--which I don't dare wear very much, since I don't want to lose an arm to some international--or even interstellar--jewel thief! It makes me feel like the Queen of Something--certainly not Serene, since it implies calmness and repose, which I certainly don't feel--no offense to our Miss Sands, whom I admire enormously. In a very small way I am repaying to you in kind--an item which I made, myself, and which I know that some spacemen use inside their Archers. You see, we are all informed in details. Paul, Otto, Chippie Potter and his dog, and other characters whom you won't remember, send their best greetings. Oh, I've got Stardust fever, too, but I'll yield to my folks' wishes and wait, and learn a profession that will be of some use Out There. May you wear what I'm sending in good health, safety and fortune. Send no more staggering gifts, please--I couldn't stand it--but please do write. Tell me how it really is in the Belt. You simply don't realize how much--"
Nance Codiss' missive rattled along, and the scrawled words got to be like small, happy bells inside Nelsen's skull. His crooked grin came out; he unpacked the sweater--creylon wool, very warm, bright red, a bit crude in workmanship here and there--but imagine a girl bothering, these days! He donned the garment and decided it fit fine.
Then he tried to write a letter:
"Hi, Nance! I've just put it on--first time--beautiful! It'll stay right with me. Thanks. Talk about being staggered..."
There he bogged down, some, wondering how much she had changed, wondering just what he ought to say to her, and who these characters that he wouldn't remember, might be. Cripes, how old was she, now? Seventeen? He ended up taking her at her word. He described Pallastown rather heavy-handedly, and bought some microfilm postcards to go along with his missive, as soon as he went out to mail it.
But a few hours later, from deep in space, he looked back at the Town, shining in the distance, and in the blue mood of thinking about Charlie Reynolds, Mitch Storey, and Two-and-Two, he wondered how much longer it, or Nance, or anything else, could last. Then he glanced down at the bright sweater, and chuckled...
Unexpectedly, Ramos remained an active member of KRNH Enterprises for over a year. But the end had to come. "I told Art I'd let my dough ride, Frank," he said to Nelsen in the lounge of Post One. "I'll only draw enough earnings to build me a real, deep-space bubb, nuclear-propelled, and with certain extra gadgets. A few guys have tried to follow the unmanned, instrumented rockets, out to the system of Saturn. Nobody got back, yet. I think I know what they figured wrong. The instruments showed--well, skip it... I'm going into Town to prepare. It'll take quite a while, so I'll have some fun, too."
Ramos' eyes twinkled with a secret triumph--before the fact.
"You don't argue a fighting rooster out of fighting," Nelsen laughed. "Besides, it wouldn't be Destiny--or any fun--to succeed. So accept the complimentary comparison--if it fits--which maybe it doesn't, you egotistical bonehead. Good luck--buena suerte, amigo. I'll look you up in Town, if I get a chance..."
Nelsen was always busy to the gills. Progress was so smooth for another couple of years, that the hunch of Big Trouble building up, became a gnawing certainty in his nerves.
Of course there were always the Jolly Lads to watch out for--the extreme individualists, space-twisted and wild. Robbing and murdering could seem easier than digging. Take your loot into Pallastown--who knew you hadn't grubbed it, yourself? Sell it. Get the stink blown off you--forget some terrible things that had happened to you. Have yourself a time. Strike Out again. Repeat...
Nelsen knew that, through the months, he had killed defensively at least twice. Once, with a long-range homing bullet--weapons sanctioned by pious and cautious international agreement, were more lethal, now, to match the weapons of the predatory. Once by splitting a helmet with a rifle barrel. When he was out alone, exploring a new post site on a small asteroid, a starved Tovie runaway had jumped him. Maybe he should regret the end of that incident.
Trips to Pallastown were increasingly infrequent. But there was one time when he almost had come specially to see Ramos' new bubb, still under wraps, supposedly. Well--that erratic character had it out on a long test run. Damn him! As usual, time was crowding Nelsen. He had to get back on the job. He had just a couple of hours left.
He wrote a letter to Nance Codiss, answering one of hers--funny, he'd never yet tried to contact her vocally. Being busy, being cautious about using a beam--these were good reasons. Now there was hardly enough spare time to reach twice across the light-minutes. Maybe the real truth was that men got strangely shy in the silences of the Belt.
"Dear Nance: You seem to be making fine headway in your new courses. All the good words, for that..."
There were plenty of good words, but he didn't put many of them down. He didn't know if the impulse to write Darling, was just his own loneliness, which any girl with a kind word would have filled. He didn't know her, or that part of himself, very well. He kept remembering her as she had been. Then he'd realize that memory wasn't a stable thing to hang onto. Everything changed--how well he had learned that! She was older, now, intelligent, and at school again, studying some kind of medical laboratory technology. Certainly she had become more sophisticated and elusive--her gay letters were just a superficial part of what she must be. And certainly there were dates and boyfriends, and all the usual phases of getting out of step with a mere recollection, like himself. Nelsen had some achy emotions. Should he ask for her picture? Should he send one of himself?
He just scribbled on, ramblingly, as usual. Yep, in a new Archer Seven, you could undo a few clamps, pull a foot up out of a boot, and actually change your socks... Inconsequential nonsense like that. He ended by telling her not to worry about any knicknacks he might send--that they came easy, out here. He microposted the letter, and mailed a square of soft glass-silk of many colors.
Then he pronounced a few cuss words, laughed at himself for getting so serious, shrugged, and with the casualness of hopper with his pockets loaded, moved toward the rec area, which was some distance off.
It was night over this part of rapidly growing Pallastown. Moving along a lighted causeway, he saw the man with the shovel teeth. Glory, had he managed to survive so long? His mere presence, here, seemed like a signal of the end of peace. Nelsen and Ramos used to practice close-contact tactics at zero-G, in space. So Nelsen didn't even wait for the man to notice him. He leaped, and sped like an arrow, thudding into the guy's stomach with both of his boot heels. Shovel Teeth was hurled fifty yards backward, Nelsen hurtling with him all the way. Unless Nelsen wanted to kill him, there wasn't any more to do. Partial revenge.
He wasn't worried about anybody except the guy's Jolly Lad henchmen. There was nobody close by. Now he did a quick fade, sure that nobody had seen who he was, during the entire episode. No use to call the cops--there were too many uncertainties about the setup in wild, polyglot Pallastown. Nelsen moved on to the rec area.
He didn't go into a garishly splendid place, named The Second Stop. Thus, he didn't see its owner, whose identity he had already heard about, of course. Not that he wouldn't have liked to. But there wasn't any time to get involved in a long chat with a woman... Nor did he see the tall, skinny, horse-faced comic, known only as Igor, go through slapstick acrobatics that once would have been impossible...
By a round-about route he proceeded to the catapults, where Gimp Hines was waiting for him. They had been conversing just a short while ago.
"Did you drop in on Eileen?" Gimp asked right away.
"No. There'll be other occasions," Nelsen laughed. "Someday, if we live, she'll own all the joints in the solar system."
"Uh-huh--I'd bet on it... By the way, there's a grapevine yarn around. Somebody kicked Fanshaw--the Jolly Lad big-shot--in the belly. You, perhaps?"
"Don't listen to gossip," Nelsen said primly. "Are you serious about going to Mercury?"
"Of course. There are people to take over my office duties. I'll be on my way in a couple of weeks. I think you'd like to come along, Frank."
Nelsen felt an urge that was like a crying for freedom.
"Sure I would. But I'm bound to the wheel. Cripes, though--watch yourself, fella. Don't you get into a mess!"
"Hell--you're the mess specialist, Frank. Fanshaw isn't here for fun. And there's been that new trouble at home..."
A Tovie bubb, loaded with people, and a Stateside bubb, both in orbit around the Earth, had collided. No survivors. But there was plenty of blaming and counter-blaming. Another dangerous incident. Glory--with all the massed destructive power there was, could luck really last forever?
Frank Nelsen got back to Post One, okay. But later, riding in to Post Three, just in an Archer Six, with a couple of guards for company, he picked up a long-lost voice, falsely sweet, then savage at the end:
"I'm a Jinx, aren't I, Frankie? A vulture. Nice and cavalier, you are. I bet you hoped I was dead. Okay--Sucker...!"
Tiflin didn't even answer when Nelsen tried to beam him.
Nelsen was able to save Post Three. The guards and most of the personnel were experienced and tough. They drove the Jolly Lads back and deflected some chunks of aimed and accelerated asteroid chips, with new defense rockets.
Joe Kuzak, at Post Seven, wasn't so lucky, though Frank had tipped him off. Half of the post was scattered and pirated. Six fellas and the wife of one of them--a Bunch from Baltimore--were just drying shreds that drifted in the wreckage. Big Joe, though he had a rocket chip through his chest, had been able to beat off the attackers, with the help of a few asteroid-hoppers and his novice crew which turned out to be more rugged than some people might have expected.
Frank got to them just as it was over--except for the cursing, the masculine tears of grief and rage, the promises of revenge. Luckily, none of the women had been captured.
Joe Kuzak, full of new antibiotics and coagulants, was still up and around. "So we knocked off a few of them, Frank," he said ruefully in his office bubb. "Several were in Tovie armor. Runaways, or agents? They're crowding us, boy. Hell, what a junk heap this post is going to be, to sort out..."
"Get to it," Nelsen commented.
"You've got something in mind?"
"Uh-huh. Coming in, I heard somebody address somebody else as Fan. Fanshaw, that would be. And I kind of remembered his voice, as he cracked out orders. He was with this group. I'm going after him."
"Good night...! I'll send some of my crowd along."
"Nope, Joe. They'd spot two or more guys. One, they won't even believe in. This is a lone-wolf deal. Besides, it's personal... Shucks--I don't even think there's a risk..."
There, he knew he exaggerated--especially as, huddled up to resemble a small asteroid-fragment, he followed the retreating specks. His only weapon was a rapid-fire launcher, using small rockets loaded only with chemical explosive. He felt a tingle all through him. Scare, all right.
Ahead, as he expected, he saw three stolen bubbs blossom out. There'd be a real pirates' party, like he'd seen, once. They'd have a lookout posted, of course. But the enormity of the Belt made them cocky. Who could ever really police very much of it? One other advantage was that Jolly Lads were untidy. Around the distant bubbs floated a haze of jettisoned refuse. Boxes, wrappings, shreds of stellene. Nelsen had figured on that.
Decelerating, he draped a sheet of synthetic cellulose that he'd brought along, loosely over his armored shape. Then he drifted unobtrusively close. At a half-mile distance, he peered through the telescope sight of his launcher. The bubbs were close together. The lookout floated free. Him, he got first, with a careful, homing shot.
Immediately he fired a burst into each bubb, saw them collapse around their human contents. The men inside were like cats in limp bags, the exits of which could no longer be found. Calmly he picked the biggest lumps of struggling forms, and fired again and again, until there was no more motion left except an even rotation.
He soon located Fanshaw. His unarmored body was bloated and drying, his mouth gaped, his shovel teeth were exposed to the stars and the distant, naked sun. Nelsen had to think back to six dead young men and a girl, to keep from feeling lousy. Had Fanshaw been just another guy invading a region that was too big and terrible for humans?
With something like dread, Nelsen looked for Tiflin, too. But, of course, that worthy wasn't around.
Nelsen picked up some space-fitness cards. Quite a few nations were represented. Joe would have to turn in the cards to the respective authorities. Noting its drift course, Nelsen left the wreckage, and hurried back to Post Seven, before other Jolly Lads could catch up and avenge their pals.
"Fanshaw's groups will fight it out for a new leader, Joe," he said. "That should keep them busy, for a while..."
Succeeding months were quieter. But the Tovies had lost no advantage. They had Ceres, the biggest of the asteroids, and their colonies were moving in on more and more others that were still untouched, closing them, against all agreements, to any competition.
The new Archer Seven which Nelsen presently acquired, had a miniature TV screen set in its collar. Afield, he was able to pick up propaganda broadcasts from Ceres. They showed neat, orderly quarters, good food, good facilities, everything done by command and plan. He wondered glumly if that was better for men who were pitted against space. The rigid discipline sheltered them. They didn't have to think in a medium that might be too huge for their brains and emotions. Maybe it was more practical than rough-and-tumble individualism. He had a bitter picture of the whole solar system without a free mind in its whole extent--that is, if another gigantic blowup didn't happen first...
Nelsen didn't see Ramos' new bubb, nor did he see him leave for Saturn and its moons. The guy had avoided him, and gone secretive. But over a year later, the news reached Nelsen at Post Eight. A man named Miguel Ramos had got back, more dead than alive, after a successful venture, alone, to the immediate vicinity of the Ringed Planet. His vehicle was riddled. He was in a Pallastown hospital.
Frank Nelsen delegated his duties, and went to see Ramos. The guy seemed hardly more than half-conscious. He had no hands left. His legs were off at the knee. Frostbite. Only the new antibiotics he had taken along, had kept the gangrene from killing him. There was a light safety belt across his bed. But somehow he knew Nelsen. And his achievement seemed like a mechanical record fixed in his mind.
"Hi, Frank," he whispered hurriedly. "I figured it right. Out there, near Saturn, clusters of particles of frozen methane gas are floating free like tiny meteors. The instrumented rockets didn't run into them, and they were too light to show clearly on radar. But a bubb with a man in it is lots bigger, and can be hit and made like a sieve. That's what happened to those who went first. Their Archers were pierced too. I had mine specially armored, with a heavy helmet and body plating... The particles just got my gloves and my legs. Cripes, I got pictures--right from the rim of the Rings! And lots of data..."
Ramos showed the shadow of a reckless grin of triumph. Then he passed out.
Later, Nelsen saw the photographs, and the refrigerated box with the clear, plastic sides. Inside it was what looked like dirty, granular snow--frozen water. Which was all it was. Unless the fact that it was also the substance of Saturn's Rings made a difference.
Saturn--another of the great, cold, largely gaseous planets, where it would perhaps always be utterly futile for a man to try to land... Ramos, the little Mex who chased the girls. Ramos, the hero, the historical figure, now...
Cursing under his breath, Nelsen wandered vaguely to The Second Stop. There, he saw what probably every spaceman had dreamed of. Lucette of Paris swimming nude in a gigantic dewdrop--possible where gravity was almost nil. Music played. Beams of colored light swung majestically, with prismatic effects through the great, flattened, shimmering ovoid of water, while Lucette's motions completed a beautiful legend...
Two figures moved past Nelsen in the darkened interior. The first one was tall and lean. Then he saw the profile of a lean face with a bent nose, heard a mockingly apologetic "Oh-oh..." and didn't quite realize that this was Tiflin, the harbinger of misfortune, before it was too late to collar him. Nelsen followed as soon as he could push his way from the packed house. But pursuit was hopeless in the crowded causeway outside.
A few minutes later, he was in Eileen Sands' apartment. It was not his first visit. Eileen seldom danced or sang, anymore, herself. She was different, now. She wore an evening dress--soft blue, tasteful. Here, she was the cool, poised owner, the lady.
"Tiflin hasn't been around here for a long time, Frank," she was saying. "You know that his buddy entertained for me for a while. I have an interested nature, but Tiflin never gave me anything but wisecracks. There are lots of Tovies around--there's even a center for runaways. I don't ask questions of customers usually. And technically, all I can require of a comic is talent. This Igor had a certain kind. What is the difficulty now?"
Frank Nelsen looked at Eileen almost wearily for a second. "Just that Tiflin is somehow involved with most of the bad luck that I've ever had out here," he said, grimly. "And if Pallastown were destroyed, everybody but the Tovies might as well go home from the Belt. The timing seems to me to be about right. They'd risk it, feeling we're too scared to strike back at home. The Jolly Lads--who are international--could be encouraged to do the job for them."
Sudden hollows showed in Eileen's cheeks. "What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Nothing much for me to do," he answered. "I only happened to notice, while I was coming in to Pallas, that all the guard stations, extending way out, were quietly very alert. But is that enough? Well, if they can't cope with an attack, what good am I? We're vulnerable, here. I guess we just sit tight and wait."
She smiled faintly. "All right--let's. Sit, relax, converse. Stop being the Important Personage for a while, Frank."
"Look who's talking. Okay--what do you know that's new to tell?"
"A few things. I keep track of most everybody."
He took her slender hand, brown in his angular fist, that was pale from his space gloves. "Gimp, first," he said.
"Still on Mercury, with Two-and-Two. Two-and-Two was a bricklayer, a good beginning for a construction man. That seems to be paying off, as colonists move in. Gimp is setting up solar power stations."
"Encouraging information, for once. Here's a hard one--Jig Hollis. The real intelligent man who stayed home. I've envied him for years."
"Hmmm--yes, Frank. Intelligent, maybe--but he never quite believed it, himself. His wife stayed with him, even after he turned real sour and reckless. One night he hit a big oak tree with his car. Now, he is just as dead as if he had crashed into the sun at fifty miles per second. He couldn't take knowing that he was scared to do what he wanted."
"Hell!" Nelsen said flatly.
"Now who else should I gossip about?" Eileen questioned. "Oh, yes--Harv Diamond, hero of our lost youth, who got space fatigue. Well, he recovered and returned to active duty in the U.S.S.F. Which perhaps leaves me with just my own love life to confess." She smiled lightly. "Once there was a kid named Frankie Nelsen, who turned out to be a very conscientious jerk. Since then, there have been scads of rugged, romantic characters on all sides... You're going to ask about Miguel Ramos."
She paused, looked unhappy and tired. "The celebrity," she said. "Mashed up. But he'll recover--this time. I've seen him--sent him flowers, sat beside him. But what do you do with a clown like that? Lock him in the closet or look at him through a telescope? Goodbye--hello--goodbye. A kid with gaudy banners flying, if he lives to be forty--which he never will. They'll be giving him artificial hands and feet, and he'll be trying for Pluto. A friend. I guess I'm proud. That's all. Anything else you want to know?"
"Yeah. There was a cute little girl at Serene."
"Jennie Harper. She married one of those singing Moon prospectors. Somebody murdered them both--way out on Far Side."
Frank Nelsen's mouth twisted. "That's enough, pal," he said. "I better go do my sitting tight someplace else. Keep your Archer handy. Thanks, and see you..."
Within forty minutes David Lester was showing him some pictures that a hopper had brought in from a vault in a surface-asteroid.
On the screen, great, mottled shapes moved through a lush forest. Thousands of tiny, flitting bat-like creatures--miniature pterodactyls of the terrestrial Age of Reptiles--hovered over a swamp, where millions of insects hung like motes in the light of the low sun. A much larger pterodactyl, far above, glided gracefully over a cliff, and out to sea, its long, beaked head turning watchfully.
"Hey!" Nelsen said mildly, as his jaded mind responded.
Lester nodded. "They were on Earth, too--as the Martians must have been--exploring and taking pictures, during the Cretaceous Period. Oh, but there's a perhaps even better sequence! Like the Martians, they had a world-wrecking missile, which they were building in space. Spherical. About six miles in diameter, I calculate. Shall I show you?"
"No... I think I'll toddle over to the offices, Les. Keep wearing those Archers, people. Glad the kid likes to play in his..."
Nelsen had donned his own Seven, with the helmet fastened across his chest by a strap. At the KRNH office, there was a letter, which luckily hadn't been sent out to Post Eight. The tone was more serious than that of any that Nance Codiss had sent before.
"Dear Frank: I'm actually coming your way. I'll be stopping to work at the Survey Station Hospital on Mars for two months en route..."
He read that far when he heard the sirens and saw the flashes of defending batteries that were trying to ward off missiles from Pallastown. He latched his helmet in place. He was headed for the underground galleries when the first impacts came. He saw four domes vanish in flashes of fire. Then he didn't run anymore. He had his small rocket launcher, from the office. If they ever came close enough... But of course they'd stay thousands of miles off. He got to the nearest fallen dome as fast as he could. Everybody had been in armor, but there were over a hundred dead. Emergency and rescue crews were operating efficiently.
He glanced around for indications. No explosive, chemical or nuclear, had yet been used. But there was the old Jolly Lad trick: Accelerate a chunk of asteroid-material to a speed of several miles per second by grasping it with your gloved hands, while the shoulder-ionic of your armor was at full power. Start at a great distance, aim your missile with your body, let it go... Impact would be sheer, blasting incandescence. A few hundred chunks of raw metal could finish Pallastown... Were these just crazy, wild slobs whooping it up, or real crud provided with a purpose and reward? Either way, here was the eternal danger to any Belt settlement.
Nelsen could have tried to reach an escape-exit into open space, but he helped with the injured while he waited for more impacts to come. There was another series of deflecting flashes from the defense batteries. Two more domes vanished... Then--somehow--nothing more. Evidently some of the attackers had been only half hearted, this time. Reprieve...
Almost four hundred people were dead. It could have been the whole Town. Then spreading disaster. All Nelsen's friends were okay. The Posts called in--okay, too. Nelsen waited three days. He wanted to help defend, if the attack was renewed. But now the U.N.S.F. was concentrating in the vicinity. For a while, things would be quiet, Out Here. Just the same, he felt kind of fed up. He felt as if the end of everything he knew had crept inevitably a little closer.
He beamed Mars--the Survey Station. He contacted Nance. He had known that she should have arrived already. He was relieved. He knew what the region between here and there could be like when there was trouble.
"It's me--Frank Nelsen--Nance," he said into his helmet-phone, as he stood beyond the outskirts of the Town, on the barren, glittering surface of Pallas. "I'm still wearing the sweater. Stay where you are. I've never been on Mars, either. But I'll be there, soon..."
His old uncertainties about talking to her evaporated now that he was doing it.
"For Pete's sake--Frank!" he heard her laugh happily, still sounding like the neighbor kid. "Gosh, it's good to hear you!"
He left for Post One, soon after that. Nowadays, it was almost a miniature of the ever more magnificent--if insecure--Pallastown. He kept thinking angrily of Art Kuzak, getting a little overstuffed, it seemed. The hunkie kid, the ex-football player who had become a big commercial and industrial baron of the Belt. Easy living. Cuties around. And poor twin Joe--just another stooge...
Nelsen went into the office, his fists clenched overdramatically. "I'm taking a leave, Art--maybe a long one," he said.
Art Kuzak stared at him. "You damned, independent bums--you, too, Nelsen!" he began to growl. But when he saw Nelsen's jaw harden, he got the point, and grinned, instead. "Okay, Frank. Nobody's indispensible. I might do the same when you come back--who knows...?"
Frank Nelsen joined a KRNH bubb convoy--Earthbound, but also passing fairly close to Mars--within a few hours.
VII
Frank Nelsen meant the journey to be vagabond escape, an interlude of to hell with it relief from the grind, and from the increasingly uncertain mainstream of the things he knew best.
He rode with a long train of bubbs and great sheaves of smelted metal rods--tungsten, osmium, uranium 238. The sheaves had their own propelling ionic motors. He lazed like a tramp. He talked with asteroid-hoppers who meant to spend some time on Earth. Several had become almost rich. Most had strong, quiet faces that showed both distance- and home-hunger. A few had broken, and the angry sensitivity was visible.
Nelsen treated himself well. He was relieved of the duty of eternal vigilance by men whose job it was. So, for a while, his purpose was almost successful.
But the memory--or ghost--of Mitch Storey was never quite out of his mind. And, as a tiny, at first telescopic crescent with a rusty light enlarged with lessened distance ahead, the ugly enigma of present-day Mars dug deeper into his brain.
Every twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes--the length of the Martian day--whenever the blue-green wedge of Syrtis Major appeared in the crescent, he beamed the Survey Station, which was still maintained for the increase of knowledge, and as a safeguard for incautious adventurers who will tackle any dangerous mystery or obstacle. His object was to talk to Nance Codiss.
"I thought perhaps you and your group had gotten restless and had started out for the Belt already," he laughed during their first conversation.
"Oh, no--a lab technician like me is far too busy here, for one thing," she assured him, her happy tone bridging the distance. "We came this far with a well-armed freight caravan, in good passenger quarters. If we went on, I suppose it would be the same... Anyway, for years you didn't worry much about me. Why now, Frank?"
"A mystery," he teased in return. "Or perhaps because I considered Earth safe--instinctively."
But he was right in the first place. It was a mystery--something to do with the startling news that she was on the way, that closer friendship was pending. The impulse to go meet her had been his first, almost thoughtless impulse.
He was still glad that she wasn't out between Mars and the Belt, where disaster had once hit him hard. But now he wondered if the Survey Station was any better for anybody, even though it was reputed to be quite secure.
The caravan he rode approached his destination no closer than ten million miles. Taking cautious note of radar data which indicated that space all around was safely empty, he cast off in his Archer with a small, new, professional-type bubb packed across his hips. Inside his helmet he lighted a cigarette--quite an unusual luxury.
It took a long time to reach Phobos. They gave him shots there--new preventative medicine that was partially effective against the viruses of Mars. Descent in the winged rocket was rough. But then he was gliding with a sibilant whistle through a natural atmosphere, again. Within minutes he was at the Station--low, dusty domes, many of them deserted, now, at the edge of the airfield, a lazily-spinning wind gauge, tractors, auto-jeeps, several helicopters.
He stepped down with his gear. Mars was all around him: A few ground-clinging growths nearby--harmless, locally evolved vegetation. Distant, coppery cliffs reflecting the setting sun. Ancient excavations notched them. Dun desert to the east, with little plumes of dust blowing. Through his Archer--a necessary garment here not only because the atmosphere was only one-tenth as dense as Earth-air and poor in oxygen, but because of the microscopic dangers it bore--Nelsen could hear the faint sough of the wind.
The thirty-eight percent of terrestrial gravity actually seemed strong to him now, and made him awkward, as he turned and looked west. Perhaps two miles off, past a barbed-wire fence and what must be an old tractor trail of the hopeful days of colonization, he saw the blue-green edge of Syrtis Major, the greatest of the thickets, with here and there a jutting spur of it projecting toward him along a gully. Nelsen's hide tingled. But his first glimpse was handicapped by distance. He saw only an expanse of low shagginess that might have been scrub growths of any kind.
Dug into the salt-bearing ground at intervals, he knew, were the fire weapons ready to throw oxygen and synthetic napalm--jellied gasoline. Never yet had they been discharged, along this defense line. But you could never be sure just what might be necessary here.
A man of about thirty had approached. "I meet the new arrivals," he said. "If you'll come along with me, Mr. Nelsen..."
He was dark, and medium large, and he had a genial way. He looked like a hopper--an asteroid-miner--the tough, level-headed kind that adjusts to space and keeps his balance.
"Name's Ed Huth," he continued, as they walked to the reception dome. "Canadian. Good, international crowd here--however long you mean to stay. Most interesting frontier in the solar system, too. Probably you've heard most of the rules and advice. But here's a paper. Refresh your memory by reading it over as soon as you can. There is one thing which I am required to show everybody who comes here. Inside this peek box. You are instructed to take a good look."
Huth's geniality had vanished.
The metal box was a yard high, and twice as long and wide. It stood, like a memorial, before the reception dome entrance. A light shone beyond the glass-covered slot, as Nelsen bent to peer.
He had seen horror before now. He had seen a pink mist dissolve in the sunshine as a man in armor out in the Belt was hit by an explosive missile, his blood spraying and boiling. Besides, he had read up on the thickets of Mars, watched motion pictures, heard Gimp Hines' stories of his brief visit here. So, at first, he could be almost casual about what he saw in the peek box. There were many ghastly ways for a man to die.
Even the thicket plant in the box seemed dead, though Nelsen knew that plant successors to the original Martians had the rugged power of revival. This one showed the usual paper-dry whorls or leaves, and the usual barrel-body, perhaps common to arid country growths, everywhere. Scattered over the barrel, between the spines, were glinting specks--vegetable, light-sensitive cells developed into actual visual organs. The plant had the usual tympanic pods of its kind--a band of muscle-like tissue stretched across a hollow interior--by which it could make buzzing sounds. Nelsen knew that, like any Earthly green plant, it produced oxygen, but that, instead of releasing it, it stored the gas in spongy compartments within its horny shell, using it to support an animal-like tissue combustion to keep its vitals from freezing during the bitterly frigid nights.
Nelsen also knew that deeper within the thing was a network of whitish pulp, expanded at intervals to form little knobs. Sectioned, under a microscope, they would look like fibred masses of animal or human nerve and brain cells, except that, chemically, they were starch and cellulose rather than protein.
Worst to see was the rigid clutch of monster's tactile organs, which grew from the barrel's crown. It was like a powerful man struggling to uproot a rock, or a bear or an octopus crushing an enemy. It was dark-hole drama, like something from another galaxy. Like some horribly effective piece of sculpture, the tableau in the box preserved the last gasp of an incautious youth in armor.
The tendrils of the thicket plant were furred with erect spines of a shiny, russet color. They were so fine that they looked almost soft. But Nelsen was aware that they were sharper than the hypodermic needles they resembled--in another approach to science. Now, Nelsen felt the tingling revulsion and hatred.
"Of course you know that you don't have to get caught like that poor bloke did," Huth said dryly. "Just not to disinfect the outside of your Archer well enough and then leave it near you, indoors, is sufficient. I was here before there was any trouble. When it came, it was a shambles..."
Huth eyed Nelsen for a moment, then continued on another tack. "Biology... Given the whole universe to experiment in, I suppose you can never know what it will come up with--or what is possible. These devils--you get to hate them in your sleep. If their flesh--or their methods--were something like ours, as was the case with the original Martians or the people of the Asteroid Planet, it wouldn't seem so bad. Still, they make you wonder: What would you do, if, in your own way, you could think and observe, but were rooted to the ground; if you were denied the animal ability of rapid motion, if you didn't have hands with which to fashion tools or build apparatus, if fire was something you could scarcely use?..."
Nelsen smiled. "I am wondering," he said. "I promise to do a lot more of it as soon as I get squared away. I could inflate my bubb, and sleep in the yard in it, if I had to. Then, as usual, off the Earth, you'll expect me to earn my breathing air and keep, after a couple of days, whether I can pay instead or not. That's fine with me, of course. There's another matter which I'd like to discuss, but that can be later."
"No sleeping out," Huth laughed. "That's just where people get careless. There are plenty of quarters available since the retreat of settlers almost emptied this world of terrestrial intrusion--except for us here and the die-hard desert rats, and the new, screwball adventurers... By the way, if it ever becomes important, the deserts are safe--at least from what you just saw--as you probably know..."
Nelsen passed through an airlock, where live steam and a special silicone oil accomplished the all-important disinfection of his Archer, his bubb, and the outside of his small, sealed baggage roll. Armor and bubb he left racked with rows of others.
It wasn't till he got into the reception dome lounge that he saw Nance Codiss. She didn't rush at him. Reserve had dropped over them both again as if in reconsideration of a contact made important too suddenly. He clasped her fingers, then just stood looking at her. Lately, they had exchanged a few pictures.
"Your photographs don't lie, Nance," he said at last.
"Yours do, Frank," she answered with complete poise. "You look a lot less grim and tired."
"Wait," he told her. "I'll be right back..."
He went with Ed Huth to ditch his roll in his sleeping cubicle, get cleaned up and change his clothes.
She was beautiful, she had grave moods, she was wearing his fabulous bracelet--if only not to offend him. But when he returned, he met two of the girls who had come out to Mars with her--a nurse and another lab technician. They were the bubbly type, full of bravado and giggles for their strange, new surroundings. For a moment he felt far too old at twenty-four for Nance's twenty. He wondered regretfully if her being here was no more than part of his excuse for getting away from the Belt and from the sense of ultimate human disaster building up.
But much of his feeling of separation from her disappeared as they sat alone in the lounge, talking--first about Jarviston, then about here. Nance had available information about the thickets pretty well down pat.
"You can't keep those plants alive here at the Station, Frank," she said quietly. "They make study difficult by dying. It's as if they knew that they couldn't win here. So they retreat--to keep their secrets. But Dr. Pacetti, our head of Medical Research, says that we can never know that they won't find a way to attack us directly. That's what the waiting napalm line is for. I don't think he is exaggerating."
"Why do you say that?" Nelsen asked.
He was encouraging her, of course. But he wasn't being patronizing. Frost tingled in his nerves. He wanted to know her version.
"I'll show you the little museum we have," she replied, her eyes widening slightly. "This is probably old hat to you--but it's weird--it gives you the creeps..."
He followed her along a covered causeway to another dome. In a gallery there, a series of dry specimens were set up, inside sealed boxes made of clear plastic.
The first display was centered around a tapered brass tube--perhaps one of the barrels of an antique pair of fieldglasses. Wrapping it was a spiny brown tendril from which grew two sucker-like organs, shaped like acorn tops. One was firmly attached to the metal. The other had been pulled free, its original position on the barrel marked by a circular area of corrosion. The face of the detached sucker was also shown--a honeycomb structure of waxy vegetable tissue, detailed with thousands of tiny ducts and hairlike feelers.
"Some settler dropped the piece of brass out on a trail in Syrtis Major," Nance explained. "Later, it was found like this. Brass is something that people have almost stopped using. So, it was new to them. They wouldn't have been interested in magnesium, aluminum, or stainless steel anymore. The suckers aren't a usual part of them either. But the suckers grow--for a special purpose, Dr. Pacetti believes. A test--perhaps an analysis. They exude an acid, to dissolve a little of the metal. It's like a human chemist working. Only, perhaps, better--more directly--with specialized feelers and sensing organs."
Nance's quiet voice had a slight, awed quaver at the end.
Frank Nelsen nodded. He had examined printed pictures and data before this. But here the impact was far more real and immediate; the impact of strange minds with an approach of their own was more emphatic.
"What else?" he urged.
They stood before another sealed case containing a horny, oval pod, cut open. It had closed around a lump of greenish stone.
"Malachite," Nance breathed. "One kind of copper ore. They reduced it, extracted some of the pure metal. See all the little reddish specks shining? It is pretty well established that the process is something like electroplating. There's a dissolving acid--then a weak electric current--from a kind of battery... Oh, nobody should laugh, Frank--Dr. Pacetti keeps pointing out that there are electric eels on Earth, with specialized muscle-tissue that acts as an electric cell... But this is somewhat different. Don't ask me exactly how it functions--I only heard our orientation lecture, while we toured this museum. But see those small compartments in the thick shells of the pod--with the membranes separating them? All of them contained fluids--some acid, others alkaline. Mixed in with the cellulose of the membranes, you can see both silvery and reddish specks--as if they had to incorporate both a conductor and a difference of metals to get a current. At least, that was what was suggested in the lecture..."
Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss moved on from display case to display case, each of which showed another kind of pod cut in half. The interiors were all different and all complicated... Membranes with a faint, metallic sheen--laminated or separated by narrow air spaces as in a capacitor, for instance... Balls of massed fibre, glinting... Curious, spiral formations of waxy tissue...
"They use electricity as a minor kind of defense," Nance went on, her tone still low with suppressed excitement that was close to dread. "We know that some of them can give you a shock--if you're fool enough to get so close that you can touch them. And they do emit radio impulses on certain wavelengths. Signals--communication...? As for the rest, perhaps you'd better do your own guessing, Frank. But the difference between us and them seems to be that we make our apparatus. They grow them, build them--with their own living tissue cells--in a way that must be under their constant, precise control. I suppose they even work from a carefully thought-out design--a kind of cryptic blueprint... Go along with the idea--or not--as you choose. But our experts suspect that much of what we have here represents research apparatus--physical, chemical, electrical. That they may get closer to understanding the ultimate structure of matter than we can, because their equipment is part of themselves, in which they can develop senses that we don't possess... Well, I'll skip any more of that. Because the best--or the worst--is still coming. Right here, Frank..."
The case showed several small, urn-like growths, sectioned like the other specimens.
Frank Nelsen grinned slightly. "All right--let me tell it," he said. "Because this is something I really paid attention to! Like you imply, their equipment is alive. So they work best with life--viruses, germs, vegetable-allergy substances. These are their inventing, developing and brewing bottles--for the numerous strains of Syrtis Fever virus. The living molecule chains split off from the inner tissue walls of the bottles, and grow and multiply in the free fluid. At least, that's how I read it."
"And that is where my lab job begins, Frank," she told him. "Helping develop anti-virus shots--testing them on bits of human tissue, growing in a culture bath. An even partially effective anti-virus isn't found easily. And when it is, another virus strain will soon appear, and the doctors have to start over... Oh, the need isn't as great, any more, as when the Great Rush away from Mars was on. There are only half a dozen really sick people in the hospital now. Late comers and snoopers who got careless or curious. You've got to remember that the virus blows off the thickets like invisible vapor. There's one guy from Idaho--Jimmy--James Scanlon. Come along. I'll show you, Frank..."
He lay behind plastic glass, in a small cubicle. A red rash, with the pattern of frostwork on a Minnesota windowpane in January, was across his lean, handsome face. Maybe he was twenty--Nance's age. His bloodshot eyes stared at terrors that no one else could see.
Nance called softly through the thin infection barrier. "Jimmy!"
He moaned a little. "Francy..."
"High fever, Frank," Nance whispered. "Typical Syrtis. He wants to be home--with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia--yearning terribly for old, familiar surroundings--is a major symptom. It's like a command from them--to get out of Mars. The red rash is something extra he picked up. An allergy... Oh, we think he'll survive. Half of them now do. He's big and strong. Right now, even the nurses don't go in there, except in costumes that are as infection-tight as armor. Later on, when the fever dwindles to chronic intermittence, it will no longer be contagious. Even so, the new laws on Earth won't let him return there for a year. I don't know whether such laws are fair or not. We've got a hundred here, who were sick, and are now stranded and waiting, working at small jobs. Others have gone to the Belt--which seems terrible for someone not quite well. I hope that Jimmy bears up all right--he's such a kid... Let's get out of here..."
Her expression was gently maternal. Or maybe it was something more?
Back in the lounge, she asked, "What will you do here, Frank?"
"Whatever it is, there is one thing I want to include," he answered. "I want to try to find out just what happened to Mitch Storey."
"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared, deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick settler in--on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After he got lost, his wife--a nurse from here whose name had been Selma Washington--went looking for him. She never was found either."
"Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement.
"Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols--watching for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late comers who might turn out to be screwballs. You look as though you might be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty in half an hour..."
Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you."
For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli. At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use.
He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars--from a safe altitude of two thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic cities--still faintly tainted with radioactivity--where the original inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation water of the otherwise mythical "canals." The huge south polar cap of hoarfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the trails, once burned out with oxygen and gasoline-jelly to permit the passage of vehicles, had again become completely overgrown--who could hope to stamp out that devilishly hardy vegetation, propagating by means of millions of windblown spores, with mere fire? The broken-down trains of tractors and trailers, now almost hidden. The stellene garden domes that had flattened. Here were the relics left by people who had sought to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear.
Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths.
Twice, working warily with machetes, and holding their flame weapons ready, they chopped armored mummies from enwrapping tendrils, while little eye cells glinted at them balefully, and other tendrils bent slowly toward them. They searched out the space-fitness cards, which bore old dates, and addresses of next of kin.
In a few more days, Nelsen was flying the 'copter. Then he was out on his own, watching, searching. For a couple of weeks he hangared the heli at once, after each patrol, and Nance always was there to meet him as he did so.
Inevitably the evening came when he said, "We could fly out again, Nance. For an hour or two. It doesn't break any rules."
Those evening rides, high over Syrtis Major, toward the setting sun, became an every other day custom, harmless in itself. A carefully kept nuclear-battery motor didn't conk; the vehicle could almost fly without guidance. It was good to look down at the blue-green shagginess, below... Familiarity bred, not contempt, but a decline of dread to the point where it became a pleasant thrill--an overtone to the process of falling in love. Otherwise, perhaps they led each other on, into incaution. Out in the lonely fastnesses of Mars they seemed to find the sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic Earth that the settlers had sought here.
"We always pass over that same hill," Nance said during one of their flights. "It must have been a beautiful little island in the ancient ocean, when there was that much water. Now it belongs to us, Frank."
"It's barren--we could land," Nelsen suggested quickly.
They visited the hill a dozen times safely, breaking no printed rule. But maybe they shouldn't have come so often to that same place. In life there is always a risk--which is food for a fierce soul. Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss were fierce souls.
They'd stand by the heli and look out over Syrtis, their gloved fingers entwined. If they couldn't kiss, here, through their helmets, that was merely comic pathos--another thing to laugh and be happy over.
"Our wind-blown hill," Nance chuckled on that last evening. "Looking down over a culture, a history--maybe arguments, lawsuits, jokes, parties; gossip too, for all we know--disguised as a huge briar patch that makes funny noises."
"Shut up--I love you," Nelsen gruffed.
"Shut up yourself--it's you I love," she answered.
The little sun was half sunk behind the Horizon. The 'copter was only a hundred feet away, along the hillcrest. That was when it happened. Two dull, plopping sounds came almost together.
If a thinking animal can use the pressure of a confined gas to propel small missiles, is there any reason why other intelligences can't do the same? From two bottle-like pods the clusters of darts--or long, sharp thorns--were shot. Only a few of them struck their targets. Fewer, still, found puncturable areas and struck through silicone rubber and fine steelwire cloth into flesh. Penetration was not deep, but deep enough.
Nance screamed. Nelsen wasn't at all sure that he didn't scream himself as the first anguish dizzied and half blinded him.
From the start it was really too late. Nelsen was as hardy and determined as any. He tried to get Nance to the 'copter. Less than halfway, she crumpled. With a savage effort of will he managed to drag her a few yards, before his legs refused to obey him, or support him.
His blood carried a virus to his brain about as quickly as it would have carried a cobra's venom. They probably could have made such protein-poisons, too; but they had never used them against men, no doubt because something that could spread and infect others was better.
For a while, as the black, starshot night closed in, Nelsen knew, or remembered, nothing at all--unless the mental distortions were too horrible. Then he seemed to be in a pit of stinking, viscous fluid, alive with stringy unknowns that were boring into him... Unreachable in another universe was a town called Jarviston. He yelled till his wind was gone.
He had a half-lucid moment in which he knew it was night, and understood that he had a raging fever. He was still clinging to Nance, who clung to him. So instinct still worked. He saw that they had blundered--its black bulk was visible against the stars. Phobos hadn't risen; Deimos, the farther moon, was too small to furnish appreciable light.
Something touched him from behind, and he recoiled, pushing Nance back. He yanked the machete from his belt, and struck blindly... Oh, no!--you didn't get caught like this--not usually, he told himself. Not in their actual grip! They were too slow--you could always dodge! It was only when you were near something not properly disinfected that you got Syrtis Fever, which was the worst that could happen--wasn't it...?
He heard an excited rhythm in the buzzing. Now he remembered his shoulder-lamp, fumbled to switch it on, failed, and stumbled a few steps with Nance toward the hill. Something caught his feet--then hers. Trying to get her free, he dropped his machete...
Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."
Yeah--forty minutes.
"It's--it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer almost apologetically. Dear Nance...
Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got both her and himself loose.
It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have sprung from them--someway. A huge, zombie form--the ugliest part of this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.
The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his shoulder...
There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either. The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness, misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?
It seemed that he was always struggling impossibly to get himself and Nance somewhere--out of hot, noisesome holes of suffocation, across deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed incongruously with strange harmonica music that seemed to express all time and space... He could never succeed though the need was desperate. But sometimes there was a coolness answering his thirst, or rubbed into his burning skin, and he would seem to sleep... Often, voices told him things, but he always forgot...
It wasn't true that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn chair of tubular magnesium with a back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stellene. The stone walls showed the beady fossils of prehistoric Mars. More than probably, these chambers had been cut in the living rock, by the ancients.
Reclining in another lawn chair beside his was Nance, her eyes closed, her face thin and pale. He was frightened--until he remembered, somehow, that she was nearly as well as he was. Beyond her was a doorway, leading into what seemed a small, modern kitchen. There was a passage to a small, neat garden, where Earthly vegetables and flowers grew. It was ceiled with stellene; its walls were solid rock. Looking up through the transparent roof above him, he saw how a thin mesh of fuzzy tendrils and whorls masked this strange Shangri-la.
Nelsen closed his eyes, and thought back. Now he remembered most of what he had been told. "Mitch!" he called quietly, so as not to awaken Nance. "Hey, Mitch...! Selma...!"
Mitch Storey was there in a moment--dressed in dungarees and work shirt like he used to be, but taller, even leaner, and unsmiling.
Nelsen got up. "Thanks, Mitch," he said.
Their voices stayed low and intense.
"For nothing, Frank. I'm damned glad to see you, but you still shouldn't have come nosing. 'Cause--I told you why. Looking for you, Huth burned out more than five square miles. And if folks get too smart and too curious, it won't be any good for what's here..."
Nelsen felt angry and exasperated. But he had a haunting thought about a lanky colored kid in Jarviston, Minnesota. A guy with a dream--or perhaps a prescient glimpse of his own future.
"What's a pal supposed to do?" he growled. "For a helluva long time you've answered nobody--though everyone in the Bunch must have tried beaming you."
"Sure, Frank... Blame, from me, would be way out of line. I heard you guys lots of times. But it was best to get lost--maybe help keep the thickets like they are for as long as possible... A while back, I began picking up your voice in my phones again. I figured you were heading for trouble when you kept coming with your girl to that same hill. So I was around, like I told you before... Sorry I had to hit you and give you the needle, but you were nuts--gone with Syrtis. Getting you back here, without Huth spotting the old heli I picked up once at a deserted settlers' camp was real tough going. I had to land, hide it and wait, four or five times. And you were both plenty sick. But there are a few medical gimmicks I learned from the thickets--better than those at the Station."
"You've done all right for yourself here, haven't you, Mitch?" Nelsen remarked with a dash of mockery. "All the modern conveniences--in the middle of the forbidden wilds of Syrtis Major."
"Sure, Frank--'cause maybe I'm selfish. Though it's just stuff the settlers left behind. Anyway, it wasn't so good at the start. I was careful, but I got the fever, too. Light. Then I fell--broke my leg--out there. I thought sure I was finished when they got hold of me. But I just lay there, playing on my mouth organ--an old hymn--inside my helmet. Maybe it was the music--they must have felt the radio impulses of my tooting before. Or else they knew, somehow, that I was on their side--that I figured they were too important just to disappear and that I meant to do anything I could, short of killing, to keep them all right... Nope, I wouldn't say that they were so friendly, but they might have thought I'd be useful--a guinea-pig to study and otherwise. For all I know, examining my body may have helped them improve their weapons... Anyhow--you won't believe this--'cause it's sort of fantastic--but you know they work best with living tissue. They fixed that leg, bound it tight with tendrils, went through the steel cloth of my Archer with hollow thorns. The bone knit almost completely in four days. And the fever broke. Then they let me go. Selma was already out looking for me. When I found her, she had the fever, too. But I guess we're immune now."
Storey's quiet voice died away.
"What are you going to do, Mitch? Just stay here for good?"
"What else--if I can? This is better than anything I remember. Peaceful, too. If they study me, I study them--not like a real scientist--but by just having them close around. I even got to know some of their buzzing talk. Maybe I'll have to be their ambassador to human folks, sometime. They are from the planets of the stars, Frank. Sirius, I think. Tough little spores can be ejected from one atmosphere, and drift in space for millions of years... They arrived after the first Martians were extinct. Now that you're here, Frank, I wish you'd stay. But that's no good. Somebody lost always makes people poke around."
Nelsen might have argued a few points. But for one thing, he felt too tired. "I'll buy it all, your way, Mitch," he said. "I hope Nance and I can get out of here in a couple more days. Maybe I shouldn't have run out on the Belt. Can't run--thoughts follow you. But now--dammit--I want to go home!"
"That's regular, Frank. 'Cause you've got Syrtis. Chronic, now--intermittent. But it'll fade. Same with your girl. Meanwhile, they won't let you go Earthside, but you'll be okay. I'll fly you out, close enough to the Station to get back, any morning before daylight, that you pick... Only, you won't tell, will you, Frank?"
"No--I promise--if you think secrecy makes any difference. Otherwise--thanks for everything... By the way--do you ever listen in on outside news?"
"Enough. Still quiet... And a fella named Miguel Ramos--with nerve-controlled clamps for hands--got a new, special bubb and took off for Pluto."
"No! Damn fool... Almost as loony as you are, Mitch."
"Less... Wake up, Nance. Dinner... Chicken--raised right here..."
That same afternoon, Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss sat in the garden. "If I blur, just hold me tight, Frankie," she said. "Everything is still too strange to quite get a grip on--yet... But I'm not going home, Frank--not even when it is allowed. I set out--I'm sticking--I'm not turning tail. It's what people have got to do--in space more than ever..."
Even when the seizure of fever came, and the sweat gathered on her lips, and her eyes went wild, she gritted her teeth and just clung to him. She had spunk--admirable, if perhaps destructive. "Love yuh," Frank kept saying. "Love yuh, Sweetie..."
Two days later, before the frigid dawn, they saw the last of Mitch Storey and his slender, beautiful wife with her challenging brown eyes.
"Be careful that you do right for Mitch and--these folks," she warned almost commandingly as the old heli landed in the desert a few miles from the Station. "What would you do--if outsiders came blundering into your world by the hundreds, making trails, killing you with fire? At first, they didn't even fight back."
The question was ancient but valid. In spite of his experiences, Nelsen agreed with the logic and the justice. "We'll make up a story, Selma," he said solemnly.
Mitch looked anxious. "Human people will find a way, won't they, Frank?" he asked. "To win, to come to Mars and live, I mean--to change everything. Sure--some will be sympathetic. But when there's practical pressure--need--danger--economics...?"
"I don't know, Mitch," Nelsen answered in the same tone as before. "Your thickets do have a pretty good defense."
But in his heart he suspected that fierce human persistence couldn't be stopped--as long as there were humans left. Mitch and his star folk couldn't withdraw from the mainstream of competition--inherent in life--that was spreading again across the solar system. They could only stand their ground, take their fearful chances, be part of it.
One of the last things Mitch said, was, "Got any cigarettes, Frank? Selma likes one, once in a while."
"Sure. Three packs here inside my Archer. Mighty small hospitality gift, Mitch..."
After the 'copter drifted away, it seemed that a curtain drew over Nelsen's mind, blurring the whole memory. It was as though they had planned that. It was almost as though Mitch, and Selma, as he had just seen them, were just another mind-fantasy of the Heebie-Jeebie Planet, created by its present masters.
"Should we believe it?" Nance whispered.
"My cigarettes are gone," Frank told her.
At the Survey Station they got weary looks from Ed Huth. "I guess I picked a wrong man, Nelsen," he said.
"It looks as though you did, Ed," Frank replied. "I'm really sorry."
They got worse hell from a little doctor from Italy, whose name was Padetti. They were asked a lot of questions. They fibbed some, but not entirely.
"We sort of blanked out, Doctor," Nance told him. "I suppose we spent most of our time in the desert, living in our Archers. There were the usual distorted hallucinations of Syrtis Fever. A new strain, I suspect... Four months gone? Oh, no...!"
She must have had a time evading his questions for the next month, while she worked, again, in the lab. Maybe he did divine half of the truth, at last. Maybe he even was sympathetic toward the thickets that he was trying to defeat.
Nelsen wasn't allowed to touch another helicopter. During that month, between brief but violent seizures of the fever, he was employed as a maintenance mechanic.
Then the news came. There had been an emergency call from Pallastown. Rescue units were to be organized, and rocketed out in high-velocity U.N.S.F. and U.S.S.F bubbs. There had been sabotage, violence. The Town was three-quarters gone, above the surface. Planned attack or--almost worse--merely the senseless result of space-poisoned men kicking off the lid in a spree of hell-raising humor and fun?
Nelsen was bitter. But he also felt the primitive excitement--almost an eagerness. That was the savage paradox in life.
"You still have the dregs of Syrtis Fever," a recruiting physician told him. "But you know the Belt. That makes a big difference... All right--you're going..."
Nance Codiss didn't have that experience. Her lab background wasn't enough. So she was stuck, on Mars.
Nelsen had been pestering her to marry him. Now, in a corner of the crowded lounge, he tried again.
She shook her head. "You'd still have to leave me, Frank," she told him. "Because that's the way strong people have to be--when there's trouble to be met. Let's wait. Let's know a little better where we're at--please, darling. I'll be all right. Contact me when you can..."
Her tone was low and tender and unsteady. He hugged her close.
Soon, he was aboard a GO-rocket, shooting up to Phobos to join the assembling rescue team. He wondered if this was the beginning of the end...
VIII
Frank Nelsen missed the first shambles at Pallastown, of course, since even at high speed, the rescue unit with which he came did not arrive until days after the catastrophe.
There had been hardly any warning, since the first attack had sprung from the sub-levels of the city itself.
A huge tank of liquid oxygen, and another tank of inflammable synthetic hydrocarbons to be used in the manufacture of plastics, had been simultaneously ruptured by charges of explosive, together with the heavy, safety partition between them. The resulting blast and fountain of fire had jolted even the millions of tons of Pallas' mass several miles from its usual orbit.
The sack of the town had begun at once, from within, even before chunks of asteroid material, man-accelerated and--aimed, had begun to splatter blossoms of incandescence into the confusion of deflating domes and dying inhabitants. Other vandal bands had soon landed from space.
The first hours of trying to regain any sort of order, during the assault and after it was finally beaten off, must have been heroic effort almost beyond conception. Local disaster units, helped by hoppers and citizens, had done their best. Then many had turned to pursuit and revenge.
After Nelsen's arrival, his memory of the interval of acute emergency could have been broken down into a series of pictures, in which he was often active.
First, the wreckage, which he helped to pick up, like any of the others. Pallastown had been like froth on a stone, a castle on a floating, golden crag. It had been a flimsy, hastily-built mushroom city, with a beautiful, tawdry splendor that had seemed out of place, a target shining for thousands of miles.
Haw, haw...! Nelsen could almost hear the coarse laughter of the Jolly Lads, as they broke it up, robbed it, raped it--because they both sneered at its effeteness, and missed what it represented to them... Nelsen remembered very well how a man's attitudes could be warped while he struggled for mere survival in an Archer drifting in space.
Yet even as he worked with the others, to put up temporary domes and to gather the bloated dead, the hatred arose in him, and was strengthened by the fury and grief in the grim, strong faces around him. To exist where it was, Pallastown could not be as soft as it seemed. And to the hoppers--the rugged, level-headed ones who deserved the name--it had meant much, though they had visited it for only a few days of fun, now and then.
The Jolly Lads had been routed. Some must have fled chuckling and cursing almost sheepishly, like infants the magnitude of whose mischief has surpassed their intention, and has awed and frightened them, at last. They had been followed, even before the various late-coming space forces could get into action.
Nelsen overheard words that helped complete the pictures:
"I'll get them... They had my wife..."
"This was planned--you know where..."
It was planned, all right. But if Ceres, the Tovie colony, had actually been the instigator, there was evidence that the scheme had gotten out of hand. The excitement of destruction had spread. Stories came back that Ceres had been attacked, too.
"I killed a man, Frank--with this pre-Asteroidal knife. He was after Helen and my son..."
This was timid David Lester talking, awed at himself, proud, but curiously ashamed. This made another picture. By luck the Lesters lived in the small above-the-surface portion of Pallastown that had not been seriously damaged.
Frank Nelsen also killed, during a trip to Post One of the KRNH Enterprises, to get more stellene and other materials to expand the temporary encampments for the survivors. He killed two fleeing men coldly and at a distance, because they did not answer his hail. The shreds of their bodies and the loot they had been carrying were scattered to drift in the vacuum, adding another picture of retribution to thousands like it.
Belt Parnay was the name of the leader whom everybody really wanted to get. Belt Parnay--another Fessler, another Fanshaw. That was a curious thing. There was another name and face; but as far as could be told, the personality was very similar. It was as if, out of the darker side of human nature, a kind of reincarnation would always take place.
They didn't get Parnay. Inevitably, considering the enormity of space, many of the despoilers of Pallastown escaped. The shrewdest, the most experienced, the most willing to shout and lead and let others do the dangerous work, had the advantage. For they also knew how to run and hide and be prudently quiet. Parnay was one of these.
Some captives were recovered. Others were found, murdered. Fortunately, Pallastown was still largely a man's city. But pursuit and revenge still went on...
Post One was intact. Art Kuzak had surrounded it with a cordon of tough and angry asteroid-hoppers. It was the same with the other posts, except Five and Nine, which were wiped out.
"Back at last, eh, Nelsen?" Art roared angrily, as soon as Frank had entered his office.
"A fact we should accept, not discuss," Nelsen responded dryly. "You know the things we need."
"Um-hmm--Nelsen. To rescue and restore Pallastown--when it's pure nonsense, only inviting another assault! When we know that dispersal is the only answer. The way things are, everywhere, the whole damned human race needs to be dispersed--if some of it is to survive!"
It made another picture--Art Kuzak, the old friend, gone somewhat too big for his oversized britches, perhaps... No doubt Art had had to put aside some grandiose visions, considering the turn that events had taken: Whole asteroids moved across the distance, and put into orbit around the Earth, so that their mineral wealth could be extracted more conveniently. Space resorts established for tourists; new sports made possible by zero-gravity, invented and advertised. Art Kuzak had the gift of both big dreaming and of practice. He'd talked of such things, before.
Nelsen's smirk was wry. "Dispersal for survival. I agree," he said. "When they tried to settle Mars, it was being mentioned. Also, long before that. Your wisdom is not new, Art. It wasn't followed perhaps because people are herding animals by instinct. Anyhow, our side has to hold what it has really got--one-fourth of Pallastown above the surface, and considerably more underground, including shops, installations, and seventy per cent of its skilled inhabitants, determined to stay in the Belt after the others were killed or wounded, or ran away. Unless you've quit claiming to be a practical man, Art, you'll have to go along with helping them. You know what kind of materials and equipment are needed, and how much we can supply, better than I do. Or do I have to withdraw my fraction of the company in goods? We'll take up the dispersal problem as soon as possible."
Art Kuzak could only sigh heavily, grin a lopsided grin, and produce. Soon a great caravan of stuff was on the move.
There was another picture: Eileen Sands, the old Queen of Serene in a not-yet-forgotten song, sitting on a lump of yellow alloy splashed up from the surface of Pallas, where a chunk of mixed metal and stone had struck at a speed of several miles per second, fusing the native alloy and destroying her splendid Second Stop utterly in a flash of incandescence. Back in Archer, she looked almost as she used to look at Hendricks'. Her smile was rueful.
"Shucks, I'm all right, Frank," she said. "Even if Insurance, with so many disaster-claims, can't pay me--which they probably still can. The boys'll keep needing entertainment, if it's only in a stellene space tent. They won't let me just sit... For two bits, though, I'd move into a nice, safe orbit, out of the Belt and on the other side of the sun from the Earth, and build myself a retreat and retire. I'd become a spacewoman, like I wanted to, in the first place."
"I'll bet," Nelsen joshed. "Otherwise, what have you heard and seen? There's a certain fella..."
Right away, she thought he meant Ramos. "The damfool--why ask me, Frank?" she sniffed, her expression sour and sad. "How long has he been gone again, now? As usual he was proposing--for the first few days after he set out. After that, there were a few chirps of messages. Then practically nothing. Anyway, how long does it take to get way out to Pluto and back, even if a whole man can have the luck to make it. And is there much more than half of him left...? For two bits I'd--ah--skip it!"
Nelsen smiled with half of his mouth. "I wanted to know about Ramos, too, Eileen. Thanks. But I was talking about Tiflin."
"Umhmm--you're right. He and Pal Igor were both around at my place about an hour before we were hit. I called him something worse than a bad omen. He was edgy--almost like he used to be. He said that, one of these days--be cavalier--I was going to get mine. He and Igor eeled away before my customers could break their necks."
Nelsen showed his teeth. "Thanks again. I wondered," he said.
He stayed in Pallastown until, however patched it looked, it was functioning as the center of the free if rough-and-tumble part of the Belt once more--though he didn't know for how long this would be true. Order of one kind had been fairly restored. But out of the disaster, and something very similar on Ceres, the thing that had always been most feared had sprung. It was the fact of opposed organized might in close proximity in the region between Pallas and Ceres. Again there was blaming and counter-blaming, about incidents the exact sources of which never became clear. What each of the space forces, patrolling opposite each other, had in the way of weapons, was of course no public matter, either; but how do you rate two inconceivables? Nor did the threat stay out in the vastness between the planets.
From Earth came the news of a gigantic, incandescent bubble, rising from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, and spreading in almost radioactivity-free waves and ripples, disrupting penned-in areas of food-producing sea, and lapping at last at far shores. Both sides disclaimed responsibility for the blast.
Everybody insisted hopefully that this latest danger would die down, too. Statesmen would talk, official tempers would be calmed, some new working arrangements would be made. But meanwhile, the old Sword of Damocles hung by a thinner hair than ever before. One trigger-happy individual might snap it for good. If not now, the next time, or the next. A matter of hours, days, or years. The mathematics of probabilities denied that luck could last forever. In this thought there was a sense of helplessness, and the ghost of a second Asteroid Belt.
Frank Nelsen might have continued to make himself useful in Pallastown, or he might have rejoined the Kuzaks, who had moved their mobile posts back into a safer zone on the other side of Pallas. But his instincts, now, all pointed along another course of action--the only course that seemed to make any sense just then.
He approached Art Kuzak at Post One. "About deployment," he began. "I've made up some sketches, showing what I'd like the factories to turn out. The ideas aren't new--now they'll spring up all around like thoughts of food in a famine. If anything will approach answering all problems, they will. And KRNH is as well able to put them into effect as anybody... So--unless you've got some better suggestions?"
Art Kuzak looked the sketches over shrewdly for half an hour.
"All right, Frank," he said after some further conversation. "It looks good enough. I'll chip in. Whether they're sucker bait or not, these things will sell. Only--could it be you're running away?"
"Perhaps," Nelsen answered. "Or following my nose--by a kind of natural compulsion which others will display, too. Two hundred of these to start. The men going with me will pay for theirs. I'll cover the rest of this batch: You'll be better than I am at figuring out prices and terms for later batches. Just on a hunch, I'll always want a considerable oversupply. Post One's shops can turn them out fast. All they are, mostly, is just stellene, arranged in a somewhat new way. The fittings--whatever can't be supplied now, can follow."
Fifty asteroid-hoppers, ten of them accompanied by wives, went with Nelsen as he started out with a loaded caravan toward an empty region halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Everyone in the group was convinced by yearnings of his own.
Thinking of Nance Codiss, Nelsen planned to keep within beam range of the Red Planet. He had called Nance quite often. She was still working in the Survey Station hospital, which was swamped with injured from Pallastown.
Nelsen could tag all of the fierce drives in him with single words.
Home was the first. After all his years away from Earth, the meaning of the word would have been emphatic in him, even without the recurrent spasms of hot-cold weakness, which, though fading, still legally denied him the relief of going back to old familiar things. Besides, Earth seemed insecure. So he could only try to make home possible in space. Remembering his first trip, long ago, from the Moon to Mars, he knew how gentle the Big Vacuum could sometimes seem, with just a skin of stellene between it and himself. Home was a plain longing, too, in the hard, level eyes around him.
Love. Well, wasn't that part of the first item he had tagged?
Wanderlust. The adventurous distance drive--part of any wild-blooded vagabond male. Here in his idea, this other side of a human paradox seemed possible to answer, too. You could go anywhere. Home went with you. Your friends could go along, if they wished.
Freedom. In the billions of cubic miles could any system ever be big enough to pen you in, tell you what to think or do, as long as you hurt no one? Well--he thought not, but perhaps that remained to be seen.
Safety. Deployment was supposed to be the significant factor, there. And how could you make it any better than it was going to be now? Even if there were new dangers?
The future. There was no staying with the past. The Earth was becoming too small for its expanding population. It was a stifling, dangerous little world that, if the pressures were not relieved, might puff into fire and fragments at any moment during any year. And the era of prospecting and exploration in the Asteroid Belt seemed destined soon to come to an end, in any event.
Frank Nelsen's drives were very strong, after so much had passed around him for so long a time. Thus, maybe he became too idealistic and--at moments--almost fanatically believing, without enough of the saving grain of doubt and humor. The hoppers with him were much like himself--singly directed by what they had lacked for years.
The assembly operation was quickly accomplished, as soon as they were what they considered a safe distance from the Belt. On a greater scale, it was almost nothing more than the first task that Nelsen had ever performed in space--the jockying of a bubb from its blastoff drum, inflating it, rigging it, spinning it for centrifugal gravity, and fitting in its internal appointments.
Nelsen looked at the fifty-odd stellene rings that they had broken out of their containers--the others, still packed, were held in reserve. Those that had been freed glistened translucently in the sunlight. Nelsen had always thought that bubbs were beautiful. And these were still bubbs, but they were bigger, safer, more complicated.
A bantam-sized hopper named Hank Janns spoke from beside Nelsen as they floated near each other. "Pop--sizzle--and it's yours, Chief. A prefab, a house, a dwelling. A kitchen, a terrace, a place for a garden, a place for kids, even... With a few personal touches, you've got it made. Better than the house trailer my dad used to hook onto the jalopy when I was ten... My Alice likes it, too, Chief--that's the real signal! Tell your pals Kuzak that this is the Idea of the Century."
Frank Nelsen kind of thought so, too, just then. The first thing he did was to beam the Survey Station on Mars, like he was doing twice a week--to communicate more often would have courted the still dangerous chance of being pinpointed. For similar reasons he couldn't explain too clearly what his project was, but he hoped that he had gotten a picture of what it was like across to his girl.
"Come see for yourself, Nance," he said enthusiastically. "I'll arrange for a caravan from Post One to stop by on Phobos and pick you up. Also--there's my old question... So, what'll it be, Nance? Maybe we can feel a little surer of ourselves, now. We can work the rest out. Come and look, hang around--see how everything shakes down, if you'd rather."
He waited for the light-minutes to pass, before he could hear her voice. "Hello, Frank..." There was the same eager quaver. "Still pretty jammed, Frank... But we know about it here--from Art... Some of the Pallastown convalescents will be migrating your way... I'll wrangle free and come along... Maybe in about a month..."
He didn't know quite whether to take her at her word--or whether she was somehow hedging. In the Big Vacuum, the human mind seemed hard put, quite, to know itself. Distances and separations were too great. Emotions were too intense or too stunned. This much he had learned to understand. Perhaps he had lost Nance. But maybe, still--in some bleak, fatalistic way--it would be just as well in the end, for them both.
"Sure, Nance," he said gently. "I'll call again--the regular time..."
Right after that he was talking, over a much greater span, to Art Kuzak. "First phase about completed, Art... Finger to thumb--in spite of the troubles elsewhere. So let it roll...!"
Art Kuzak's reply had an undercurrent of jubilance, as if whatever he knew now was better than he had expected. "Second phase is en route. Joe will be along... Don't be surprised..."
Joe Kuzak's approach, a few hundred hours later, made a luminous cluster in the sky, like a miniature galaxy. It resolved itself into vast bales, and all of the stellene rings--storage and factory--of Post Three. Also there were over a hundred men and thirty-three wives. Many of them were Pallastown refugees.
Nelsen helped Joe through the airlock of the ring that he had hoped would be his and Nance's. "Bubbtown, huh, Frank?" Joe chuckled. "The idea is spreading faster than we had believed, and we aren't the only ones that have got it. The timing is just right. People are scared, fed up. Out Here--and on Earth, too... Most of the guys that are single in this crowd have girls who will be on the way soon. Some of the tougher space-fitness tests are being junked. We're even screening a small batch of runaways from Ceres--to be included in the next load. An experiment. But it should work out. They're just like anybody... Art is all of sudden sort of liberal--the way he gets when things seem to break right."
Everything went fine for quite a while. Art Kuzak was out playing his hunches, giving easy terms to those who couldn't pay at once.
"Might as well gamble," he growled from the distance. "Space and terrestrial forces are still poised. If we lose at all, we lose the whole works, anyway. So let's bring them from all around the Belt, from Earth, Venus and from wherever they'll come. Give them a place to work, or let them start their own deal. It all helps... You know what I hear? The Tovies are letting men do things by themselves. To hold their own in room as big as this, they have to. Their bosses are over a barrel. Just organized discipline ain't gonna work. A guy has to want things his own way..."
In a more general view, doubts were sneaking up on Frank Nelsen, though as far as KRNH was concerned, he had started the ball rolling. "We'll keep our fingers crossed," he said.
It was only a couple of Earth-days later that another member of the old Bunch showed up. "I had to bubb all the way from Mercury to Post One to get your location from Art, Frankie," he complained. "Cripes--why didn't anybody ever try to beam Gimp and me, anymore? Solar radiation ain't that hard to get past... So I had to come sneak a look for myself, to see what the Big Deal on the grapevine is."
"We left the back door unlatched for you, Two-and-Two," Nelsen laughed. "And you crept in quietly. Swell to see you."
Sitting showered and in fresh clothes on Frank Nelsen's sundeck, any changes in Two-and-Two Baines were less evident than one might have supposed. His eyes had a much surer, farther look. Otherwise he was still the same large hulk with much the same lugubrious humor.
"Mercury's okay, Frankie," he said. "About four thousand people are living in the Twilight Zone, already. I could show you pictures, but I guess you know. Whole farms and little towns under stellene. Made me some dough doing lots of the building. Could have been more, but who cares? Oh, Gimp'll be along out here sometime, soon. He was putting up another solar powerhouse. But he's beginning to say, what the hell, the future ain't there, or on any planet... So this is how it's gonna be, huh? With some additions, sure. Factories, super markets, cornfields, pig farms, parks, playgrounds, beauty parlors, all encased in stellene, and orbiting in clusters around the sun, eh...? 'Hey, Pop!' some small fry will say to his old man. 'Gimme ten bucks, please, for an ice cream cone down at the soda bubb?' And his mom'll say to his dad, 'George, Dear--is the ionocar nice and shiny? I have to go play bridge with the girls over in Nelsenville...' No, I'm not ribbing you, Frankie. It'll be kind of nice to hear that type of talk, again--if they only include a place for a man to be a little bit himself."
Two-and-Two (George) Baines sighed rapturously and continued. "Figure it out to the end, Frankie. No planets left--all the materials in them used up to build these bubbtowns. There'll be just big shining, magnificent rings made up of countless little floating stellene houses all around the sun. A zillion people, maybe more. Gardens, flowers, everything beautiful. Everybody free to move anywhere. Uh-uh--I'm not making fun, Frankie. I'm joining in with all the relief and happiness of my heart. Only, it'll be kind of sad to see the old planets go--to be replaced by a wonderful super-suburbia. Or maybe we should say, superbia."
Nelsen burst out laughing, at last. "You sly slob...! Anyhow, that extreme is millenniums off--if it has a chance of happening, at all. Even so, our descendants, if any, will be going to the stars by then. There won't be any frustration of their thirst for danger... Just as there isn't any, now, for us. Except that we can keep our weapons handy, and hope... Me--I'm a bit bored with adventure, just at present."
"So am I," Two-and-Two affirmed fervently. "Now, have you got me a job, Frankie?"
"There'll be something," Nelsen answered him. "Meanwhile, to keep from feeling regimented by civilization, you could take your rocket launcher and join the perimeter watchers that range out a thousand miles..."
Nance Codiss arrived a week later, with a group of recent Pallastown convalescents. Bad signs came with her, but that fact got lost as she hugged Nelsen quickly there in the dwelling he had set up with the thought it would be their home. At once she went on a feminine exploring expedition of the prefab's interior, and its new, gleaming appointments. Kitchen, living room, sundeck. Nelsen's garden was already well along.
"Like the place?" he asked.
"Love it, Frank," she answered quietly.
"It could have been more individual," he commented. "But we were in a hurry. So they are all identical. That can be fixed, some, soon. You're thinking about improvements?"
Her eyes twinkled past the shadow in her expression. "Always some," she laughed. Then her face went solemn. "Let them ride, for now, Frank. It's all wonderful and unbelievable. Hug me again--I love you. Only--all this is even more fantastically new to me than it is to you. Realize that, please, Frank. I'm a month late in getting here and I'm still groping my way. A little more time--for us both... Because you might be fumbling, some, too."
Her tone was gentle. He saw that her eyes, meeting his, were honest and clear. He felt the careful strength behind them, after a moment of hurt. There was no rushing, one-way enthusiasm that might easily burn out and blow up in a short time.
He held her close. "Sure, Nance," he said.
"You probably know that our group from Mars was followed, Frank. I hope I'm not a jinx."
"Of course you're not. Somebody would have followed--sometime. We're watching and listening. Just keep your Archer handy..."
The faint, shifting blips in the radar screens was an old story, reminding him that certain things were no better than before, and that some were worse. Somewhere there were other bubbtowns. There were policing space forces, too. But for millions of miles around, this cluster of eight hundred prefabs and the numerous larger bubbs that served them, were all alone.
Nelsen looked out from his sundeck, and saw dangerous contrasts. The worst, perhaps, was a spherical bubble of stellene. Inside it was a great globe of water surrounded by air--a colossal dewdrop. Within it, a man and two small boys--no doubt father and sons from Pallastown, were swimming, horsing around, having a swell time--only a few feet from nothing. Nelsen spoke softly into his radio-phone. "Leland--close down the pool..."
It wasn't long before the perimeter watch, returning from a patrol that had taken them some distance out, brought in a makeshift dwelling bubb made from odds and ends of stellene. They had also picked up its occupant, a lean comic character with an accent and a strange way of talking.
"Funny that you'd turn up, here--Igor, is it?" Nelsen said dryly.
Igor sniffed, as if with sorrow. He had been roughed up, some. "Very funny--also simple. You making a house, so I am making a house for this identical purpose. People from Ceres are already being here; in consequence, I am also arriving. Nobody are saying what are proper doing and thinking--so I am informed. I am believing--okay, Igor. When being not true, I am going away again."
The tone was bland. The pale eyes looked naive and artless, except, perhaps, for a hard, shrewd glint, deep down.
Joe Kuzak was present. "We searched him, Frank," he said. "His bubb, too. He's clean--as far as we can tell. Not even a weapon. I also asked him some questions. I savvy a little of his real lingo."
"I'll ask them over," Nelsen answered. "Igor--a friend named Tiflin wouldn't be being around some place, would he?"
The large space comedian didn't even hesitate. "I am thinking not very far--not knowing precisely. Somebody more is being here, likewise. Belt Parnay. You are knowing this one? Plenty Jollies--new fellas--not having much supplies--only many new rocket launchers they are receiving from someplace. You are understanding this? Bad luck, here, it is meaning."
Nelsen eyed the man warily, with mixed doubt and liking. "I don't think you can be going away again, right now, Igor," he said. "We don't have a jail, but a guard will be as good..."
The watch didn't give the alarm for several hours. Three hisses in the phones, made vocally. Then one, then two more. North, second quadrant, that meant. Direction of first attack. Ionic drives functioned. The cluster of bubbs began to scatter further. Nelsen knew that if Igor had told the truth, the outlook was very poor. Too much deployment would thin the defenses too much. And against new, homing rockets--if Parnay really had them--it would be almost useless. A relatively small number of men, riding free in armor, could smash the much larger targets from almost any distance.
Nelsen didn't stay in his prefab. Floating in his Archer, he could be his own, less easily identifiable, less easily hit command post, while he fired his own homing missiles at the far-off radar specks of the attackers. He ordered everyone not specifically needed inside the bubbs for some defense purpose to jump clear.
In the first half-minute, he saw at least fifty compartmented prefabs partly crumple, as explosives tore into them. A dozen, torn open, were deflated entirely. The swimming pool globe was punctured, and a cloud of frosty vapor made rainbows in the sunshine, as the water boiled away. Far out, Nelsen saw the rockets he and his own men had launched, sparkling soundlessly, no doubt scoring, some, too.
The attackers didn't even try to get close yet. Far greater damage would have to be inflicted, before panic and disorganization might give them sufficient advantage. But such damage would take only minutes. Too much would reduce the loot. So now there was a halt in the firing, and another component of fear was applied. It was a growling, taunting voice.
"Nelsen! And all of you silly bladder-brains...! This is Belt Parnay...! Ever hear of him? Come back from hell, eh? Not with just rocks, this time! The latest, surest equipment! Want to give up, now, Nelsen--you and your nice, civilized people? Cripes, what will you cranks try next? Villages built in nothing and on nothing! Thanks, though. Brother, what a blowout this is gonna provide!"
Parnay's tone had shifted, becoming mincingly mocking, then hard and joyful at the end.
Maybe he shouldn't have suggested so plainly what would happen--unless something was done, soon. Maybe he shouldn't have sounded just a little bit unsure of himself under all his bluff. Because Nelsen had made preparations that matched a general human trend. Now, he saw a condition that fitted in, making an opportunity... So he began to taunt Parnay back.
"We've got a lot of the latest type rockets to throw, too, Parnay. You'd have quite a time, trying to take us. But there's more... Just look behind you, Parnay. And all around. Not too far. Who's silly? Who's the jerk? Some new guys are in your crowd, I hear? Then they won't have much against them--they aren't real outlaws. Do you think they want to keep following you around, stinking in their armor--when what we've got is what they're bound to want, right now, too? They can hear what I'm saying, Parnay. Every one of them must have a weapon in his hands. Why, you stupid clown, you're in a trap! We will give them what they need most, without them having to risk getting killed. In space, there'll have to be a lot of things forgotten, but not for you or for the rough old-timers with you... Come on, you guys out there. There's a folded bubb right here waiting for each of you. Take it anywhere you want--away from here, of course... Parnay--big, important Belt Parnay--are you still alive...?"
Nelsen had his own sneering tone of mockery. He used it to best advantage--but with fear in his heart. Plenty of his act was only counter-bluff. But now, as he paused, he heard Two-and-Two Baines' mournful voice continue the barrage of persuasion.
"Flowers, Parnay? We ain't got many, yet. But you won't care... Fellas--do you want to keep being pushed around by this loud mouth who likes to run and lets you sweat for him, because he's mostly alone and needs company? Believe me, I know what it's like out there, too. At a certain point, all you really want is something a little like home. And the Chief ain't kidding. It was all planned. Try us and see. Send a couple of guys in. They'll come out with the proof..."
Other voices were shouting. "Wake up, you suckers...! You'll never take us, you stupid slobs...! Come on and try it, if that's what you want to be..."
What happened, could never have happened so quickly if Parnay's doubtless considerably disgruntled following hadn't been disturbed further by intrigue beforehand. Nelsen heard Parnay roar commands and curses that might have awed many a man. But then there was a cluster of minute sparks in the distance, as rockets, not launched by the defenders, homed and exploded.
There was a pause. Then many voices were audible, shouting at the same time, with scarcely any words clear... Several minutes passed like that. Then there was almost silence.
"So--has it happened?" Nelsen growled into his phone.
"It has," came the mocking answer. "Be cavalier, Nelsen. Salute the new top outlaw... Don't faint-- I knew I'd make it... And don't try anything you might regret... I'm coming in with a couple of my Jolly Lads. You'd better not welsh on your promises. Because the others are armed and waiting..."
The guys with Tiflin looked more tired than tough. Out from under their fierce, truculent bravado showed the fiercer hunger for common things and comforts. Nelsen knew. The record was in his own memory.
"You'll get your bubbs right away," he told them. "Then send the others in, a pair at a time. After that, go and get lost. Make your own place--town--whatever you want to call it... Leland, Crobert, Sharpe--fit these guys out, will you...?"
All this happened under the sardonic gaze of Glen Tiflin, and before the puzzled eyes of Joe Kuzak and Two-and-Two Baines. A dozen others were hovering near.
Nelsen lowered his voice and called, "Nance?"
She answered at once. "I'm all right, Frank. A few people to patch. Some beyond that. I'm in the hospital with Doc Forbes..."
"You guys can find something useful to do," Nelsen snapped at the gathering crowd.
"Well, Frankie," Tiflin taunted. "Aren't you going to invite me into your fancy new quarters? Joe and Two-and-Two also look as though they could stand a drink."
On the sundeck, Tiflin spoke again. "I suppose you've got it figured, Nelsen?"
Nelsen answered him in clipped fashion. "Thanks. But let's not dawdle too much. I've got a lot of wreckage to put back together... Maybe I've still got it figured wrong, Tiflin. But lately I began to think the other way. You were always around when trouble was cooking--like part of it, or like a good cop. The first might still be right."
Tiflin sneered genially. "Some cops can't carry badges. And they don't always stop trouble, but they try... Anyhow, what side do you think I was on, after Fessler kicked me around for months...? Let Igor go. He's got law and order in his soul. I kind of like having him around... But keep your mouths buttoned, will you? I'm talking to you, Mr. Baines, and you, Mr. Kuzak, as well as to you, Nelsen. And I'm take my bubb along, the same as the other ninety or so guys who are left from Parnay's crowd. I've got to look good with them... Cheers, you slobs. See you around..."
Afterwards, Joe growled, "Hell--what do you know! Him...! Special Police. Undercover. U.N., U.S., or what?"
"Shut up," Nelsen growled.
Though he had sensed it coming and had met it calmly, the Tiflin switch was something that Frank Nelsen had trouble getting over. It confused him. It made him want to laugh.
Another thing that began to bother him even more was the realization that the violence, represented by Fessler, Fanshaw, Parnay, and thousands of others like them back through history, was bound to crop up again. It was part of the complicated paradox of human nature. And it was hard to visualize a time when there wouldn't be followers--frustrated slobs who wanted to get out and kick over the universe. Nelsen had felt such urges cropping up within himself. So this wasn't the end of trouble--especially not out here in raw space, that was still far too big for man-made order.
So it wasn't just the two, opposed space navies patrolling, more quietly now, between Ceres and Pallas. That condition could pass. The way people always chose--or were born to--different sides was another matter. Or was it just the natural competition of life in whatever form? More disturbing, perhaps, was the mere fact of trying to live here, so close to natural forces that could kill in an instant.
For example, Nelsen often saw two children and a dog racing around inside one of the rotating bubbs--having fun as if just in a back yard. If the stellene were ripped, the happy picture would change to horror... How long would it take to get adjusted to--and accept--such a chance? Thoughts like that began to disturb Nelsen. Out here, in all this enormous freedom, the shift from peaceful routine to tragedy could be quicker than ever before.
But is wasn't thinking about such grim matters that actually threw Frank Nelsen--that got him truly mixed up. In Parnay's attack, ten men and two women had been killed. There were also twenty-seven injured. Such facts he could accept--they didn't disturb him too much, either. Yet there was a curious sort of straw that broke the camel's back, one might have said.
The incident took place quite a while after the assault. Out on an inspection tour in his Archer, he happened to glance through the transparent wall of the sundeck of a prefab he was passing...
In a moment he was inside, grinning happily. Miss Rosalie Parks was lecturing him: "... You needn't be surprised that I am here, Franklin. 'O, tempora O, mores!' Cicero once said. 'O, the times! O, the customs!' But we needn't be so pessimistic. I am in perfect health--and ten years below retirement age. Young people, I suspect, will still be taught Latin if they choose... Or there will be something else... Of course I had heard of your project... It was quite easy for you not to notice my arrival. But I came with the latest group, straight from Earth..."
Nelsen was very pleased that Miss Parks was here. He told her so. He stayed for cakes and coffee. He told her that it was quite right for her to keep up with the times. He believed this, himself...
Afterwards, though, in his own quarters, he began to laugh. Her presence was so incongruous, so fantastic...
His laughter became wild. Then it changed to great rasping hiccups. Too much that was unbelievable by old standards had happened around him. This was delayed reaction to space. He had heard of such a thing. But he had hardly thought that it could apply to him, anymore...! Well, he knew what to do... Tranquilizer tablets were practically forgotten things to him. But he gulped one now. In a few minutes, he seemed okay, again...
Yet he couldn't help thinking back to the Bunch, the Planet Strappers. To the wild fulfillment they had sought... So--most of them had made it. They had become men--the hard way. Except, of course, Eileen--the distaff side... They had planned, callowly, to meet and compare adventures in ten years. And this was still less than seven...
How long had it been since he had even beamed old Paul, in Jarviston...? Now that most of the Syrtis Fever had left him, it seemed futile even to consider such a thing. It involved memories buried in enormous time, distance, change, and unexpectedness.
Glen Tiflin--the sour, space-wild punk who had become a cop. Had Tiflin even saved his--Frank Nelsen's--life, once, long ago, persuading a Jolly Lad leader to cast him adrift for a joke, rather than to kill him and Ramos outright...?
Charlie Reynolds--the Bunch-member whom everybody had thought most likely to succeed. Well, Charlie was dead from a simple thing, and buried on Venus. He was unknown--except to his acquaintances.
Jig Hollins, the guy who had played it safe, was just as dead.
Eileen Sands was a celebrity in Serene, in Pallastown and the whole Belt.
Mex Ramos--of the flapping squirrel tails on an old motor scooter--now belonged to the history of exploration, though he no longer had real hands or feet, and, very likely, was now dead, somewhere out toward interstellar space.
David Lester, the timid one, had become successful in his own way, and was the father of one of the first children to be born in the Belt.
Two-and-Two Baines had won enough self-confidence to make cracks about the future. Gimp Hines, once the saddest case in the Whole Bunch, had been, for a long time, perhaps the best adjusted to the Big Vacuum.
Art Kuzak, one-time hunkie football player, was a power among the asteroids. His brother, Joe, had scarcely changed, personally.
About himself, Nelsen got the most lost. What had he become, after his wrong guesses and his great luck, and the fact that he had managed to see more than most? Generally, he figured that he was still the same free-wheeling vagabond by intention, but too serious to quite make it work out. Sometimes he actually gave people orders. It came to him as a surprise that he must be almost as rich as old J. John Reynolds, who was still drawing wealth from a comparatively small loan--futilely at his age, unless he had really aimed at the ideal of bettering the future.
Nelsen's busy mind couldn't stop. He thought of three other-world cultures he had glimpsed. Two had destroyed each other. The third and strangest was still to be reckoned with...
There, he came to Mitch Storey, the colored guy with the romantic name. Of all the Planet Strappers, his history was the most fabulous. Maybe, now, with a way of living in open space started, and with the planets ultimately to serve only as sources of materials, Mitch's star people would be left in relative peace for centuries.
Frank Nelsen began to chuckle again. As if something, everything, was funny. Which, perhaps, it was in a way. Because the whole view, personal and otherwise, seemed too huge and unpredictable for his wits to grasp. It was as if neither he, nor any other person, belonged where he was at all. He checked his thoughts in time. Otherwise, he would have commenced hiccuping.
That was the way it went for a considerable succession of arbitrary twenty-four hour day-periods. As long as he kept his attention on the tasks in hand, he was okay--he felt fine. Still, the project was proceeding almost automatically, just now. The first cluster of prefabs had grown until it had been split into halves, which moved a million miles apart, circling the sun. And he knew that there were other clusters, built by other outfits, growing and dividing into widely separated portions of the same great ring-like zone.
Maybe the old problems were beat. Safety? If deployment was the answer to that, it was certainly there--to a degree, at least. Room enough? Check. It was certainly available. Freedom of mind and action? There wasn't much question that that would work out, too. Home, comfort, and a kind of life not too unfamiliar? In the light of detached logic and observation, that was going fine, too. In the main, people were adjusting very quickly and eagerly. Perhaps too quickly.
That was where Nelsen always got scared, as if he had become a nervous old man. The Big Vacuum had a grandeur. It could seem gentle. Could children, women and men--everybody sometimes forgot--learn to live with it without losing their respect for it, until suddenly it killed them?
That was the worst point, if he let himself think. And how could he always avoid that? From there his thoughts would branch out into his multiple uncertainties, confusions and puzzlements. Then those strangling hiccups would come. And who could be taking devil-killers all the time?
He hadn't avoided Nance Codiss. He talked with her every day, lunched with her, even held her hand. Otherwise, a restraint had come over him. Because something was all wrong with him, and was getting worse. Just one urge was clear, now, inside him. She knew, of course, that he was loused up; but she didn't say anything. Finally he told her.
"You were right, Nance. I was fumbling my way, too. Space fatigue, the medic told me just a little while ago. He agrees with me that I should go back to Earth. I've got to go--to take a look at everything from the small end, again. Of course I've always had the longing. And now I can go. It has been a year since the worst of the Syrtis Fever."
"I've had the fever. And sometimes the longing, Frank," she said after she had studied him for a moment. "I think I'd like to go."
"Only if you want to, Nance. It's me that's flunking out, pal." He chuckled apologetically, almost lightly. "My part has to be a one-person deal. I don't know whether I'll ever come back. And you seem to fit, out here."
She looked at him coolly for almost a minute. "All right, Frank," she said quietly. "Follow your nose. It's just liable to be right on the beam--for you. I might follow mine. I don't know."
"Joe and Two-and-Two are around--if you need anything, Nance," he said. "I'll tell them. Gimp, I hear, is on the way. Not much point in my waiting for him, though..."
Somehow he loved Nance Codiss as much or more than ever. But how could he tell her that and make sense? Not much made sense to him anymore. It seemed that he had to get away from everybody that he had ever seen in space.
Fifty hours before his departure with a returning bubb caravan that had brought more Earth-emigrants, Nelsen acquired a travelling companion who had arrived from Pallastown with a small caravan bringing machinery. The passenger-hostess brought him to Nelsen's prefab. He was a grave little guy, five years old. He was solemn, polite, frightened, tall for his age--funny how corn and kids grew at almost zero-gravity.
The boy handed Nelsen a letter. "From my father and mother, sir," he said.
Nelsen read the typed missive.
"Dear Frank: The rumor has come that you are going home. You have our very best wishes, as always. Our son, Davy, is being sent to his paternal grandmother, now living in Minneapolis. He will go to school there. He is capable of making the trip without any special attention. But--a small imposition. If you can manage it, please look in on him once in a while, on the way. We would appreciate this favor. Thank you, take care of yourself, and we shall hope to see you somewhere within the next few months. Your sincere friends, David and Helen Lester."
A lot of nerve, Nelsen thought first. But he tried to grin engagingly at the kid and almost succeeded.
"We're in luck, Dave," he said. "I'm going to Minneapolis, too. I'm afraid of a lot of things. What are you afraid of?"
The small fry's jutting lip trembled. "Earth," he said. "A great big planet. Hoppers tell me I won't even be able to stand up or breathe."
Nelsen very nearly laughed and went into hiccups, again. Fantastic. Another viewpoint. Seeing through the other end of the telescope. But how else would it be for a youngster born in the Belt, while being sent--in the old colonial pattern--to the place that his parents regarded as home?
"Those jokers," Nelsen scoffed. "They're pulling your leg! It just isn't so, Davy. Anyhow, during the trip, the big bubb will be spun fast enough, so that we will get used to the greater Earth-gravity. Let me tell you something. I guess it's space and the Belt that I'm afraid of. I never quite got over it. Silly, huh?"
But as Nelsen watched the kid brighten, he remembered that he, himself, had been scared of Earth, too. Scared to return, to show weakness, to lack pride... Well, to hell with that. He had accomplished enough, now, maybe, to cancel such objections. Now it seemed that he had to get to Earth before it vanished because of something he had helped start. Silly, of course...
He and Davy travelled fast and almost in luxury. Within two weeks they were in orbit around the bulk of the Old World. Then, in the powerful tender with its nuclear retard rockets, there was the Blast In--the reverse of that costly agony that had once meant hard won and enormous freedom, when he was poor in money and rich in mighty yearning. But now Nelsen yielded in all to the mother clutch of the gravity. The whole process had been gentled and improved. There were special anti-knock seats. There was sound- and vibration-insulation. Even Davy's slight fear was more than half thrill.
At the new Minneapolis port, Nelsen delivered David Lester, Junior into the care of his grandmother, who seemed much more human than Nelsen once had thought long ago. Then he excused himself quickly.
Seeking the shelter of anonymity, he bought a rucksack for his few clothes, and boarded a bus which dropped him at Jarviston, Minnesota, at two a.m. He thrust his hands into his pockets, partly like a lonesome tramp, partly like some carefree immortal, and partly like a mixed-up wraith who didn't quite know who or what he was, or where he belonged.
In his wallet he had about five hundred dollars. How much more he might have commanded, he couldn't even guess. Wups, fella, he told himself. That's too weird, too indigestible--don't start hiccuping again. How old are you--twenty-five, or twenty-five thousand years? Wups--careful...
The full Moon was past zenith, looking much as it always had. The blue-tinted air domes of colossal industrial development, were mostly too small at this distance to be seen without a glass. Good...
With wondering absorption he sniffed the mingling of ripe field and road smells, borne on the warm breeze of the late-August night. Some few cars evidently still ran on gasoline. For a moment he watched neon signs blink. In the desertion he walked past Lehman's Drug Store and Otto Kramer's bar, and crossed over to pause for a nameless moment in front of Paul Hendricks' Hobby Center, which was all dark, and seemed little changed. He took to a side street, and won back the rustle of trees and the click of his heels in the silence.
A few more buildings--that was about all that was visibly different in Jarviston, Minnesota.
A young cop eyed him as he returned to the main drag and paused near a street lamp. He had a flash of panic, thinking that the cop was somebody, grown up, now, who would recognize him. But at least it was no one that he remembered.
The cop grinned. "Get settled in a hotel, buddy," he said. "Or else move on, out of town."
Nelsen grinned back, and ambled out to the highway, where intermittent clumps of traffic whispered.
There he paused, and looked up at the sky, again. The electric beacon of a weather observation satellite blinked on and off, moving slowly. Venus had long since set, with hard-to-see Mercury preceding it. Jupiter glowed in the south. Mars looked as remote and changeless as it must have looked in the Stone Age. The asteroids were never even visible here without a telescope.
The people that he knew, and the events that he had experienced Out There, were like myths, now. How could he ever put Here and There together, and unite the mismatched halves of himself and his experience? He had been born on Earth, the single home of his kind from the beginning. How could he ever even have been Out There?
He didn't try to hitch a ride. He walked fourteen miles to the next town, bought a small tent, provisions and a special, miniaturized radio. Then he slipped into the woods, along Hickman's Lake, where he used to go.
There he camped, through September, and deep into October. He fished, he swam again. He dropped stones into the water, and watched the circles form, with a kind of puzzled groping in his memory. He retreated from the staggering magnificence of his recent past and clutched at old simplicities.
On those rare occasions when he shaved, he saw the confused sickness in his face, reflected by his mirror. Sometimes, for a moment, he felt hot, and then cold, as if his blood still held a tiny trace of Syrtis Fever. If there was such a thing? No--don't start to laugh, he warned himself. Relax. Let the phantoms fade away. Somewhere, that multiple bigness of Nothing, of life and death, of success and unfairness and surprise, must have reality--but not here...
Occasionally he listened to news on the radio. But mostly he shut it off--out. Until boredom at last began to overtake him--because he had been used to so much more than what was here. Until--specifically--one morning, when the news came too quickly, and with too much impact. It was a recording, scratchy, and full of unthinkable distance.
"... Frank, Gimp, Two-and-Two, Paul, Mr. Reynolds, Otto, Les, Joe, Art, everybody--especially you, Eileen--remember what you promised, when I get back, Eileen...! Here I am, on Pluto--edge of the star desert! Clear sailing--all the way. All I see, yet, is twilight, rocks, mountains, snow which must be frozen atmosphere--and one big star, Sol. But I'll get the data, and be back..."
Nelsen listened to the end, with panic in his face--as if such adventures and such living were too gigantic and too rich... He hiccuped once. Then he held himself very still and concentrated. He had known that voice Out There and Here, too. Now, as he heard it again--Here, but from Out There--it became like a joining force to bring them both together within himself. Though how could it be...?
"Ramos," he said aloud. "Made it... Another good guy, accomplishing what he wanted... Hey...! Hey, that's swell... Like things should happen."
He didn't hiccup anymore, or laugh. By being very careful, he just grinned, instead. He arose to his feet, slowly.
"What am I doing here--wasting time?" he seemed to ask the woods.
Without picking up his camping gear at all, he headed for the road, thumbed a ride to Jarviston, where he arrived before eight o'clock. Somebody had started ringing the city hall bell. Celebration?
Hendricks' was the most logical place for Nelsen to go, but he passed it by, following a hunch to his old street. She had almost said that she might come home, too. He touched the buzzer.
Not looking too completely dishevelled himself, he stood there, as a girl--briskly early in dress and impulse, so as not to waste the bright morning--opened the door.
"Yeah, Nance--me," he croaked apologetically. "Ramos has reached Pluto!"
"I know, Frankie!" she burst out.
But his words rushed on. "I've been goofing off--by Hickman's Lake. Over now. Emotional indigestion, I guess--from living too big, before I could take it. I figured you might be here. If you weren't, I'd come... Because I know where I belong. Nance--I hope you're not angry. Maybe we're pulling together, at last?"
"Angry--when I was the first fumbler? How could that be, Frank? Oh, I knew where you were--folks found out. I told them to leave you alone, because I understood some of what you were digging through. Because it was a little the same--for me... So, you see, I didn't just tag after you." She laughed a little. "That wouldn't be proud, would it? Even though Joe and Two-and-Two said I had to go bring you back..."
His arms went tight around her, right there on the old porch. "Nance--love you," he whispered. "And we've got to be tough. Everybody's got to be tough--to match what we've come to. Even little kids. But it was always like that--on any kind of frontier, wasn't it? A few will get killed, but more will live--many more..."
Like that, Frank Nelsen shook the last of the cobwebs out of his brain--and got back to his greater destiny.
"I'll buy all of that philosophy," Nance chuckled gently. "But you still look as though you needed some breakfast, Frank."
He grinned. "Later. Let's go to see Paul, first. A big day for him--because of Ramos. Paul is getting feeble, I suppose?" Nelsen's face had sobered.
"Not so you could notice it much, Frank," Nance answered. "There's a new therapy--another side of What's Coming, I guess..."
They walked the few blocks. The owner of the Hobby Center was now a long-time member of KRNH Enterprises. He had the means to expand and modernize the place beyond recognition. But clearly he had realized that some things should not change.
In the display window, however, there gleamed a brand-new Archer Nine, beautiful as a garden or a town floating, unsupported, under the stars--beautiful as the Future, which was born of the Past.
A Bunch of fellas--the current crop of aficionados--were inside the store, making lots of noise over the news. Was that Chip Potter, grown tall? Was that his same old dog, Blaster? Frank Nelsen could see Paul Hendricks' white-fringed bald-spot.
"Go ahead--open the door. Or are you still scared?" Nance challenged lightly.
"No--just anticipating," Nelsen gruffed. "And seeing if I can remember what's Out There ... Serene, bubb, Belt, Pallas..." He spoke the words like comic incantations, yet with a dash of reverence.
"Superbia?" Nance teased.
"That is somebody's impertinent joke!" he growled in feigned solemnity. "Anyhow, it would be too bad if something that important couldn't take a little ribbing. Shucks--we've hardly started to work, yet!"
He drew Nance back a pace, out of sight of those in the store, and kissed her long and rather savagely.
"With all its super-complications, life still seems pretty nice," he commented.
The door squeaked, just as it used to, as Nelsen pushed it open. The old overhead bell jangled.
Pale, watery eyes lifted and lighted with another fulfilment.
"Well, Frank! Long time no see...!"
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
By Randall Garrett
The tumult in Convention Hall was a hurricane of sound that lashed at a sea of human beings that surged and eddied around the broad floor. Men and women, delegates and spectators, aged party wheelhorses and youngsters who would vote for the first time that November, all lost their identities to merge with that swirling tide. Over their heads, like agitated bits of flotsam, pennants fluttered and placards rose and dipped. Beneath their feet, discarded metal buttons that bore the names of two or three "favorite sons" and those that had touted the only serious contender against the party's new candidate were trodden flat. None of them had ever really had a chance.
The buttons that were now pinned on every lapel said: "Blast 'em With Cannon!" or "Cannon Can Do!" The placards and the box-shaped signs, with a trifle more dignity, said: WIN WITH CANNON and CANNON FOR PRESIDENT and simply JAMES H. CANNON.
Occasionally, in the roar of noise, there were shouts of "Cannon! Cannon! Rah! Rah! Rah! Cannon! Cannon! Sis-boom-bah!" and snatches of old popular tunes hurriedly set with new words:
On with Cannon, on with Cannon! White House, here we come! He's a winner, no beginner; He can get things done! (Rah! Rah! Rah!)
And, over in one corner, a group of college girls were enthusiastically chanting:
He is handsome! He is sexy! We want J. H. C. for Prexy!
It was a demonstration that lasted nearly three times as long as the eighty-five-minute demonstration that had occurred when Representative Matson had first proposed his name for the party's nomination.
* * * * *
Spatially, Senator James Harrington Cannon was four blocks away from Convention Hall, in a suite at the Statler-Hilton, but electronically, he was no farther away than the television camera that watched the cheering multitude from above the floor of the hall.
The hotel room was tastefully and expensively decorated, but neither the senator nor any of the other men in the room were looking at anything else except the big thirty-six-inch screen that glowed and danced with color. The network announcer's words were almost inaudible, since the volume had been turned way down, but his voice sounded almost as excited as those from the convention floor.
Senator Cannon's broad, handsome face showed a smile that indicated pleasure, happiness, and a touch of triumph. His dark, slightly wavy hair, with the broad swathes of silver at the temples, was a little disarrayed, and there was a splash of cigarette ash on one trouser leg, but otherwise, even sitting there in his shirt sleeves, he looked well-dressed. His wide shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist and lean hips, and he looked a good ten years younger than his actual fifty-two.
He lit another cigarette, but a careful scrutiny of his face would have revealed that, though his eyes were on the screen, his thoughts were not in Convention Hall.
Representative Matson, looking like an amazed bulldog, managed to chew and puff on his cigar simultaneously and still speak understandable English. "Never saw anything like it. Never. First ballot and you had it, Jim. I know Texas was going to put up Perez as a favorite son on the first ballot, but they couldn't do anything except jump on the bandwagon by the time the vote reached them. Unanimous on the first ballot."
Governor Spanding, a lantern-jawed, lean man sitting on the other side of Senator Cannon, gave a short chuckle and said, "Came close not t' being unanimous. The delegate from Alabama looked as though he was going to stick to his 'One vote for Byron Beauregarde Cadwallader' until Cadwallader himself went over to make him change his vote before the first ballot was complete."
The door opened, and a man came in from the other room. He bounced in on the balls of his feet, clapped his hands together, and dry-washed them briskly. "We're in!" he said, with businesslike glee. "Image, gentlemen! That's what does it: Image!" He was a tall, rather bony-faced man in his early forties, and his manner was that of the self-satisfied businessman who is quite certain that he knows all of the answers and all of the questions. "Create an image that the public goes for, and you're in!"
Senator Cannon turned his head around and grinned. "Thanks, Horvin, but let's remember that we still have an election to win."
"We'll win it," Horvin said confidently. "A properly projected image attracts the public--"
"Oh, crud," said Representative Matson in a growly voice. "The opposition has just as good a staff of PR men as we do. If we beat 'em, it'll be because we've got a better man, not because we've got better public relations."
"Of course," said Horvin, unabashed. "We can project a better image because we've got better material to work with. We--"
"Jim managed to get elected to the Senate without any of your help, and he went in with an avalanche. If there's any 'image projecting' done around here, Jim is the one who does it."
Horvin nodded his head as though he were in complete agreement with Matson. "Exactly. His natural ability plus the scientific application of mass psychology make an unbeatable team."
Matson started to say something, but Senator Cannon cut in first. "He's right, Ed. We've got to use every weapon we have to win this election. Another four years of the present policies, and the Sino-Russian Bloc will be able to start unilateral disarmament. They won't have to start a war to bury us."
Horvin looked nervous. "Uh ... Senator--"
Cannon made a motion in the air. "I know, I know. Our policy during the campaign will be to run down the opposition, not the United States. We are still in a strong position, but if this goes on--Don't worry, Horvin; the whole thing will be handled properly."
Before any of them could say anything, Senator Cannon turned to Representative Matson and said: "Ed, will you get Matthew Fisher on the phone? And the Governor of Pennsylvania and ... let's see ... Senator Hidekai and Joe Vitelli."
"I didn't even know Fisher was here," Matson said. "What do you want him for?"
"I just want to talk to him, Ed. Get him up here, with the others, will you?"
"Sure, Jim; sure." He got up and walked over to the phone.
Horvin, the PR man, said: "Well, Senator, now that you're the party's candidate for the Presidency of the United States, who are you going to pick for your running mate? Vollinger was the only one who came even close to giving you a run for your money, and it would be good public relations if you chose him. He's got the kind of personality that would make a good image."
"Horvin," the senator said kindly, "I'll pick the men; you build the image from the raw material I give you. You're the only man I know who can convince the public that a sow's ear is really a silk purse, and you may have to do just that.
"You can start right now. Go down and get hold of the news boys and tell them that the announcement of my running mate will be made as soon as this demonstration is over.
"Tell them you can't give them any information other than that, but give them the impression that you already know. Since you don't know, don't try to guess; that way you won't let any cats out of the wrong bags. But you do know that he's a fine man, and you're pleased as all hell that I made such a good choice. Got that?"
Horvin grinned. "Got it. You pick the man; I'll build the image." He went out the door.
* * * * *
When the door had closed, Governor Spanding said: "So it's going to be Fisher, is it?"
"You know too much, Harry," said Senator Cannon, grinning. "Remind me to appoint you ambassador to Patagonia after Inauguration Day."
"If I lose the election at home, I may take you up on it. But why Matthew Fisher?"
"He's a good man, Harry."
"Hell yes, he is," the governor said. "Tops. I've seen his record as State Attorney General and as Lieutenant Governor. And when Governor Dinsmore died three years ago, Fisher did a fine job filling out his last year. But--"
"But he couldn't get re-elected two years ago," Senator Cannon said. "He couldn't keep the governor's office, in spite of the great job he'd done."
"That's right. He's just not a politician, Jim. He doesn't have the ... the personality, the flash, whatever it is that it takes to get a man elected by the people. I've got it; you sure as hell have it; Fisher doesn't."
"That's why I've got Horvin working for us," said Senator Cannon. "Whether I need him or not may be a point of argument. Whether Matthew Fisher needs him or not is a rhetorical question."
Governor Spanding lit a cigarette in silence while he stared at the quasi-riot that was still coming to the screen from Convention Hall. Then he said: "You've been thinking of Matt Fisher all along, then."
"Not Patagonia," said the senator. "Tibet."
"I'll shut up if you want me to, Jim."
"No. Go ahead."
"All right. Jim, I trust your judgment. I've got no designs on the Vice Presidency myself, and you know it. I like to feel that, if I had, you'd give me a crack at it. No, don't answer that, Jim; just let me talk.
"What I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of good men in the party who'd make fine VP's; men who've given their all to get you the nomination, and who'll work even harder to see that you're elected. Why pass them up in favor of a virtual unknown like Matt Fisher?"
Senator Cannon didn't say anything. He knew that Spanding didn't want an answer yet.
"The trouble with Fisher," Spanding went on, "is that he ... well, he's too autocratic. He pulls decisions out of midair. He--" Spanding paused, apparently searching for a way to express himself. Senator Cannon said nothing; he waited expectantly.
"Take a look at the Bossard Decision," Spanding said. "Fisher was Attorney General for his state at the time.
"Bossard was the Mayor of Waynesville--twelve thousand and something population, I forget now. Fisher didn't even know Bossard. But when the big graft scandal came up there in Waynesville, Fisher wouldn't prosecute. He didn't actually refuse, but he hemmed and hawed around for five months before he really started the State's machinery to moving. By that time, Bossard had managed to get enough influence behind him so that he could beat the rap.
"When the case came to trial in the State Supreme Court, Matt Fisher told the Court that it was apparent that Mayor Bossard was the victim of the local district attorney and the chief of police of Waynesville. In spite of the evidence against him, Bossard was acquitted." Spanding took a breath to say something more, but Senator James Cannon interrupted him.
"Not 'acquitted', Harry. 'Exonerated'. Bossard never even should have come to trial," the senator said. "He was a popular, buddy-buddy sort of guy who managed to get himself involved as an unwitting figurehead. Bossard simply wasn't--and isn't--very bright. But he was a friendly, outgoing, warm sort of man who was able to get elected through the auspices of the local city machine. Remember Jimmy Walker?"
Spanding nodded. "Yes, but--"
"Same thing," Cannon cut in. "Bossard was innocent, as far as any criminal intent was concerned, but he was too easy on his so-called friends. He--"
"Oh, crud, Jim!" the governor interrupted vehemently. "That's the same whitewash that Matthew Fisher gave him! The evidence would have convicted Bossard if Fisher hadn't given him time to cover up!"
* * * * *
Senator James Cannon suddenly became angry. He jammed his own cigarette butt into the ash tray, turned toward Spanding, and snapped: "Harry, just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Bossard wasn't actually guilty. Let's suppose that the Constitution of the United States is really true--that a man isn't guilty until he's proven guilty.
"Just suppose"--his voice and expression became suddenly acid--"that Bossard was not guilty. Try that, huh? Pretend, somewhere in your own little mind, that a mere accusation--no matter what the evidence--doesn't prove anything! Let's just make a little game between the two of us that the ideal of Equality Under the Law means what it says. Want to play?"
"Well, yes, but--"
"O.K.," Cannon went on angrily. "O.K. Then let's suppose that Bossard really was stupid. He could have been framed easily, couldn't he? He could have been set up as a patsy, couldn't he? Couldn't he?"
"Well, sure, but--"
"Sure! Then go on and suppose that the prosecuting attorney had sense enough to see that Bossard had been framed. Suppose further that the prosecutor was enough of a human being to know that Bossard either had to be convicted or completely exonerated. What would he do?"
Governor Spanding carefully put his cigarette into the nearest ash tray. "If that were the case, I'd completely exonerate him. I wouldn't leave it hanging. Matt Fisher didn't do anything but make sure that Bossard couldn't be legally convicted; he didn't prove that Bossard was innocent."
"And what was the result, as far as Bossard was concerned?" the senator asked.
Spanding looked around at the senator, staring Cannon straight in the face. "The result was that Bossard was left hanging, Jim. If I go along with you and assume that Bossard was innocent, then Fisher fouled up just as badly as he would have if he'd fluffed the prosecution of a guilty man. Either a man is guilty, or he's innocent. If, according to your theory, the prosecutor knows he's innocent, then he should exonerate the innocent man! If not, he should do his best to convict!"
"He should?" snapped Cannon. "He should? Harry, you're letting your idealism run away with you! If Bossard were guilty, he should have been convicted--sure! But if he were innocent, should he be exonerated? Should he be allowed to run again for office? Should the people be allowed to think that he was lily-white? Should they be allowed to re-elect a nitwit who'd do the same thing again because he was too stupid to see that he was being used?
"No!" He didn't let the governor time to speak; he went on: "Matthew Fisher set it up perfectly. He exonerated Bossard enough to allow the ex-mayor to continue in private life without any question. But--there remained just enough question to keep him out of public office for the rest of his life. Was that wrong, Harry? Was it?"
Spanding looked blankly at the senator for a moment, then his expression slowly changed to one of grudging admiration. "Well ... if you put it that way ... yeah. I mean, no; it wasn't wrong. It was the only way to play it." He dropped his cigarette into a nearby ash tray. "O.K., Jim; you win. I'll back Fisher all the way."
"Thanks, Harry," Cannon said. "Now, if we--"
Congressman Matson came back into the room, saying, "I got 'em, Jim. Five or ten minutes, they'll be here. Which one of 'em is it going to be?"
"Matt Fisher, if we can come to an agreement," Cannon said, watching Matson's face closely.
Matson chewed at his cigar for a moment, then nodded. "He'll do. Not much political personality, but, hell, he's only running for Veep. We can get him through." He took the cigar out of his mouth. "How do you want to run it?"
"I'll talk to Fisher in my bedroom. You and Harry hold the others in here with the usual chitchat. Tell 'em I'm thinking over the choice of my running mate, but don't tell 'em I've made up my mind yet. If Matt Fisher doesn't want it, we can tell the others that Matt and I were simply talking over the possibilities. I don't want anyone to think he's second choice. Got it?"
Matson nodded. "Whatever you say, Jim."
* * * * *
That year, late August was a real blisterer along the eastern coast of the United States. The great megalopolis that sprawled from Boston to Baltimore in utter scorn of state boundaries sweltered in the kind of atmosphere that is usually only found in the pressing rooms of large tailor shops. Consolidated Edison, New York's Own Power Company, was churning out multimegawatts that served to air condition nearly every enclosed place on the island of Manhattan--which served only to make the open streets even hotter. The power plants in the Bronx, west Brooklyn, and east Queens were busily converting hydrogen into helium and energy, and the energy was being used to convert humid air at ninety-six Fahrenheit into dry air at seventy-one Fahrenheit. The subways were crowded with people who had no intention of going anywhere in particular; they just wanted to retreat from the hot streets to the air-conditioned bowels of the city.
But the heat that can be measured by thermometers was not the kind that was causing two groups of men in two hotels, only a few blocks apart on the East Side of New York's Midtown, to break out in sweat, both figurative and literal.
One group was ensconced in the Presidential Suite of the New Waldorf--the President and Vice President of the United States, both running for re-election, and other high members of the incumbent party.
The other group, consisting of Candidates Cannon and Fisher, and the high members of their party, were occupying the only slightly less pretentious Bridal Suite of a hotel within easy walking distance of the Waldorf.
Senator James Cannon read through the news release that Horvin had handed him, then looked up at the PR man. "This is right off the wire. How long before it's made public?"
Horvin glanced at his watch. "Less than half an hour. There's an NBC news program at five-thirty. Maybe before, if one of the radio stations think it's important enough for a bulletin break."
"That means that it will have been common knowledge for four hours by the time we go on the air for the debate," said Cannon.
Horvin nodded, still looking at his watch. "And even if some people miss the TV broadcast, they'll be able to read all about it. The deadline for the Daily Register is at six; the papers will hit the streets at seven-fifteen, or thereabouts."
Cannon stood up from his chair. "Get your men out on the streets. Get 'em into bars, where they can pick up reactions to this. I want as good a statistical sampling as you can get in so short a time. It'll have to be casual; I don't want your men asking questions as though they were regular pollsters; just find out what the general trend is."
"Right." Horvin got out fast.
The other men in the room were looking expectantly at the senator. He paused for a moment, glancing around at them, and then looked down at the paper and said: "This is a bulletin from Tass News Agency, Moscow." Then he began reading.
"Russian Luna Base One announced that at 1600 Greenwich Standard Time (12:00 N EDST) a presumed spacecraft of unknown design was damaged by Russian rockets and fell to the surface of Luna somewhere in the Mare Serenitas, some three hundred fifty miles from the Soviet base. The craft was hovering approximately four hundred miles above the surface when spotted by Soviet radar installations. Telescopic inspection showed that the craft was not--repeat: not--powered by rockets. Since it failed to respond to the standard United Nations recognition signals, rockets were fired to bring it down. In attempting to avoid the rockets, the craft, according to observers, maneuvered in an entirely unorthodox manner, which cannot be attributed to a rocket drive. A nearby burst, however, visibly damaged the hull of the craft, and it dropped toward Mare Serenitas. Armed Soviet moon-cats are, at this moment, moving toward the downed craft.
"Base Commander Colonel A. V. Gryaznov is quoted as saying: 'There can be no doubt that we shall learn much from this craft, since it is apparently of extraterrestrial origin. We will certainly be able to overpower any resistance it may offer, since it has already proved vulnerable to our weapons. The missiles which were fired toward our base were easily destroyed by our own antimissile missiles, and the craft was unable to either destroy or avoid our own missiles.'
"Further progress will be released by the Soviet Government as it occurs."
Senator Cannon dropped the sheet of paper to his side. "That's it. Matt, come in the bedroom; I'd like to talk to you."
* * * * *
Matthew Fisher, candidate for Vice President of the United States, heaved his two-hundred-fifty-pound bulk out of the chair he had been sitting in and followed the senator into the other room. Behind them, the others suddenly broke out into a blather of conversation. Fisher's closing of the door cut the sound off abruptly.
Senator Cannon threw the newssheet on the nearest bed and swung around to face Matthew Fisher. He looked at the tall, thick, muscular man trying to detect the emotions behind the ugly-handsome face that had been battered up by football and boxing in college, trying to fathom the thoughts beneath the broad forehead and the receding hairline.
"You got any idea what this really means, Matt?" he asked after a second.
Fisher's blue-gray eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and his gaze sharpened. "Not until just this moment," he said.
Cannon looked suddenly puzzled. "What do you mean?"
"Well," Fisher said thoughtfully, "you wouldn't ask me unless it meant something more than appears on the surface." He grinned rather apologetically. "I'm sorry, Jim; it takes a second or two to reconstruct exactly what did go through my mind." His grin faded into a thoughtful frown. "Anyway, you asked me, and since you're head of the Committee on SPACE Travel and Exploration--" He spread his hands in a gesture that managed to convey both futility and apology. "The mystery spacecraft is ours," he said decisively.
James Cannon wiped a palm over his forehead and sat down heavily on one of the beds. "Right. Sit down. Fine. Now; listen: We--the United States--have a space drive that compares to the rocket in the same way that the jet engine compares to the horse. We've been keeping it under wraps that are comparable to those the Manhattan Project was kept under 'way back during World War II. Maybe more so. But--" He stopped, watching Fisher's face. Then: "Can you see it from there?"
"I think so," Fisher said. "The Soviet Government knows that we have something ... in fact, they've known it for a long time. They don't know what, though." He found a heavy briar in his pocket, pulled it out, and began absently stuffing it with tobacco from a pouch he'd pulled out with the pipe. "Our ship didn't shoot at their base. Couldn't, wouldn't have. Um. They shot it down to try to look it over. Purposely made a near-miss with an atomic warhead." He struck a match and puffed the pipe alight.
"Hm-m-m. The Soviet Government," he went on, "must have known that we had something 'way back when they signed the Greenston Agreement." Fisher blew out a cloud of smoke. "They wanted to change the wording of that, as I remember."
"That's right," Cannon said. "We wanted it to read that 'any advances in rocket engineering shall be shared equally among the Members of the United Nations', but the Soviet delegation wanted to change that to 'any advances in space travel'. We only beat them out by a verbal quibble; we insisted that the word 'space', as used, could apply equally to the space between continents or cities or, for that matter, between any two points. By the time we got through arguing, the UN had given up on the Soviet amendment, and the agreement was passed as was."
"Yeah," said Fisher, "I remember. So now we have a space drive that doesn't depend on rockets, and the USSR wants it." He stared at the bowl of his briar for a moment, then looked up at Cannon. "The point is that they've brought down one of our ships, and we have to get it out of there before the Russians get to it. Even if we manage to keep them from finding out anything about the drive, they can raise a lot of fuss in the UN if they can prove that it's our ship."
"Right. They'll ring in the Greenston Agreement even if the ship technically isn't a rocket," Cannon said. "Typical Soviet tactics. They try to time these things to hit at the most embarrassing moments. Four years ago, our worthy opponent got into office because our administration was embarrassed by the Madagascar Crisis. They simply try to show the rest of the world that, no matter which party is in, the United states is run by a bunch of inept fools." He slapped his hand down on the newssheet that lay near him. "This may win us the election," he said angrily, "but it will do us more harm in the long run than if our worthy opponent stayed in the White House."
"Of what avail to win an election and lose the whole Solar System," Fisher paraphrased. "It looks as though the President has a hot potato."
"'Hot' is the word. Pure californium-254." Cannon lit a cigarette and looked moodily at the glowing end. "But this puts us in a hole, too. Do we, or don't we, mention it on the TV debate this evening? If we don't, the public will wonder why; if we do, we'll put the country on the spot."
Matt Fisher thought for a few seconds. Then he said, "The ship must have already been having trouble. Otherwise it wouldn't have been hovering in plain sight of the Soviet radar. How many men does one of those ships hold?"
"Two," the senator told him.
"We do have more than one of those ships, don't we?" Fisher asked suddenly.
"Four on Moon Base; six more building," said Senator Cannon.
"The downed ship must have been in touch with--" He stopped abruptly, paused for a second, then said: "I have an idea, Senator, but you'll have to do the talking. We'll have to convince the President that what we're suggesting is for the good of the country and not just a political trick. And we don't have much time. Those moon-cats shouldn't take more than twelve or fifteen hours to reach the ship."
"What's your idea?"
"Well, it's pretty rough right now; we can't fill in the details until we get more information, but--" He knocked the dottle from his pipe and began outlining his scheme to the senator.
* * * * *
Major Valentin Udovichenko peered through the "windshield" of his moon-cat and slowed the vehicle down as he saw the glint of metal on the Earthlit plain ahead. "Captain!" he snapped. "What does that look like to you?" He pointed with a gloved hand.
The other officer looked. "I should say," he said after a moment, "that we have found what we have been looking for, major."
"So would I. It's a little closer to our base than the radarmen calculated, but it certainly could have swerved after it dropped below the horizon. And we know there hasn't been another ship in this vicinity."
The captain was focusing a pair of powerful field glasses on the object. "That's it!" he said bridling his excitement. "Egg-shaped, and no sign of rocket exhausts. Big dent in one side."
Major Udovichenko had his own binoculars out. "It's as plain as day in this Earthlight. No sign of life, either. We shouldn't have any trouble." He lowered the binoculars and picked up a microphone to give the other nine moon-cats their instructions.
Eight of the vehicles stayed well back, ready to launch rockets directly at the fallen spacecraft if there were any sign of hostility, while two more crept carefully up on her.
They were less than a hundred and fifty yards away when the object they were heading for caught fire. The major braked his vehicle to a sudden halt and stared at the bright blaze that was growing and spreading over the metallic shape ahead. Bursts of flame sprayed out in every direction, the hot gases meeting no resistance from the near-vacuum into which they spread.
Major Udovichenko shouted orders into his microphone and gunned his own motor into life again. The caterpillar treads crunched against the lunar surface as both moon-cats wheeled about and fled. Four hundred yards from the blaze, they stopped again and watched.
By this time, the blaze had eaten away more than half of the hulk, and it was surrounded by a haze of smoke and hot gas that was spreading rapidly away from it. The flare of light far outshone the light reflected from the sun by the Earth overhead.
"Get those cameras going!" the major snapped. He knew that the eight moon-cats that formed the distant perimeter had been recording steadily, but he wanted close-ups, if possible.
None of the cameras got much of anything. The blaze didn't last long, fierce as it was. When it finally died, and the smoke particles settled slowly to the lunar surface, there was only a blackened spot where the bulk of a spaceship had been.
"Well ... I ... will ... be--," said Major Valentin Udovichenko.
* * * * *
The TV debate was over. The senator and the President had gone at each other hot and heavy, hammer and tongs, with the senator clearly emerging as the victor. But no mention whatever had been made of the Soviet announcement from Luna.
At four thirty-five the next morning, the telephone rang in the senator's suite. Cannon had been waiting for it, and he was quick to answer.
The face that appeared on the screen was that of the President of the United States. "Your scheme worked, senator," he said without preamble. There was an aloofness, a coolness in his voice. Which was only natural, considering the heat of the debate the previous evening.
"I'm glad to hear it, Mr. President," the senator said, with only a hair less coolness. "What happened?"
"Your surmise that the Soviet officials did not realize the potential of the new craft was apparently correct," the President said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian radar. The disabled ship had had some trouble with its drive mechanism; it would never have deliberately exposed itself to Russian detection. General Thayer had already asked my permission to destroy the disabled vessel rather than let the Soviets get their hands on it, and, but for your suggestion, I would have given him a go-ahead.
"But making a replica of the ship in plastic was less than a two-hour job. The materials were at hand; a special foam plastic is used as insulation from the chill of the lunar substrata. The foam plastic was impregnated with ammonium nitrate and foamed up with pure oxygen; since it is catalyst-setting, that could be done at low temperatures. The outside of the form was covered with metallized plastic, also impregnated with ammonium nitrate. I understand that the thing burned like unconfined gunpowder after it was planted in the path of the Soviet moon-cats and set off. The Soviet vehicles are on their way back to their base now."
After a moment's hesitation, he went on: "Senator, in spite of our political differences, I want to say that I appreciate a man who can put his country's welfare ahead of his political ambitions."
"Thank you, Mr. President. That is a compliment I appreciate and accept. But I want you to know that the notion of decoying them away with an inflammable plastic replica was not my idea; it was Matt Fisher's."
"Oh? My compliments to Mr. Fisher." He smiled then. It was obviously forced, but, just as obviously, there was sincerity behind it. "I hope the best team wins. But if it does not, I am secure in the knowledge that the second best team is quite competent."
Firmly repressing a desire to say, I am sorry that I don't feel any such security myself, Cannon merely said: "Thank you again, Mr. President."
When the connection was cut, Cannon grinned at Matthew Fisher. "That's it. We've saved a ship. It can be repaired where it is without a fleet of Soviet moon-cats prowling around and interfering. And we've scotched any attempts at propagandizing that the Soviets may have had in mind." He chuckled. "I'd like to have seen their faces when that thing started to burn in a vacuum. And I'd like to see the reports that are being flashed back and forth between Moscow and Soviet Moon Base One."
"I wasn't so much worried about the loss of the disabled ship as the way we'd lose it," Matthew Fisher said.
"The Soviets getting it?" Cannon asked. "We didn't have to worry about that. You heard him say that Thayer was going to destroy it."
"That's exactly what I meant," said Fisher. "How were we going to destroy it? TNT or dynamite or Radex-3 would have still left enough behind for a good Soviet team to make some kind of sense out of it--some kind of hint would be there, unless an awful lot of it were used. A fission or a thermonuclear bomb would have vaporized it, but that would have been a violation of the East-West Agreement. We'd be flatly in the wrong."
Senator Cannon walked over to the sideboard and poured Scotch into two glasses. "The way it stands now, the ship will at least be able to limp out of there before anyone in Moscow can figure out what happened and transmit orders back to Luna." He walked back with the glasses and handed one to Fisher. "Let's have a drink and go to bed. We have to be in Philadelphia tomorrow, and I'm dead tired."
"That's a pair of us," said Fisher, taking the glass.
* * * * *
Another month of campaigning, involving both televised and personal appearances, went by without unusual incidents. The prophets, seers, and pollsters were having themselves a grand time. Some of them--the predicting-by-past-performances men--were pointing out that only four Presidents had failed to succeed themselves when they ran for a second term: Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and Herbert Hoover. They argued that this presaged little chance of success for Senator James Cannon. The pollsters said that their samplings had shown a strong leaning toward the President at first, but that eight weeks of campaigning had started a switch toward Cannon, and that the movement seemed to be accelerating. The antipollsters, as usual, simply smiled smugly and said: "Remember Dewey in '48?"
Plays on Cannon's name had caught the popular fancy. The slogan "Blast 'em With Cannon" now appeared on every button worn by those who supported him--who called themselves "Cannoneers." Their opponents sneeringly referred to them as "Cannon fodder," and made jokes about "that big bore Cannon."
The latter joke was pure epithet, with no meaning behind it; when Senator James Cannon spoke, either in person or over the TV networks, even his opponents listened with grudging interest.
The less conservative newspapers couldn't resist the gag, either, and printed headlines on the order of CANNON FIRES BLAST AT FOREIGN POLICY, CANNON HOT OVER CIA ORDER, BUDGET BUREAU SHAKEN BY CANNON REPORT, and TREASURY IS LATEST CANNON TARGET.
The various newspaper columnists, expanding on the theme, made even more atrocious puns. When the senator praised his running mate, a columnist said that Fisher had been "Cannonized," and proceeded to call him "Saint" Matthew. The senator's ability to remember the names and faces of his constituents caused one pundit to remark that "it's a wise Cannon that knows its own fodder."
They whooped with joy when the senator's plane was delayed by bad weather; causing him to arrive several hours late to a bonfire rally in Texas. Only a strong headline writer could resist: CANNON MISSES FIRE!
As a result, the senator's name hit the headlines more frequently than his rival's did. And the laughter was with Cannon, not at him.
Nothing more was heard about the "mysterious craft" that the Soviet claimed to have shot down, except a terse report that said it had "probably been destroyed." It was impossible to know whether or not they had deduced what had happened, or whether they realized that the new craft was as maneuverable over the surface of the moon as a helicopter was over the surface of Earth.
Instead, the Sino-Soviet bloc had again shifted the world's attention to Africa. Like the Balkan States of nearly a century before, the small, independent nations that covered the still-dark continent were a continuing source of trouble. In spite of decades of "civilization," the thoughts and actions of the majority of Africans were still cast in the matrix of tribal taboos. The changes of government, the internal strife, and the petty brush wars between nations made Central and South America appear rigidly stable by comparison. It had been suggested that the revolutions in Africa occurred so often that only a tachometer could keep up with them.
If nothing else, the situation had succeeded in forcing the organization of a permanent UN police force; since back in 1960, there had not been a time when the UN Police were not needed somewhere in Africa.
In mid-October, a border dispute between North Uganda and South Uganda broke out, and within a week it looked as though the Commonwealth of Victorian Kenya, the Republic of Upper Tanganyika, and the Free and Independent Popular Monarchy of Ruanda-Urundi were all going to try to jump in and grab a piece of territory if possible.
The Soviet Representative to the United Nations charged that "this is a purely internal situation in Uganda, caused by imperialist agents provocateur financed by the Western Bloc." He insisted that UN intervention was unnecessary unless the "warmongering" neighbors of Uganda got into the scrap.
In a televised press interview, Vice Presidential Candidate Matthew Fisher was asked what he thought of the situation in East Africa.
"Both North and South Uganda," he said, "are communist controlled, but, like Yugoslavia, they have declared themselves independent of the masters at Moscow. If this conflict was stirred up by special agents--and I have no doubt that it was--those agents were Soviet, not Western agents. As far as the UN can be concerned, the Soviet Minister is correct, since the UN has recognized only the government of North Uganda as the government of all Uganda, and it is, therefore, a purely internal affair.
"The revolution--that is, partial revolution--which caused the division of Uganda a few years ago, was likewise due to Soviet intervention. They hoped to replace the independent communist government with one which would be, in effect, a puppet of the Kremlin. They failed. Now they are trying again.
"Legally, UN troops can only be sent there at the request of the Northern Uganda government. The Secretary General can send police troops there of his own accord only if another nation tries to invade Uganda.
"But--and here is the important point--if the Uganda government asks the aid of a friendly government to send troops, and if that friendly government complies with that request, that cannot be considered an invasion!"
Question from a reporter: "Do you believe that such intervention from another country will be requested by Uganda?"
"I do. And I am equally certain that the Soviet representative to the UN, and his Superiors in Moscow, will try to make a case of invasion and aggression out of it."
* * * * *
Within twenty-four hours after that interview, the government of North Uganda requested aid from Victorian Kenya, and a huge contingent of Kenyan troops marched across the border to help the North Uganda army. And the Soviet representative insisted that the UN send in troops to stop the "imperialist aggression" of Victorian Kenya. The rigidly pro-Western VK government protested that the Sino-Soviet accusations were invalid, and then asked, on its own accord, that a UN contingent be sent in to arbitrate and act as observers and umpires.
"Win one, lose one," Matthew Fisher said privately to Senator Cannon. "Uganda will come out of this with a pro-Western government, but it might not be too stable. The whole African situation is unstable. Mathematically, it has to be."
"How's that?" Senator Cannon asked.
"Do you know the Richardson-Gordon Equations?" Fisher asked.
"No. I'm not much of a mathematician," Cannon admitted. "What do they have to do with this?"
"They were originally proposed by Lewis Richardson, the English mathematician, and later refined by G. R. Gordon. Basically, they deal with the causes of war, and they show that a conglomeration of small states is less stable than a few large ones. In an arms race, there is a kind of positive feedback that eventually destroys the system, and the more active small units there are, the sooner the system reaches the destruction point."
Senator Cannon chuckled. "Any practical politician could have told them that, but I'm glad to hear that a mathematical tool to work on the problem has been devised. Maybe one of these days we won't have to be rule-of-thumb empiricists."
"Let's hope so," said Matt Fisher.
* * * * *
By the end of October, nearly two weeks from Election Day, the decision had been made. There were still a few Americans who hadn't made up their minds yet, but not enough to change the election results, even if they had voted as a bloc for one side or the other. The change from the shouting and arguing of mid-summer was apparent to anyone who knew what he was looking for. In the bars and restaurants, in the subways and buses, aboard planes and ships and trains, most Americans apparently seemed to have forgotten that there was a national election coming up, much to the surprise of Europeans and Asians who were not familiar with the dynamics of American political thought. If a foreigner brought the subject up, the average American would give his views in a calm manner, as though the thing were already settled, but there was far more discussion of the relative merits of the horses running at Pimlico or the rise in Lunar Developments Preferred than there was of the election. There were still a few people wearing campaign buttons, but most people didn't bother pinning them on after the suit came back from the cleaners.
A more detailed analysis would have shown that this calmness was of two types. The first, by far in the majority, was the calmness of the complacent knowledge of victory. The second was the resignation to loss manifested by those who knew they were backing the wrong man, but who, because of party loyalty or intellectual conviction or just plain stubbornness, would back him.
When Senator Cannon's brother, Dr. Frank Hewlitt Cannon, took a short leave of absence from Mayo Clinic to fly to the senator's campaign headquarters, there was a flurry of speculation about the possibility of his being appointed Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, but the flurry didn't amount to much. If President Cannon wanted to appoint his brother, that was all right with the voters.
After a tirade by the Soviet Premier, charging that the UN Police troops in Victorian Kenya were "tools of Yankee aggressionists," Americans smiled grimly and said, in effect: "Just wait 'til Cannon gets in--he'll show 'em."
Election Day came with the inevitability of death and taxes. The polling booths opened first on the East Coast, and people began filing in to take their turns at the machines. By the time the polls opened in Nome, Alaska, six hours later, the trend was obvious. All but two of the New England states were strongly for Cannon. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Ohio dropped into his pocket like ripe apples. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida did the same. Alabama wavered at first, but tagged weakly along. Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan trooped in like trained seals.
In Mississippi, things looked bad. Arkansas and Louisiana were uncertain. But the pro-Cannon vote in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota left no doubt about the outcome in those states. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas--all Cannon by vast majorities.
And so the returns came in, following the sun across the continent. By the time California had reported three-fourths of its votes, it was all over but the jubilation. Nothing but an honest-to-God, genuine, Joshua-stopping-the-sun type of miracle could have saved the opposition. And such was not forthcoming.
* * * * *
At Cannon's campaign headquarters, a television screen was blaring to unhearing ears, merely adding to the din that was going on in the meeting hall. The party workhorses and the volunteers who had drummed for Cannon since the convention were repeating the scene that had taken place after Cannon's nomination in the summer, with an even greater note of triumph.
In Cannon's suite, six floors above, there was less noise, but only because there were fewer people.
"Hey!" Cannon yelled good-naturedly. "Lay off! Any more slaps on my back, and I'm going to be the first President since Franklin Roosevelt to go to my Inauguration in a wheelchair! Lay off, will you?"
"A drink, a drink, we got to have a drink," chanted Representative Edwin Matson, his bulldog face spread wide in a happy grin while he did things with bottles, ice, and glasses. "A drink, a drink--"
Governor Harold Spanding's lantern-jawed face looked as idiotically happy as Matson's, but he was quieter about it. Verbally, that is. It was he who had been pounding Cannon on the back, and now he was pounding Matthew Fisher almost as hard.
Matt Fisher finally managed to grab his hand, and he started pumping it. "What about you, Harry? I'm only a poor, simple Vice President. You got re-elected governor!"
Dr. Frank Cannon, looking like an older, balder edition of his brother, was smiling, too, but there was a troubled look in his eyes even as he congratulated the senator. Congressman Matson, passing out the drinks, handed the first one to the senator.
"Have a drink, Mr. President! You're going to have to make a speech pretty soon; you'll need a bracer!" He handed the second one to the physician. "Here you go, Doc! Congratulations! It isn't everyone who's got a President in the family!" Then his perceptive brain noticed something in the doctor's expression. "Hey," he said, more softly, "what's the trouble? You look as though you expected sickness in the family."
The doctor grinned quickly. "Not unless it's my own. I'm used to worrying about a patient's health, not a Presidential election. I'm afraid my stomach's a little queasy. Wait just a second; I've got some pills in my little black bag. Got pills in there for all ailments. Find out if anyone else needs resuscitation, will you?" Drink in hand, he went toward the closet, where his little black bag was stashed.
"Excitement," said Senator Cannon. "Frank isn't used to politics."
Matson chuckled. "Do him good to see how the other half lives." He walked off, bearing drinks for the others. Governor Spanding grabbed one and came over to the senator. "Jim! Ready to tear up your capitulation speech now?"
Cannon glanced at his watch. "Almost. The polls closed in Nome just ten minutes ago. We'll wait for the President's acknowledgment of defeat before we go downstairs." He glanced at his brother, who was washing something down with water.
Behind him, he heard Matson's voice saying: "I'm sure glad Horvin isn't here! I can hear him now: 'Image! Image! That's what won the election! Image!'" Matson guffawed. "Jim Cannon was winning elections by landslides before he ever heard of Horvin! Jim Cannon projects his own image."
"Sure he does," Matt Fisher said, "but what about me?"
"You? Hah! You're tops, Matt. Once a man gets to know you, he can see that, if he's got any brains."
Fisher chuckled gently. "Ed, you've got what it takes to be a politician, all right."
"So do you, Mr. Vice President! So do you! Hey!" He turned quickly. "We got to have a toast! Doc, you're his brother. I think the honor should be yours."
Dr. Frank Cannon, looking much more chipper since swallowing the pills, beamed and nodded at his brother. "It will be a pleasure. Gentlemen, come to attention, if you will." They did, grinning at first, then forcing solemnity into their expressions.
"Gentlemen," said. Dr. Cannon gravely, "I give you my brother, Senator James Harrington Cannon, the next President of the United States!"
"To the President!" said Governor Spanding.
"To the President!" chorused the others.
Glasses clinked and men drank solemnly.
Then, before anyone else could say anything, Dr. Cannon said: "I further propose, gentlemen, that we drink to the man who will spend the next four years in the White House--God willing--in the hope that his ability to handle that high office will be equal to the task before him, and that he will prove worthy of the trust placed in him by those who had faith in that ability."
"Amen," said Congressman Matson softly.
And they all drank again.
Senator Cannon said: "I thank you, gentlemen. I--"
* * * * *
But, at that moment, the ubiquitous clatter of noise from the television abruptly changed tenor. They all turned to look.
"... And gentlemen," the announcer's voice was saying, "The President of the United States!"
The Presidential Seal which had been pictured on the screen faded suddenly, to be replaced by the face of the President. He looked firmly resigned, but neither haggard, tired, defeated, nor unhappy. To the five men who stood watching him in that room, it was obvious that the speech to come was on tape.
The President smiled wanly. "Fellow Americans," he began, "as your President, I wish both to congratulate you and thank you. As free citizens of a free country, exercising your franchise of the ballot to determine the men and women who are to represent and lead you during their coming terms of office, you have made your decision. You have considered well the qualifications of those men and women, and you have considered well the problems that will face our country as a whole and each individual as a free citizen desiring to remain free, and you have made your choice accordingly, as is your right and duty. For that, I congratulate you."
He paused for a dramatic moment.
"The decision, I think, was not an easy one. The citizens of our great democracy are not sheep, to be led first this way and then that; they are not dead leaves to be carried by every vagrant breeze that blows; they are not children, nor are they fools."
He looked searchingly from the screen, as though to see into the minds of every person watching.
"Do not mistake my meaning," he said levelly. "I do not mean that there are no fools among us. There are." Again he paused for effect. "Every man, every woman, who, through laziness or neglect or complacency, failed to make his desire known at the polls in this election--is a fool. Every citizen who thinks that his vote doesn't count for much, and therefore fails to register that vote--is a fool. Every person who accepts the privileges of American citizenship and considers them as rights, and who neglects the duties of citizenship because they are tiresome--is a fool."
He waited for half a second.
"Fortunately for us all, the fools are in a minority in our country. This election shows that. Most of you have done your duty and followed your conscience as you see fit. And I congratulate you for that."
The smile became less broad--by just the right amount.
"Four years ago, exercising that same privilege and duty, you, the citizens of the United States, honored me and those who were working with me by electing us to the highest offices in this nation. You elected us, I believe, because we made certain promises to you--solemn promises that were made in our platform four years ago."
He took a deep breath and folded his hands below his chin.
"I am certain that you all know we have endeavored to keep those promises. I am certain that you know that we have kept faith with the people of this nation."
He looked down for a moment, then looked up again.
"This year, in our platform, we made more promises. We outlined a program that we felt would be of the greatest benefit to this nation." He unclasped his hands and spread them with an open gesture.
"Senator James Cannon and his party have also made promises--promises which, I am sure, they, too, feel are best for our nation."
Another pause.
"You, the citizens of the United States, have, in the past few months, carefully weighed these promises against one another--weighing not only the promises themselves, but the integrity and the ability of the men who made them.
"And you have made your choice.
"I cannot, and do not, quarrel with that choice. It is the essence of democratic government that disagreements in the upper echelons of that government shall be resolved by the action and the will of the governed. You, the people of the United States, have done just that.
"And--for that, I thank you."
A final hesitation.
"Next January, Senator James Harrington Cannon will be inaugurated as President of the United States. Let us show him, and the men who are to work with him, that we, as citizens of this great nation, resolving our differences, will strive unceasingly under his administration to further the high resolves and great ideals of our country.
"I believe--I know--that you are all with me in this resolution, and, for that, too,--
"--I thank you."
The face of the President of the United States faded from the screen.
* * * * *
After a few seconds, Matson sighed. "Not bad at all, really," he said, stepping over to shut off the set. "He's been taking lessons from you, Jim. But he just hasn't quite got it."
Senator Cannon took another swallow of his drink and said nothing.
"Sincerity," said Governor Spanding. "That's what's lacking. He hasn't got it, and the voters can feel it."
"He managed to be elected President of the United States on it," Senator Cannon said dryly.
Spanding didn't turn to look at Cannon; he kept looking at the dead TV screen. "These things always show up by comparison, Jim. In comparison with some of us--most of us, in fact--he looks pretty good. I've known him since he was a fresh junior senator, and I was just attorney for the House Committee for Legislative Oversight." He turned around. "You know what, Jim? When I first heard him talk, I actually thought about changing parties. Yeah. Really." He turned around again.
"But," he went on, "he's all hot air and no ability. Just like Matt, here, is all ability and no hot air. No offense meant, Matt, believe me," he added, glancing at Fisher.
"I know," Fisher said quietly.
Spanding turned around once more and looked Cannon squarely in the eyes. "You've got both, Jim. The blarney to put yourself over, and the ability to back it up. And you know I'm not trying to flatter you when I say that."
When Cannon nodded wordlessly, Spanding gave himself a short, embarrassed laugh. "Ah, Hell. I talk too much." And he took a hefty slug of his drink.
Matthew Fisher took the overcharge out of the sudden outburst of emotion by saying: "It's more than just ability and sincerity, Harry. There's determination and honesty, too."
Matson said, "Amen to that."
Dr. Frank Cannon was just standing there, looking at his brother. There was a definite look of respect on his face.
Senator Cannon said: "You're all great guys--thanks. But I've got to get downstairs and make a speech. Ed, get the recording tape out of that set; I want to make some notes on what he said. And hurry it up, we haven't got too long."
"No canned speech for you, eh, Jim?" Spanding said.
"Amen to that, too," said Representative Matson as he opened the panel in the side of the TV set.
* * * * *
From a hundred thousand loudspeakers all over the United States, from the rockbound coast of Maine to the equally rockbound coast of Alaska, from the sun-washed coast of Florida to the ditto coast of Hawaii, the immortal voice of Bing Crosby, preserved forever in an electronic pattern made from a decades-old recording, told of a desire for a White Christmas. It was a voice and a tune and a lyric that aroused nostalgia even in the hearts of Floridians and Californians and Hawaiians who had never seen snow in their lives.
The other carols rang out, too--"Silent Night," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and all the others. All over the nation, in millions upon millions of Christian homes, the faithful prepared to celebrate the birth, the coming, of their Saviour, Who had come to bring peace on Earth to men.
And in millions of other American homes, the Children of Abraham celebrated the Festival of Lights--Chanukah, the Dedication--the giving of thanks for the Blessing of God upon the priestly family of the Maccabees, who, twenty-odd centuries before, had taken up arms against the tyranny of a dynasty which had banned the worship of Almighty God, and who, by winning, had made themselves a symbol forever of the moral struggle against the forces that oppress the free mind of Man.
The newspapers and television newscasts were full of the age-old "human interest stories" which, in spite of their predictability--the abandoned baby, the dying child, the wretchedly ill oldster--still brought a tear to the eye during the Holiday Season.
As President-elect Cannon slowly made his cabinet appointments, the announcements appeared, but there was hardly any discussion of them, much less any hue and cry.
One editorial writer did make a comment: "It is encouraging to see that President-elect Cannon consults with Vice-President-elect Matthew Fisher regularly and frequently as the appointments are made. For a good many years, ever since the Eisenhower Administration, back in the Fifties, it has been the policy of most of our Chief Executives to make sure that the Vice President is groomed to take over smoothly if anything should happen to the President. Senator Cannon, however, is, as far as we know, the first President-elect who has begun this grooming before the Inauguration. This, in our opinion, shows both wisdom and political astuteness."
By the second week of the New Year, the new Cabinet had been picked. Contrary to the rumors before the election, the senator's brother had not been selected for any post whatever, but the men who were picked for Cabinet posts were certainly of high caliber. The United States Senate had confirmed them all before Inauguration Day.
That day was clear and cold in Washington. After the seemingly endless ceremonies and ceremonials, after the Inaugural Ball, and the Inaugural Supper, and the Inaugural Et Cetera, President James Cannon went to bed, complaining of a "slight headache".
"Frankly," he told Vice President Matthew Fisher, "it is a real head-splitter." He took four aspirin and went to bed.
He said he felt "a little better" the next day.
* * * * *
The fifth of February.
Ten forty-eight in the evening.
The White House, Washington, D.C.
Dr. Frank Hewlitt Cannon stood in a darkened bedroom in Blair House, across the street from the Executive Mansion, nervously looking out the window, at the big white house across the way. He was not nervous for himself, although he had plenty of reason to be. He was clad in pajamas, as his brother had ordered, and had even taken the extra precaution of rumpling up his hair.
He looked at his watch, and then looked back at the White House.
How long? he thought. How long?
He looked at his wrist again. The sweep hand only moved when he looked at it, apparently. He dropped his hands and clasped them behind his back. How long before he would know?
My kid brother, he thought. I could always outthink him and outfight him. But he's got something I haven't got. He's stuck to his guns and fought hard all these years. I couldn't do what he's doing tonight, and I know it. You're a better man than I am, kid.
Across Pennsylvania Avenue, Senator James Cannon was doing some heavy consideration, too. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the small tubular device in his hand.
Will Frank be safe? That's the only weak point in the plan.
Frank was safe. He had to be. Frank hadn't been over from Blair House in three days. They hadn't even seen each other in three days. The Secret Service men--
He threw a glance toward the door that led from his bedroom to the hall.
The Secret Service agents would know that Frank couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it. The only possible connection would be the hypogun itself. He looked at the little gadget. Hell, he thought; now or never.
He got up and strode purposefully into the bathroom. He smiled crookedly at his own reflection in the mirror. It was damnably difficult for a President to outwit his own bodyguard.
Get on with it!
He swallowed the capsule Frank had given him. Then, placing the muzzle against the precise spots Frank had shown him, James Cannon pulled the trigger. Once ... twice ... thrice ...
Against each nerve center in his left side. Fine.
Now that it was done, all fear--all trepidation--left Senator James Cannon. Now there was no way to go but ahead.
First, the hypogun that had blown the drug into his body. Two minutes to get rid of that, for that was the only thing that could tie Frank in to the plan.
They had already agreed that there was no way to get rid of it. It couldn't be destroyed or thrown away. There was only one way that it could be taken from the White House ...
Cannon left his fingerprints on it, dropped it into the wastebasket, and covered it with tissue paper. Then he left the bathroom and walked toward the hall door. Beyond it, he knew, were the guarding Secret Service men.
And already his left side was beginning to feel odd.
He walked to the door and opened it. He had a scowl on his face.
"Hello, Jenkins--Grossman," he said, as the two men turned. "I've got a hell of a headache again. Aspirin doesn't seem to help, and I can't get any sleep." He looked rather dazed, as though he wasn't sure of his surroundings. He smiled lopsidedly. "Call Frank, over at Blair House, will you? Hurry?" Then he swallowed, looked dazed, and fell to the floor in a heap.
The two Secret Service men didn't move, but they shouted loudly. Their orders were to guard the body of the President--literally! Until it was declared legally dead, that body was their responsibility.
The other Secret Service men in the White House came on the run. Within one minute after Cannon had fallen, a call had gone to Blair House, asking for the President's brother.
Inside of another two minutes, Dr. Frank Cannon was coming through the front door of the Executive Mansion. In spite of the chill outside, he was wearing only a topcoat over his pajamas.
"What happened?" he snapped, with the authority that only a physician can muster. "Where is he?"
He heard the story on the way to the President's room. Jenkins and Grossman were still standing over the fallen Chief Executive. "We haven't moved him, except to make him more comfortable," said Grossman. "He's still O.K.... I mean, he's breathing, and his heart's still going. But we didn't want to move him--"
"Fine!" snapped the doctor. "Best thing." He knelt over his brother and picked up his wrist. "Have you called anyone else?" he asked sharply while he felt the pulse.
"The Naval Hospital," said another agent. "They're coming fast!"
"Fine!" repeated Dr. Frank. By this time, most of the White House staff was awake. Frank Cannon let go the wrist and stood up quickly. "Can't tell for sure, but it looks like a slight stroke. Excuse me."
He went into the Executive bedroom, and on into the bathroom. He closed the door. Quickly, he fished the hypogun out of the wastebasket and dropped it into the little black bag which he had carried with him. He came out with a glass of water. Everything was taken care of.
* * * * *
PRESIDENT SUFFERS STROKE! JHC Taken To US Naval Hospital In Washington After Stroke In White House
All over the world, headlines and newscasts in a hundred tongues carried the story. And from all over the world came messages of sympathy and concern for the stricken Chief Executive. From England, simultaneous messages arrived from the Sovereign and the Prime Minister; from France, notes from both the President and the Premier of the Seventh Republic; from Ethiopia, condolences from His Imperial Majesty and from the Chief Executive. The United German Federation, the Constitutional Kingdom of Spain, the Republic of Italy, the United Austro-Yugoslavian Commonwealth, and the Polish Free State all sent rush radiograms. So did Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. From Africa, Australia, Southern Asia, Oceania, and Central America came expressive words of sorrow. Special blessings were sent by His Holiness from Vatican City, by the Patriarch of Istanbul, and by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Presidente of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos personally took a plane to Washington, as did the Governor General of Canada, carrying a personal message from the Prime Minister. Even the Soviet Union sent a radiogram, and the story of the tragedy was printed in Pravda, accompanied by an editorial that almost approached straight reporting.
President James Harrington Cannon knew none of this. He was unconscious and unable to receive visitors.
As far as actual news from the White House was concerned, news commentator Barton Wayne gave the best summary over a major American TV network on the morning of the sixth of February:
"Last night, at approximately eleven p.m., James Harrington Cannon, President of the United States, collapsed at the feet of the Secret Service men who were guarding him. Within a few minutes, Dr. Frank Hewlitt Cannon, the President's brother, called by the Secret Service in obedience to the President's last conscious words, had arrived from Blair House, where he had been staying.
"Dr. Frank Cannon diagnosed the President's illness as a--quote--slight stroke--unquote. Later, after the President had been taken to the Naval Hospital for further diagnosis, Dr. Cannon released a statement. Quote--further tests have enabled the medical staff of this hospital to make a more detailed analysis. Apparently, the President has suffered a slight cerebral hemorrhage which has, temporarily at least, partially paralyzed the muscles of his left side. The President, however, has regained consciousness, and his life is in no danger--Unquote.
"After only sixteen days in the White House, the President has fallen ill. We can only wish him Godspeed and an early recovery."
* * * * *
Dr. Frank Cannon stood firmly by his brother's bedside, shaking his head firmly. "No, commander; I cannot permit that. I am in charge of this case, and I shall remain in charge of it until my patient tells me otherwise."
The graying Navy medical officer pursed his lips. "In cases of this sort, doctor," he said primly, "the Navy is in charge. The patient is, after all, the President of the United States."
Dr. Frank went right on shaking his head. "Cuts no ice, commander. I was specifically summoned by the patient. I agreed to take the case. I will be most happy to accept your co-operation; I welcome your advice and aid; but I will not allow my patient to be taken from my charge."
"It is hardly considered proper for the physician in charge of a serious case to be a relative of the patient."
"Possibly. But it is neither unethical nor illegal." He gave the commander a dry smile. "I know my brother, commander. Quite well. I also know that you have the authority and the means to expel me from this hospital." The smile became positively icy. "And, in view of the former, I should not advise you to exercise the latter."
The commander wet his lips. "I have no intention of doing so, doctor," he said rather huffily. "But, inasmuch as the X rays show no--"
There came a mumble from the man on the bed, and, in that instant, both men forgot their differences and became physicians again, as they focused their attention on the patient.
President Cannon was blinking his eyes groggily. Or, rather, eye. The left one refused to do more than show a faint flicker of the lid.
"Hullo, Jamie," Dr. Frank said gently. "How d'you feel?" It took nerves of steel to show that tender composure. The drug should wear off quickly, but if Jim Cannon's mind was still fuzzy, and he said the wrong thing--
For a moment, the President said nothing as he tried to focus his right eye.
"Don't try to move, Mr. President," said the Navy doctor softly.
President Cannon smiled lopsidedly, the left side of his face refusing to make the effort. "Arright," he said, in a low, blurred voice. "Wha' happen', Frang?"
"Apparently," said Dr. Frank carefully, "you've had a little bit of a stroke, kid. Nothing to worry about. How do you feel?"
"Funny. Li'l dizzy. Don't hurt, though."
"Good. Fine. You'll be O.K. shortly."
The President's voice became stronger. "I'm glad you're here, Frank. Tell me--is it ... bad?"
"'Tain't good, kid," Dr. Frank said with a bedside grin. "You can't expect a stroke to put you in the best of health, now, can you?"
The lopsided smile came back. "Guess not." The smile went away, to be replaced by a puzzled frown. "My whole left side feels dead. What's the matter?"
Instead of answering, Dr. Frank Cannon turned to the Navy medic. "I'll let the commander explain that. What's your diagnosis, doctor?"
The commander ran his tongue nervously over his lips before speaking. "There's apparently a small blood clot in the brain, Mr. President, interfering with the functioning of the efferent nerves."
"Permanent?"
"We don't know yet, sir. We hope not."
President Cannon sighed. "Well. Thank you, commander. And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to speak to my brother--alone."
The commander glanced at Dr. Frank, then back at the President. "Certainly, sir." He turned to leave.
"Just a moment, commander," Dr. Frank said. "There'll be news reporters out there. Tell them--" He frowned a little. "Tell them that the President is conscious and quite rational, but that there is still some weakness. I don't think anything more than that will be necessary."
"I agree. Certainly, doctor." At the door, the commander paused and said: "I'll keep everyone out until you call."
"Thanks," said Dr. Frank as the door closed behind the Navy man.
As soon as it closed, President Cannon struggled to get up.
"Don't try it, kid," the doctor said, "those muscles are paralyzed, even if you aren't sick. Here, let me help you."
"How did it come off?" Cannon asked as his brother propped him up.
"Perfectly. No one doubts that it's a stroke. Now what?"
"Give me a cigarette."
"All right, but watch it. Use your right hand, and smoke with the right side of your mouth. Here." The doctor lit a cigarette and handed it to his brother. "Now, what's the next step?"
"The next step is to tell Matthew Fisher," said the President.
* * * * *
Dr. Frank Cannon scowled. "Why? Why not just go through with the thing and let him be fooled along with the rest? It seems to me he'd be ... well, more secure in his own position if he didn't know."
"No." The President hunched himself up on his pillows. "Can't you raise the head of this bed?"
Dr. Frank touched a button on the bedside panel, and the upper portion of the bed rose smoothly at an angle. "Better?"
"Fine. Much better."
"You were saying--"
"Yeah. About Matt Fisher. He has to know. He'll guess eventually, in the next four years, anyway--unless I hide away somewhere. And I have no intention of doing that.
"Oh, I'm not trying to show Matt what a great guy I am, Frank. You know better than that, and so will he. But Matt will have to have all the facts at hand, if he's to do his job right, and it seems to me that this is a pretty important fact. What do you say, Frank?"
The doctor nodded slowly. "I think you know more about the situation than I do. And I trust your judgment, kid. And Matt's, too, I guess."
"No." President Cannon's voice was firm as he looked at his brother with one bright eye. "Don't trust Matt's judgment, because he doesn't have any."
Dr. Frank looked astonished. "Then what--?" He stopped.
"Matthew Fisher," said President Cannon authoritatively, "doesn't need judgment any more than you need instinct. No more so, and no less. I said he doesn't have any judgment, but that's not exactly true. He has it, but he only uses it for routine work, just as you or I use instinct. We can override our instinctive reactions when we have to. Matt can override his judgment when he has to.
"I don't pretend to know how Fisher's mind works. If I did, I wouldn't be doing this. But I do know that Matt Fisher--by some mental process I can't even fathom--almost invariably knows the right thing to do, and he knows it without using judgment."
"And you're still convinced that this is the only way out?" Dr. Frank asked. "Couldn't you stay in office and let him run things under cover?"
"We discussed all this months ago, Frank," Cannon said wearily. "My reasons remain the same. Matt couldn't possibly operate efficiently if he had to go through me every time. And I am human, too; I'd have a tendency to impose my own judgment on his decisions.
"No, Frank; this is the only way it can work. This country needs Matthew Fisher as President, but he could never have been elected. Now I've done my job; now it's time for me to get out of the way and turn the Presidency over to a man who can handle the office far better than any other man I know."
"You make him sound like some sort of superman," said Dr. Frank with a wry grin.
"Hell," said President Cannon, "you don't think I'd turn this job over to anything less, do you?" He chuckled. "Call him in, will you?"
* * * * *
PRESIDENT CANNON RESIGNS! Ill Health Given As Reason; Doctors Say Recovery Unlikely In Near Future. VP Fisher To Take Oath Tomorrow.
THIN EDGE
By Randall Garrett
I
"Beep!" said the radio smugly. "Beep! Beep! Beep!"
"There's one," said the man at the pickup controls of tugship 431. He checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction and distance were duly noted.
That information on direction and distance had already been transmitted to the instruments of the tugship's pilot. "Jazzy-o!" said the pilot. "Got 'im."
He swiveled his ship around until the nose was in line with the beep and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds. Then he took his foot off it and waited while the ship approached the asteroid.
In the darkness of space, only points of light were visible. Off to the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn't be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark. The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.
A man can navigate in space by instrument, and he can take the time to figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won't really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.
In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, simply by glancing around him.
An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities had learned was to use the human mind.
"Looks like a big 'un, Jack," said the instrument man. His eyes were on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to the pilot.
The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went--some five hundred meters in diameter, with a mass of around one hundred seventy-four million metric tons.
* * * * *
Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone, the pilot brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to that surface.
"Looks like she's got a nice spin on her," he said. "We'll see."
He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of the slowly revolving mass. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.
The pilot of the space tug waited until the blotch was centered in the crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the gigantic rock.
"Where's he got his anchor set?" the pilot asked his instrument man.
"The beep's from the North Pole," the instrument man reported instantly. "How's her spin?"
"Wait a bit. The spot hasn't come round again yet. Looks like we'll have some fun with her, though." He kept three stars fixed carefully in his spotters to make sure he didn't drift enough to throw his calculations off. And waited.
Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it, the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.
"Sixteen minutes, forty seconds," the pilot reported. "Angular momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters squared per second."
"So we play Ride 'Em Cowboy," the instrument man said "I'm evacuating. Tell me when." He had already poised his finger over the switch that would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off from the pilot's compartment when the timing had started.
"Start the pump," said the pilot.
The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from the compartment. At the same time, the pilot jockeyed the ship to a position over the north pole of the asteroid.
"Over" isn't quite the right word. "Next to" is not much better, but at least it has no implied up-and-down orientation. The surface gravity of the asteroid was only two millionths of a Standard Gee, which is hardly enough to give any noticeable impression to the human nervous system.
"Surface at two meters," said the pilot. "Holding."
* * * * *
The instrument man opened the outer door and saw the surface of the gigantic rock a couple of yards in front of him. And projecting from that surface was the eye of an eyebolt that had been firmly anchored in the depths of the asteroid, a nickel-steel shaft thirty feet long and eight inches in diameter, of which only the eye at the end showed.
The instrument man checked to make sure that his safety line was firmly anchored and then pushed himself across the intervening space to grasp the eye with a space-gloved hand.
This was the anchor.
Moving a nickel-iron asteroid across space to nearest processing plant is a relatively simple job. You slap a powerful electromagnet on her, pour on the juice, and off you go.
The stony asteroids are a different matter. You have to have something to latch on to, and that's where the anchor-setter comes in. His job is to put that anchor in there. That's the first space job a man can get in the Belt, the only way to get space experience. Working by himself, a man learns to preserve his own life out there.
Operating a space tug, on the other hand, is a two-man job because a man cannot both be on the surface of the asteroid and in his ship at the same time. But every space tug man has had long experience as an anchor setter before he's allowed to be in a position where he is capable of killing someone besides himself if he makes a stupid mistake in that deadly vacuum.
"On contact, Jack," the instrument man said as soon as he had a firm grip on the anchor. "Release safety line."
"Safety line released, Harry," Jack's voice said in his earphones.
Jack had pressed a switch that released the ship's end of the safety line so that it now floated free. Harry pulled it towards himself and attached the free end to the eye of the anchor bolt, on a loop of nickel-steel that had been placed there for that purpose. "Safety line secured," he reported. "Ready for tug line."
In the pilot's compartment, Jack manipulated the controls again. The ship moved away from the asteroid and yawed around so that the "tail" was pointed toward the anchor bolt. Protruding from a special port was a heavy-duty universal joint with special attachments. Harry reached out, grasped it with one hand, and pulled it toward him, guiding it toward the eyebolt. A cable attached to its other end snaked out of the tug.
Harry worked hard for some ten or fifteen minutes to get the universal joint firmly bolted to the eye of the anchor. When he was through, he said: "O.K., Jack. Try 'er."
The tug moved gently away from the asteroid, and the cable that bound the two together became taut. Harry carefully inspected his handiwork to make sure that everything had been done properly and that the mechanism would stand the stress.
"So far so good," he muttered, more to himself than to Jack.
Then he carefully set two compact little strain gauges on the anchor itself, at ninety degrees from each other on the circumference of the huge anchor bolt. Two others were already in position in the universal joint itself. When everything was ready, he said: "Give 'er a try at length."
The tug moved away from the asteroid, paying out the cable as it went.
Hauling around an asteroid that had a mass on the order of one hundred seventy-four million metric tons required adequate preparation. The nonmagnetic stony asteroids are an absolute necessity for the Belt Cities. In order to live, man needs oxygen, and there is no trace of an atmosphere on any of the little Belt worlds except that which Man has made himself and sealed off to prevent it from escaping into space. Carefully conserved though that oxygen is, no process is or can be one hundred per cent efficient. There will be leakage into space, and that which is lost must be replaced. To bring oxygen from Earth in liquid form would be outrageously expensive and even more outrageously inefficient--and no other planet in the System has free oxygen for the taking. It is much easier to use Solar energy to take it out of its compounds, and those compounds are much more readily available in space, where it is not necessary to fight the gravitational pull of a planet to get them. The stony asteroids average thirty-six per cent oxygen by mass; the rest of it is silicon, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, and calcium, with respectable traces of sodium, chromium, phosphorous manganese, cobalt, potassium, and titanium. The metallic nickel-iron asteroids made an excellent source of export products to ship to Earth, but the stony asteroids were for home consumption.
This particular asteroid presented problems. Not highly unusual problems, but problems nonetheless. It was massive and had a high rate of spin. In addition, its axis of spin was at an angle of eighty-one degrees to the direction in which the tug would have to tow it to get it to the processing plant. The asteroid was, in effect, a huge gyroscope, and it would take quite a bit of push to get that axis tilted in the direction that Harry Morgan and Jack Latrobe wanted it to go. In theory, they could just have latched on, pulled, and let the thing precess in any way it wanted to. The trouble is that that would not have been too good for the anchor bolt. A steady pull on the anchor bolt was one thing: a nickel-steel bolt like that could take a pull of close to twelve million pounds as long as that pull was along the axis. Flexing it--which would happen if they let the asteroid precess at will--would soon fatigue even that heavy bolt.
The cable they didn't have to worry about. Each strand was a fine wire of two-phase material--the harder phase being borazon, the softer being tungsten carbide. Winding these fine wires into a cable made a flexible rope that was essentially a three-phase material--with the vacuum of space acting as the third phase. With a tensile strength above a hundred million pounds per square inch, a half inch cable could easily apply more pressure to that anchor than it could take. There was a need for that strong cable: a snapping cable that is suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash through a spacesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use for flesh and bone thereafter.
"All O.K. here," Jack's voice came over Harry's headphones.
"And here," Harry said. The strain gauges showed nothing out of the ordinary.
"O.K. Let's see if we can flip this monster over," Harry said, satisfied that the equipment would take the stress that would be applied to it.
He did not suspect the kind of stress that would be applied to him within a few short months.
II
The hotel manager was a small-minded man with a narrow-minded outlook and a brain that was almost totally unable to learn. He was, in short, a "normal" Earthman. He took one look at the card that had been dropped on his desk from the chute of the registration computer and reacted. His thin gray brows drew down over his cobralike brown eyes, and he muttered, "Ridiculous!" under his breath.
The registration computer wouldn't have sent him the card if there hadn't been something odd about it, and odd things happened so rarely that the manager took immediate notice of it. One look at the title before the name told him everything he needed to know. Or so he thought.
The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant "wrong"--which was where he made his mistake.
There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was tapping his fingers on it.
The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm but not arrogant voice.
"Is this the city of York, New?" asked the man. There was a touch of cold humor in his voice that made the manager look more closely at him. He weighed perhaps two-twenty and stood a shade over six-two, but it was the look in the blue eyes and the bearing of the man's body that made the manager suddenly feel as though this man were someone extraordinary. That, of course, meant "wrong."
Then the question that the man had asked in rebuttal to his own penetrated the manager's mind, and he became puzzled. "Er ... I beg your pardon?"
"I said, 'Is this York, New?'" the man repeated.
"This is New York, if that's what you mean," the manager said.
"Then I am Harry Morgan, if that's what you mean."
The manager, for want of anything better to do to cover his confusion, glanced back at the card--without really looking at it. Then he looked back up at the face of Harry Morgan. "Evidently you have not turned in your Citizen's Identification Card for renewal, Mr. Morgan," he said briskly. As long as he was on familiar ground, he knew how to handle himself.
"Odd's Fish!" said Morgan with utter sadness, "How did you know?"
The manager's comfortable feeling of rightness had returned. "You can't hope to fool a registration robot, Mr. Morgan," he said "When a discrepancy is observed, the robot immediately notifies a person in authority. Two months ago, Government Edict 7-3356-Hb abolished titles of courtesy absolutely and finally. You Englishmen have clung to them for far longer than one would think possible, but that has been abolished." He flicked the card with a finger. "You have registered here as 'Commodore Sir Harry Morgan'--obviously, that is the name and anti-social title registered on your card. When you put the card into the registration robot, the error was immediately noted and I was notified. You should not be using an out-of-date card, and I will be forced to notify the Citizen's Registration Bureau."
"Forced?" said Morgan in mild amazement. "Dear me! What a terribly strong word."
The manager felt the hook bite, but he could no more resist the impulse to continue than a cat could resist catnip. His brain did not have the ability to overcome his instinct. And his instinct was wrong. "You may consider yourself under arrest, Mr. Morgan."
"I thank you for that permission," Morgan said with a happy smile. "But I think I shall not take advantage of it." He stood there with that same happy smile while two hotel security guards walked up and stood beside him, having been called by the manager's signal.
Again it took the manager a little time to realize what Morgan had said. He blinked. "Advantage of it?" he repeated haphazardly.
* * * * *
Harry Morgan's smile vanished as though it had never been. His blue eyes seemed to change from the soft blue of a cloudless sky to the steely blue of a polished revolver. Oddly enough, his lips did not change. They still seemed to smile, although the smile had gone.
"Manager," he said deliberately, "if you will pardon my using your title, you evidently cannot read."
The manager had not lived in the atmosphere of the Earth's Citizen's Welfare State as long as he had without knowing that dogs eat dogs. He looked back at the card that had been delivered to his desk only minutes before and this time he read it thoroughly. Then, with a gesture, he signaled the Security men to return to their posts. But he did not take his eyes from the card.
"My apologies," Morgan said when the Security police had retired out of earshot. There was no apology in the tone of his voice. "I perceive that you can read. Bully, may I say, for you." The bantering tone was still in his voice, the pseudo-smile still on his lips, the chill of cold steel still in his eyes. "I realize that titles of courtesy are illegal on earth," he continued, "because courtesy itself is illegal. However, the title 'Commodore' simply means that I am entitled to command a spaceship containing two or more persons other than myself. Therefore, it is not a title of courtesy, but of ability."
The manager had long since realized that he was dealing with a Belt man, not an Earth citizen, and that the registration robot had sent him the card because of that, not because there was anything illegal. Men from the Belt did not come to Earth either willingly or often.
Still unable to override his instincts--which erroneously told him that there was something "wrong"--the manager said: "What does the 'Sir' mean?"
Harry Morgan glowed warmly. "Well, now, Mr. Manager, I will tell you. I will give you an analogy. In the time of the Roman Republic, twenty-one centuries or so ago, the leader of an Army was given the title Imperator. But that title could not be conferred upon him by the Senate of Rome nor by anyone else in power. No man could call himself Imperator until his own soldiers, the men under him, had publicly acclaimed him as such. If, voluntarily, his own men shouted 'Ave, Imperator!' at a public gathering, then the man could claim the title. Later the title degenerated--" He stopped.
The manager was staring at him with uncomprehending eyes, and Morgan's outward smile became genuine. "Sorry," he said condescendingly. "I forgot that history is not a popular subject in the Welfare World." Morgan had forgotten no such thing, but he went right on. "What I meant to say was that the spacemen of the Belt Cities have voluntarily agreed among themselves to call me 'sir'. Whether that is a title of ability or a title of courtesy, you can argue about with me at another time. Right now, I want my room key."
Under the regulations, the manager knew there was nothing else he could do. He had made a mistake, and he knew that he had. If he had only taken the trouble to read the rest of the card--
"Awfully sorry, Mr. Morgan," he said with a lopsided smile that didn't even look genuine. "The--"
"Watch those courtesy titles," Morgan reprimanded gently. "'Mister' comes ultimately from the Latin magister, meaning 'master' or 'teacher'. And while I may be your master, I wouldn't dare think I could teach you anything."
"All citizens are entitled to be called 'Mister'," the manager said with a puzzled look. He pushed a room key across the desk.
"Which just goes to show you," said Harry Morgan, picking up the key.
He turned casually, took one or two steps away from the registration desk, then--quite suddenly--did an about-face and snapped: "What happened to Jack Latrobe?"
"Who?" said the manager, his face gaping stupidly.
Harry Morgan knew human beings, and he was fairly certain that the manager couldn't have reacted that way unless he honestly had no notion of what Morgan was talking about.
He smiled sweetly. "Never you mind, dear boy. Thank you for the key." He turned again and headed for the elevator bank, confident that the manager would find the question he had asked about Jack Latrobe so completely meaningless as to be incapable of registering as a useful memory.
He was perfectly right.
III
The Belt Cities could survive without the help of Earth, and the Supreme Congress of the United Nations of Earth knew it. But they also knew that "survive" did not by any means have the same semantic or factual content as "live comfortably". If Earth were to vanish overnight, the people of the Belt would live, but they would be seriously handicapped. On the other hand, the people of Earth could survive--as they had for millennia--without the Belt Cities, and while doing without Belt imports might be painful, it would by no means be deadly.
But both the Belt Cities and the Earth knew that the destruction of one would mean the collapse of the other as a civilization.
Earth needed iron. Belt iron was cheap. The big iron deposits of Earth were worked out, and the metal had been widely scattered. The removal of the asteroids as a cheap source would mean that iron would become prohibitively expensive. Without cheap iron, Earth's civilization would have to undergo a painfully drastic change--a collapse and regeneration.
But the Belt Cities were handicapped by the fact that they had had as yet neither the time nor the resources to manufacture anything but absolute necessities. Cloth, for example, was imported from Earth. A society that is still busy struggling for the bare necessities--such as manufacturing its own air--has no time to build the huge looms necessary to weave cloth ... or to make clothes, except on a minor scale. Food? You can have hydroponic gardens on an asteroid, but raising beef cattle, even on Ceres, was difficult. Eventually, perhaps, but not yet.
The Belt Cities were populated by pioneers who still had not given up the luxuries of civilization. Their one weakness was that they had their cake and were happily eating it, too.
Not that Harry Morgan didn't realize that fact. A Belt man is, above all, a realist, in that he must, of necessity, understand the Laws of the Universe and deal with them. Or die.
Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was well aware of the stir he had created in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Word would leak out, and he knew it. The scene had been created for just that purpose.
"Grasshopper sittin' on a railroad track, Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day! A-pickin' his teeth with a carpet tack, Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!"
He sang with gusto as the elevator lifted him up to the seventy-fourth floor of the Grand Central Hotel. The other passengers in the car did not look at him directly; they cast sidelong glances.
This guy, they seemed to think in unison, is a nut. We will pay no attention to him, since he probably does not really exist. Even if he does, we will pay no attention in the hope that he will go away.
On the seventy-fourth floor, he did go away, heading for his room. He keyed open the door and strolled over to the phone, where a message had already been dropped into the receiver slot. He picked it up and read it.
COMMODORE SIR HARRY MORGAN, RM. 7426, GCH: REQUEST YOU CALL EDWAY TARNHORST, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE OF GREATER LOS ANGELES, SUPREME CONGRESS. PUNCH 33-981-762-044 COLLECT.
"How news travels," Harry Morgan thought to himself. He tapped out the number on the keyboard of the phone and waited for the panel to light up. When it did, it showed a man in his middle fifties with a lean, ascetic face and graying hair, which gave him a look of saintly wisdom.
* * * * *
"Mr. Tarnhorst?" Morgan asked pleasantly.
"Yes. Commodore Morgan?" The voice was smooth and precise.
"At your service, Mr. Tarnhorst. You asked me to call."
"Yes. What is the purpose of your visit to Earth, commodore?" The question was quick, decisive, and firm.
Harry Morgan kept his affability. "That's none of your business, Mr. Tarnhorst."
Tarnhorst's face didn't change. "Perhaps your superiors haven't told you, but--and I can only disclose this on a sealed circuit--I am in sympathy with the Belt Cities. I have been out there twice and have learned to appreciate the vigor and worth of the Belt people. I am on your side, commodore, in so far as it does not compromise my position. My record shows that I have fought for the rights of the Belt Cities on the floor of the Supreme Congress. Have you been informed of that fact?"
"I have," said Harry Morgan. "And that is precisely why it is none of your business. The less you know, Mr. Tarnhorst, the safer you will be. I am not here as a representative of any of the City governments. I am not here as a representative of any of the Belt Corporations. I am completely on my own, without official backing. You have shown yourself to be sympathetic towards us in the past. We have no desire to hurt you. Therefore I advise that you either keep your nose out of my business or actively work against me. You cannot protect yourself otherwise."
Edward Tarnhorst was an Earthman, but he was not stupid. He had managed to put himself in a position of power in the Welfare World, and he knew how to handle that power. It took him exactly two seconds to make his decision.
"You misunderstand me, commodore," he said coldly. "I asked what I asked because I desire information. The People's Government is trying to solve the murder of Commodore Jack Latrobe. Assuming, of course, that it was murder--which is open to doubt. His body was found three days ago in Fort Tryon Park, up on the north end of Manhattan Island. He had apparently jumped off one of the old stone bridges up there and fell ninety feet to his death. On the other hand, it is possible that, not being used to the effects of a field of point nine eight Standard gees, he did not realize that the fall would be deadly, and accidentally killed himself. He was alone in the park at night, as far as we can tell. It has been ascertained definitely that no representative of the People's Manufacturing Corporation Number 873 was with him at the time. Nor, so far as we can discover, was anyone else. I asked you to call because I wanted to know if you had any information for us. There was no other reason."
"I haven't seen Jack since he left Juno," Morgan said evenly. "I don't know why he came to Earth, and I know nothing else."
"Then I see no further need for conversation," Tarnhorst said. "Thank you for your assistance, Commodore Morgan. If Earth's Government needs you again, you will be notified if you gain any further information, you may call this number. Thank you again. Good-by."
The screen went blank.
* * * * *
How much of this is a trap? Morgan thought.
There was no way of knowing at this point. Morgan knew that Jack Latrobe had neither committed suicide nor died accidentally, and Tarnhorst had told him as much. Tarnhorst was still friendly, but he had taken the hint and got himself out of danger. There had been one very important piece of information. The denial that any representative of PMC 873 had been involved. PMC 873 was a manufacturer of biological products--one of the several corporations that Latrobe had been empowered to discuss business with when he had been sent to Earth by the Belt Corporations Council. Tarnhorst would not have mentioned them negatively unless he intended to imply a positive hint. Obviously. Almost too obviously.
Well?
Harry Morgan punched for Information, got it, got a number, and punched that.
"People's Manufacturing Corporation Ey-yut Seven Tha-ree," said a recorded voice. "Your desire, pu-leeze?"
"This is Commodore Jack Latrobe," Morgan said gently. "I'm getting tired of this place, and if you don't let me out I will blow the whole place to Kingdom Come. Good bye-eye-eye."
He hung up without waiting for an answer.
Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an expensive one--very expensive. It consisted of an outer room--a "sitting room" as it might have been called two centuries before--and a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.
Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor. He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.
He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and left the suite.
Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left kidney and said. "Keep walking, commodore. But do what you're told."
Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.
IV
In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite 7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand, twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled, and the door swung open.
The man closed it behind him.
He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life stealing from his family and cheating his friends.
He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at it.
"Nothin'," he said to himself. "Nothin'." His detector showed that there were no electronic devices hidden in the room--at least, none that he did not already know about.
He prowled around the sitting room for several minutes, looking at everything--chairs, desk, windows, floor--everything. He found nothing. He had not expected to, since the occupant, a Belt man named Harry Morgan, had only been in the suite a few minutes.
Then he walked over to the door that separated the sitting room from the bedroom. Through it, he could see the suitcases sitting temptingly on the bed.
Again he took his detector out of his pocket. After a full minute, he was satisfied that there was no sign of any complex gadgetry that could warn the occupant that anyone had entered the room. Certainly there was nothing deadly around.
Then a half-grin came over the man's cunning face. There was always the chance that the occupant of the suite had rigged up a really old-fashioned trap.
He looked carefully at the hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any further, no little threads that would be broken.
It hadn't really seemed likely, after all. The door was open wide enough for a man to walk through without moving it.
Still grinning, the man reached out toward the door.
He was quite astonished when his hand didn't reach the door itself.
There was a sharp feeling of pain when his hand fell to the floor, severed at the wrist.
The man stared at his twitching hand on the floor. He blinked stupidly while his wrist gushed blood. Then, almost automatically, he stepped forward to pick up his hand.
As he shuffled forward, he felt a snick! snick! of pain in his ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.
It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he was no longer connected to them.
It was too late. He was already falling.
He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.
His hand lay, where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His body fell to the floor with a resounding thud! His head bounced once and then rolled under the bed.
When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.
A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went zzzt! and then there was silence.
V
When Representative Edway Tarnhorst cut off the call that had come from Harry Morgan, he turned around and faced the other man in the room. "Satisfactory?" he said.
"Yes. Yes, of course," said the other. He was a tall, hearty-looking man with a reddish face and a friendly smile. "You said just the right thing, Edway. Just the right thing. You're pretty smart, you know that? You got what it takes." He chuckled. "They'll never figure anything out now." He waved a hand toward the chair. "Sit down, Edway. Want a drink?"
Tarnhorst sat down and folded his hands. He looked down at them as if he were really interested in the flat, unfaceted diamond, engraved with the Tarnhorst arms, that gleamed on the ring on his finger.
"A little glass of whiskey wouldn't hurt much, Sam," he said, looking up from his hands. He smiled. "As you say, there isn't much to worry about now. If Morgan goes to the police, they'll give him the same information."
Sam Fergus handed Tarnhorst a drink. "Damn right. Who's to know?" He chuckled again and sat down. "That was pretty good. Yes sir, pretty good. Just because he thought that when you voted for the Belt Cities you were on their side, he believed what you said. Hell, I've voted on their side when it was the right thing to do. Haven't I now, Ed? Haven't I?"
"Sure you have," said Tarnhorst with an easy smile. "So have a lot of us."
"Sure we have," Fergus repeated. His grin was huge. Then it changed to a frown. "I don't figure them sometimes. Those Belt people are crazy. Why wouldn't they give us the process for making that cable of theirs? Why?" He looked up at Tarnhorst with a genuinely puzzled look on his face. "I mean, you'd think they thought that the laws of nature were private property or something. They don't have the right outlook. A man finds out something like that, he ought to give it to the human race, hadn't he, Edway? How come those Belt people want to keep something like that secret?"
Edway Tarnhorst massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, his eyes closed. "I don't know, Sam. I really don't know. Selfish, is all I can say."
Selfish? he thought. Is it really selfish? Where is the dividing line? How much is a man entitled to keep secret, for his own benefit, and how much should he tell for the public?
He glanced again at the coat of arms carved into the surface of the diamond. A thousand years ago, his ancestors had carved themselves a tiny empire out of middle Europe--a few hundred acres, no more. Enough to keep one family in luxury while the serfs had a bare existence. They had conquered by the sword and ruled by the sword. They had taken all and given nothing.
But had they? The Barons of Tarnhorst had not really lived much better than their serfs had lived. More clothes and more food, perhaps, and a few baubles--diamonds and fine silks and warm furs. But no Baron Tarnhorst had ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice; he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit to govern themselves a thousand years ago.
Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of themselves instead?
Edway Tarnhorst didn't honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability, out in the Belt. He didn't dare tell anyone--he hardly dared admit it to himself--but he thought those people were better somehow than the common clods of Earth. Those people didn't think that just because a man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas, making outré and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They didn't think that just because a man could write nonsense and use erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs, too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as every other, that a man had a right to be respected, that he deserved it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to what he earned.
But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on occasion--on very special occasion--could his native intelligence override the "common sense" that he had been taught. Only when an emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.
Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.
"Now we've got to be careful, Sam," he said. "Very careful. We don't want a war with the Belt Cities."
Sam Fergus snorted. "They wouldn't dare. We got 'em outnumbered a thousand to one."
"Not if they drop a rock on us," Tarnhorst said quietly.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus repeated.
But both of them could see what would happen to any city on Earth if one of the Belt ships decided to shift the orbit of a good-sized asteroid so that it would strike Earth. A few hundred thousand tons of rock coming in at ten miles per second would be far more devastating than an expensive H-bomb.
"They wouldn't dare," Fergus said again.
"Nevertheless," Tarnhorst said, "in dealings of this kind we are walking very close to the thin edge. We have to watch ourselves."
VI
Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was herded into a prison cell, given a shove across the smallish room, and allowed to hear the door slam behind him. By the time he regained his balance and turned to face the barred door again, it was locked. The bully-boys who had shoved him in turned away and walked down the corridor. Harry sat down on the floor and relaxed, leaning against the stone wall. There was no furniture of any kind in the cell, not even sanitary plumbing.
"What do I do for a drink of water?" he asked aloud of no one in particular.
"You wait till they bring you your drink," said a whispery voice a few feet from his head. Morgan realized that someone in the cell next to his was talking. "You get a quart a day--a halfa pint four times a day. Save your voice. Your throat gets awful dry if you talk much."
"Yeah, it would," Morgan agreed in the same whisper. "What about sanitation?"
"That's your worry," said the voice. "Fella comes by every Wednesday and Saturday with a honey bucket. You clean out your own cell."
"I thought this place smelled of something other than attar of roses," Morgan observed. "My nose tells me this is Thursday."
There was a hoarse, humorless chuckle from the man in the next cell. "'At's right. The smell of the disinfectant is strongest now. Saturday mornin' it'll be different. You catch on fast, buddy."
"Oh, I'm a whiz," Morgan agreed. "But I thought the Welfare World took care of its poor, misled criminals better than this."
Again the chuckle. "You shoulda robbed a bank or killed somebody. Then theyda given you a nice rehabilitation sentence. Regular prison. Room of your own. Something real nice. Like a hotel. But this's different."
"Yeah," Morgan agreed. This was a political prison. This was the place where they put you when they didn't care what happened to you after the door was locked because there would be no going out.
Morgan knew where he was. It was a big, fortresslike building on top of one of the highest hills at the northern end of Manhattan Island--an old building that had once been a museum and was built like a medieval castle.
"What happens if you die in here?" he asked conversationally.
"Every Wednesday and Saturday," the voice repeated.
"Um," said Harry Morgan.
"'Cept once in a while," the voice whispered. "Like a couple days ago. When was it? Yeah. Monday that'd be. Guy they had in here for a week or so. Don't remember how long. Lose tracka time here. Yeah. Sure lose tracka time here."
There was a long pause, and Morgan, controlling the tenseness in his voice, said: "What about the guy Monday?"
"Oh. Him. Yeah, well, they took him out Monday."
Morgan waited again, got nothing further, and asked: "Dead?"
"'Course he was dead. They was tryin' to get somethin' out of him. Somethin' about a cable. He jumped one of the guards, and they blackjacked him. Hit 'im too hard, I guess. Guard sure got hell for that, too. Me, I'm lucky. They don't ask me no questions."
"What are you in for?" Morgan asked.
"Don't know. They never told me. I don't ask for fear they'll remember. They might start askin' questions."
Morgan considered. This could be a plant, but he didn't think so. The voice was too authentic, and there would be no purpose in his information. That meant that Jack Latrobe really was dead. They had killed him. An ice cold hardness surged along his nerves.
* * * * *
The door at the far end of the corridor clanged, and a brace of heavy footsteps clomped along the floor. Two men came abreast of the steel-barred door and stopped.
One of them, a well-dressed, husky-looking man in his middle forties, said: "O.K., Morgan. How did you do it?"
"I put on blue lipstick and kissed my elbows--both of 'em. Going widdershins, of course."
"What are you talking about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The guy in your hotel suite. You killed him. You cut off both feet, one hand, and his head. How'd you do it?"
Morgan looked at the man. "Police?"
"Nunna your business. Answer the question."
"I use a cobweb I happened to have with me. Who was he?"
The cop's face was whitish. "You chop a guy up like that and then don't know who he is?"
"I can guess. I can guess that he was an agent for PMC 873 who was trespassing illegally. But I didn't kill him. I was in ... er ... custody when it happened."
"Not gonna talk, huh?" the cop said in a hard voice. "O.K., you've had your chance. We'll be back."
"I don't think I'll wait," said Morgan.
"You'll wait. We got you on a murder charge now. You'll wait. Wise guy." He turned and walked away. The other man followed like a trained hound.
* * * * *
After the door clanged, the man in the next cell whispered: "Well, you're for it. They're gonna ask you questions."
Morgan said one obscene word and stood up. It was time to leave.
He had been searched thoroughly. They had left him only his clothes, nothing else. They had checked to make sure that there were no microminiaturized circuits on him. He was clean.
So they thought.
Carefully, he caught a thread in the lapel of his jacked and pulled it free. Except for a certain springiness, it looked like an ordinary silon thread. He looped it around one of the bars of his cell, high up. The ends he fastened to a couple of little decorative hooks in his belt--hooks covered with a shell of synthetic ruby.
Then he leaned back, putting his weight on the thread.
Slowly, like a knife moving through cold peanut butter, the thread sank into the steel bar, cutting through its one-inch thickness with increasing difficulty until it was half-way through. Then it seemed to slip the rest of the way through.
He repeated the procedure thrice more, making two cuts in each of two bars. Then he carefully removed the sections he had cut out. He put one of them on the floor of his cell and carried the other in his hand--three feet of one-inch steel makes a nice weapon if it becomes necessary.
Then he stepped through the hole he had made.
The man in the next cell widened his eyes as Harry Morgan walked by. But Morgan could tell that he saw nothing. He had only heard. His eyes had been removed long before. It was the condition of the man that convinced Morgan with utter finality that he had told the truth.
VII
Mr. Edway Tarnhorst felt fear, but no real surprise when the shadow in the window of his suite in the Grand Central Hotel materialized into a human being. But he couldn't help asking one question.
"How did you get there?" His voice was husky. "We're eighty floors above the street."
"Try climbing asteroids for a while," said Commodore Sir Harry Morgan. "You'll get used to it. That's why I knew Jack hadn't died 'accidentally'--he was murdered."
"You ... you're not carrying a gun," Tarnhorst said.
"Do I need one?"
Tarnhorst swallowed. "Yes. Fergus will be back in a moment."
"Who's Fergus?"
"He's the man who controls PMC 873."
Harry Morgan shoved his hand into his jacket pocket "Then I have a gun. You saw it, didn't you?"
"Yes. Yes ... I saw it when you came in."
"Good. Call him."
When Sam Fergus came in, he looked as though he had had about three or four too many slugs of whiskey. There was an odd fear an his face.
"Whats matter, Edway? I--" The fear increased when he saw Morgan. "Whadda you here for?"
"I'm here to make a speech Fergus. Sit down." When Fergus still stood, Morgan repeated what he had said with only a trace more emphasis. "Sit down."
Fergus sat. So did Tarnhorst.
"Both of you pay special attention," Morgan said, a piratical gleam in his eyes. "You killed a friend of mine. My best friend. But I'm not going to kill either of you. Yet. Just listen and listen carefully."
Even Tarnhorst looked frightened. "Don't move, Sam. He's got a gun. I saw it when he came in."
"What ... what do you want?" Fergus asked.
"I want to give you the information you want. The information that you killed Jack for." There was cold hatred in his voice. "I am going to tell you something that you have thought you wanted, but which you really will wish you had never heard. I'm going to tell you about that cable."
Neither Fergus nor Tarnhorst said a word.
"You want a cable. You've heard that we use a cable that has a tensile strength of better than a hundred million pounds per square inch, and you want to know how it's made. You tried to get the secret out of Jack because he was sent here as a commercial dealer. And he wouldn't talk, so one of your goons blackjacked him too hard and then you had to drop him off a bridge to make it look like an accident.
"Then you got your hands on me. You were going to wring it out of me. Well, there is no necessity of that." His grin became wolfish. "I'll give you everything." He paused. "If you want it."
Fergus found his voice. "I want it. I'll pay a million--"
"You'll pay nothing," Morgan said flatly. "You'll listen."
Fergus nodded wordlessly.
"The composition is simple. Basically, it is a two-phase material-like fiberglass. It consists of a strong, hard material imbedded in a matrix of softer material. The difference is that, in this case, the stronger fibers are borazon--boron nitride formed under tremendous pressure--while the softer matrix is composed of tungsten carbide. If the fibers are only a thousandth or two thousandths of an inch in diameter--the thickness of a human hair or less--then the cable from which they are made has tremendous strength and flexibility.
"Do you want the details of the process now?" His teeth were showing in his wolfish grin.
Fergus swallowed. "Yes, of course. But ... but why do you--"
"Why do I give it to you? Because it will kill you. You have seen what the stuff will do. A strand a thousandth of an inch thick, encased in silon for lubrication purposes, got me out of that filthy hole you call a prison. You've heard about that?"
Fergus blinked. "You cut yourself out of there with the cable you're talking about?"
"Not with the cable. With a thin fiber. With one of the hairlike fibers that makes up the cable. Did you ever cut cheese with a wire? In effect, that wire is a knife--a knife that consists only of an edge.
"Or, another experiment you may have heard of. Take a block of ice. Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that the ice block remains whole--because the ice melts under the pressure of the wire and then flows around it and freezes again on the other side. But if you lubricate the wire with ordinary glycerine, it prevents the re-freezing and the ice block will be cut in two."
Tarnhorst nodded. "I remember. In school. They--" He let his voice trail off.
* * * * *
"Yeah. Exactly. It's a common experiment in basic science. Borazon fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area. Under pressures like that, steel cuts easily. With silon covering to lubricate the cut, there's nothing to it. As you have heard from the guards in your little hell-hole.
"Hell-hole?" Tarnhorst's eyes narrowed and he flicked a quick glance at Fergus. Morgan realized that Tarnhorst had known nothing of the extent of Fergus' machinations.
"That lovely little political prison up in Fort Tryon Park that the World Welfare State, with its usual solicitousness for the common man, keeps for its favorite guests," Morgan said. His wolfish smile returned. "I'd've cut the whole thing down if I'd had had the time. Not the stone--just the steel. In order to apply that kind of pressure you have to have the filament fastened to something considerably harder than the stuff you're trying to cut, you see. Don't try it with your fingers or you'll lose fingers."
Fergus' eyes widened again and he looked both ill and frightened. "The man we sent ... uh ... who was found in your room. You--" He stopped and seemed to have trouble swallowing.
"Me? I didn't do anything." Morgan did a good imitation of a shark trying to look innocent. "I'll admit that I looped a very fine filament of the stuff across the doorway a few times, so that if anyone tried to enter my room illegally I would be warned." He didn't bother to add that a pressure-sensitive device had released and reeled in the filament after it had done its work. "It doesn't need to be nearly as tough and heavy to cut through soft stuff like ... er ... say, a beefsteak, as it does to cut through steel. It's as fine as cobweb almost invisible. Won't the World Welfare State have fun when that stuff gets into the hands of its happy, crime-free populace?"
Edway Tarnhorst became suddenly alert. "What?"
"Yes. Think of the fun they'll have, all those lovely slobs who get their basic subsistence and their dignity and their honor as a free gift from the State. The kids, especially. They'll love it. It's so fine it can be hidden inside an ordinary thread--or woven into the hair--or...." He spread his hands. "A million places."
Fergus was gaping. Tarnhorst was concentrating on Morgan's words.
"And there's no possible way to leave fingerprints on anything that fine," Morgan continued. "You just hook it around a couple of nails or screws, across an open doorway or an alleyway--and wait."
"We wouldn't let it get into the people's hands," Tarnhorst said.
"You couldn't stop it," Morgan said flatly. "Manufacture the stuff and eventually one of the workers in the plant will figure out a way to steal some of it."
"Guards--" Fergus said faintly.
"Pfui. But even you had a perfect guard system, I think I can guarantee that some of it would get into the hands of the--common people. Unless you want to cut off all imports from the Belt."
Tarnhorst's voice hardened. "You mean you'd deliberately--"
"I mean exactly what I said," Morgan cut in sharply. "Make of it what you want."
"I suppose you have that kind of trouble out in the Belt?" Tarnhorst asked.
"No. We don't have your kind of people out in the Belt, Mr. Tarnhorst. We have men who kill, yes. But we don't have the kind of juvenile and grown-up delinquents who will kill senselessly, just for kicks. That kind is too stupid to live long out there. We are in no danger from borazon-tungsten filaments. You are." He paused just for a moment, then said: "I'm ready to give you the details of the process now, Mr. Fergus."
"I don't think I--" Fergus began with a sickly sound in his voice. But Tarnhorst interrupted him.
"We don't want it, commodore. Forget it."
"Forget it?" Morgan's voice was as cutting as the filament he had been discussing. "Forget that Jack Latrobe was murdered?"
"We will pay indemnities, of course," Tarnhorst said, feeling that it was futile.
"Fergus will pay indemnities," Morgan said. "In money, the indemnities will come to the precise amount he was willing to pay for the cable secret. I suggest that your Government confiscate that amount from him and send it to us. That may be necessary in view of the second indemnity."
"Second indemnity?"
"Mr. Fergus' life."
Tarnhorst shook his head briskly. "No. We can't execute Fergus. Impossible."
"Of course not," Morgan said soothingly. "I don't suggest that you should. But I do suggest that Mr. Fergus be very careful about going through doorways--or any other kind of opening--from now on. I suggest that he refrain from passing between any pair of reasonably solid, well-anchored objects. I suggest that he stay away from bathtubs. I suggest that he be very careful about putting his legs under a table or desk. I suggest that he not look out of windows. I could make several suggestions. And he shouldn't go around feeling in front of him, either. He might lose something."
"I understand," said Edway Tarnhorst.
So did Sam Fergus. Morgan could tell by his face.
* * * * *
When the indemnity check arrived on Ceres some time later, a short, terse note came with it.
"I regret to inform you that Mr. Samuel Fergus, evidently in a state of extreme nervous and psychic tension, took his own life by means of a gunshot wound in the head on the 21st of this month. The enclosed check will pay your indemnity in full. Tarnhorst."
Morgan smiled grimly. It was as he had expected. He had certainly never had any intention of going to all the trouble of killing Sam Fergus.
SPACE PRISON
By Tom Godwin
PART 1
For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red danger lines day and night.
She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives and felt the singing vibration of the hull. We should be almost safe by now, she thought. Athena is only forty days away.
Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to lie still any longer. She got up, to sit on the edge of the bed and switch on the light. Dale was gone--he had been summoned to adjust one of the machines in the ship's X-ray room--and Billy was asleep, nothing showing of him above the covers but a crop of brown hair and the furry nose of his ragged teddy bear.
She reached out to straighten the covers, gently, so as not to awaken him. It happened then, the thing they had all feared.
From the stern of the ship came a jarring, deafening explosion. The ship lurched violently, girders screamed, and the light flicked out.
In the darkness she heard a rapid-fire thunk-thunk-thunk as the automatic guard system slid inter-compartment doors shut against sections of the ship suddenly airless. The doors were still thudding shut when another explosion came, from toward the bow. Then there was silence; a feeling of utter quiet and motionlessness.
The fingers of fear enclosed her and her mind said to her, like the cold, unpassionate voice of a stranger: The Gerns have found us.
The light came on again, a feeble glow, and there was the soft, muffled sound of questioning voices in the other compartments. She dressed, her fingers shaking and clumsy, wishing that Dale would come to reassure her; to tell her that nothing really serious had happened, that it had not been the Gerns.
It was very still in the little compartment--strangely so. She had finished dressing when she realized the reason: the air circulation system had stopped working.
That meant the power failure was so great that the air regenerators, themselves, were dead. And there were eight thousand people on the Constellation who would have to have air to live....
The Attention buzzer sounded shrilly from the public address system speakers that were scattered down the ship's corridors. A voice she recognized as that of Lieutenant Commander Lake spoke:
"War was declared upon Earth by the Gern Empire ten days ago. Two Gern cruisers have attacked us and their blasters have destroyed the stern and bow of the ship. We are without a drive and without power but for a few emergency batteries. I am the Constellation's only surviving officer and the Gern commander is boarding us to give me the surrender terms.
"None of you will leave your compartments until ordered to do so. Wherever you may be, remain there. This is necessary to avoid confusion and to have as many as possible in known locations for future instructions. I repeat: you will not leave your compartments."
The speaker cut off. She stood without moving and heard again the words: I am the Constellation's only surviving officer....
The Gerns had killed her father.
He had been second-in-command of the Dunbar expedition that had discovered the world of Athena and his knowledge of Athena was valuable to the colonization plans. He had been quartered among the ship's officers--and the Gern blast had destroyed that section of the ship.
She sat down on the edge of the bed again and tried to reorient herself; to accept the fact that her life and the lives of all the others had abruptly, irrevocably, been changed.
The Athena Colonization Plan was ended. They had known such a thing might happen--that was why the Constellation had been made ready for the voyage in secret and had waited for months for the chance to slip through the ring of Gern spy ships; that was why she had raced at full speed, with her communicators silenced so there would be no radiations for the Gerns to find her by. Only forty days more would have brought them to the green and virgin world of Athena, four hundred light-years beyond the outermost boundary of the Gern Empire. There they should have been safe from Gern detection for many years to come; for long enough to build planetary defenses against attack. And there they would have used Athena's rich resources to make ships and weapons to defend mineral-depleted Earth against the inexorably increasing inclosure of the mighty, coldly calculating colossus that was the Gern Empire.
Success or failure of the Athena Plan had meant ultimate life or death for Earth. They had taken every precaution possible but the Gern spy system had somehow learned of Athena and the Constellation. Now, the cold war was no longer cold and the Plan was dust....
* * * * *
Billy sighed and stirred in the little-boy sleep that had not been broken by the blasts that had altered the lives of eight thousand people and the fate of a world.
She shook his shoulder and said, "Billy."
He raised up, so small and young to her eyes that the question in her mind was like an anguished prayer: Dear God--what do Gerns do to five-year-old boys?
He saw her face, and the dim light, and the sleepiness was suddenly gone from him. "What's wrong, Mama? And why are you scared?"
There was no reason to lie to him.
"The Gerns found us and stopped us."
"Oh," he said. In his manner was the grave thoughtfulness of a boy twice his age, as there always was. "Will they--will they kill us?"
"Get dressed, honey," she said. "Hurry, so we'll be ready when they let Daddy come back to tell us what to do."
* * * * *
They were both ready when the Attention buzzer sounded again in the corridors. Lake spoke, his tone grim and bitter:
"There is no power for the air regenerators and within twenty hours we will start smothering to death. Under these circumstances I could not do other than accept the survival terms the Gern commander offered us.
"He will speak to you now and you will obey his orders without protest. Death is the only alternative."
Then the voice of the Gern commander came, quick and harsh and brittle:
"This section of space, together with planet Athena, is an extension of the Gern Empire. This ship has deliberately invaded Gern territory in time of war with intent to seize and exploit a Gern world. We are willing, however, to offer a leniency not required by the circumstances. Terran technicians and skilled workers in certain fields can be used in the factories we shall build on Athena. The others will not be needed and there is not room on the cruisers to take them.
"Your occupation records will be used to divide you into two groups: the Acceptables and the Rejects. The Rejects will be taken by the cruisers to an Earth-type planet near here and left, together with the personal possessions in their compartments and additional, and ample, supplies. The Acceptables will then be taken on to Athena and at a later date the cruisers will return the Rejects to Earth.
"This division will split families but there will be no resistance to it. Gern guards will be sent immediately to make this division and you will wait in your compartments for them. You will obey their orders promptly and without annoying them with questions. At the first instance of resistance or rebellion this offer will be withdrawn and the cruisers will go their way again."
* * * * *
In the silence following the ultimatum she could hear the soft, wordless murmur from the other compartments, the undertone of anxiety like a dark thread through it. In every compartment parents and children, brothers and sisters, were seeing one another for the last time....
The corridor outside rang to the tramp of feet; the sound of a dozen Gerns walking with swift military precision. She held her breath, her heart racing, but they went past her door and on to the corridor's end.
There she could faintly hear them entering compartments, demanding names, and saying, "Out--out!" Once she heard a Gern say, "Acceptables will remain inside until further notice. Do not open your doors after the Rejects have been taken out."
Billy touched her on the hand. "Isn't Daddy going to come?"
"He--he can't right now. We'll see him pretty soon."
She remembered what the Gern commander had said about the Rejects being permitted to take their personal possessions. She had very little time in which to get together what she could carry....
There were two small bags in the compartment and she hurried to pack them with things she and Dale and Billy might need, not able to know which of them, if any, would be Rejects. Nor could she know whether she should put in clothes for a cold world or a hot one. The Gern commander had said the Rejects would be left on an Earth-type planet but where could it be? The Dunbar Expedition had explored across five hundred light-years of space and had found only one Earth-type world: Athena.
The Gerns were almost to her door when she had finished and she heard them enter the compartments across from her own. There came the hard, curt questions and the command: "Outside--hurry!" A woman said something in pleading question and there was the soft thud of a blow and the words: "Outside--do not ask questions!" A moment later she heard the woman going down the corridor, trying to hold back her crying.
Then the Gerns were at her own door.
She held Billy's hand and waited for them with her heart hammering. She held her head high and composed herself with all the determination she could muster so that the arrogant Gerns would not see that she was afraid. Billy stood beside her as tall as his five years would permit, his teddy bear under his arm, and only the way his hand held to hers showed that he, too, was scared.
The door was flung open and two Gerns strode in.
The were big, dark men, with powerful, bulging muscles. They surveyed her and the room with a quick sweep of eyes that were like glittering obsidian, their mouths thin, cruel slashes in the flat, brutal planes of their faces.
"Your name?" snapped the one who carried a sheaf of occupation records.
"It's"--she tried to swallow the quaver in her voice and make it cool and unfrightened--"Irene Lois Humbolt--Mrs. Dale Humbolt."
The Gern glanced at the papers. "Where is your husband?"
"He was in the X-ray room at--"
"You are a Reject. Out--down the corridor with the others."
"My husband--will he be a--"
"Outside!"
It was the tone of voice that had preceded the blow in the other compartment and the Gern took a quick step toward her. She seized the two bags in one hand, not wanting to release Billy, and swung back to hurry out into the corridor. The other Gern jerked one of the bags from her hand and flung it to the floor. "Only one bag per person," he said, and gave her an impatient shove that sent her and Billy stumbling through the doorway.
She became part of the Rejects who were being herded like sheep down the corridors and into the port airlock. There were many children among them, the young ones frightened and crying, and often with only one parent or an older brother or sister to take care of them. And there were many young ones who had no one at all and were dependent upon strangers to take their hands and tell them what they must do.
When she was passing the corridor that led to the X-ray room she saw a group of Rejects being herded up it. Dale was not among them and she knew, then, that she and Billy would never see him again.
* * * * *
"Out from the ship--faster--faster----"
The commands of the Gern guards snapped like whips around them as she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the sky was dark with sunset.
"Out from the ship--faster----"
It was hard to walk fast in the high gravity, carrying the bag in one hand and holding up all of Billy's weight she could with the other.
"They lied to us!" a man beside her said to someone. "Let's turn and fight. Let's take----"
A Gern blaster cracked with a vivid blue flash and the man plunged lifelessly to the ground. She flinched instinctively and fell over an unseen rock, the bag of precious clothes flying from her hand. She scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it.
The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. "Out from the ship--faster."
The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. "Move on--move on!"
She staggered in a blinding blaze of pain and then hurried on, holding tight to Billy's hand, the wind cutting like knives of ice through her thin clothes and blood running in a trickle down her cheek.
"He hit you," Billy said. "He hurt you." Then he called the Gern a name that five-year-old boys were not supposed to know, with a savagery that five-year-old boys were not supposed to possess.
When she stopped at the outer fringe of Rejects she saw that all of them were out of the cruiser and the guards were going back into it. A half mile down the valley the other cruiser stood, the Rejects out from it and its boarding ramps already withdrawn.
When she had buttoned Billy's blouse tighter and wiped the blood from her face the first blast of the drives came from the farther cruiser. The nearer one blasted a moment later and they lifted together, their roaring filling the valley. They climbed faster and faster, dwindling as they went. Then they disappeared in the black sky, their roaring faded away, and there was left only the moaning of the wind around her and somewhere a child crying.
And somewhere a voice asking, "Where are we? In the name of God--what have they done to us?"
She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hard pull of the gravity, and knew where they were. They were on Ragnarok, the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging fevers where men could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth and meant: The last day for gods and men. The Dunbar Expedition had discovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of how it had killed six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killed all of them if they had remained any longer.
She knew where they were and she knew the Gerns had lied to them and would never send a ship to take them to Earth. Their abandonment there had been intended as a death sentence for all of them.
And Dale was gone and she and Billy would die helpless and alone....
"It will be dark--so soon." Billy's voice shook with the cold. "If Daddy can't find us in the dark, what will we do?"
"I don't know," she said. "There's no one to help us and how can I know--what we should do----"
She was from the city. How could she know what to do on an alien, hostile world where armed explorers had died? She had tried to be brave before the Gerns but now--now night was at hand and out of it would come terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never see Dale again, never see Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the world that had killed them....
She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy's cold little hand touched her own, trying to reassure her.
"Don't cry, Mama. I guess--I guess everybody else is scared, too."
Everyone else....
She was not alone. How could she have thought she was alone? All around her were others, as helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was only one out of four thousand.
"I guess they are, Billy," she said. "I never thought of that, before."
She knelt to put her arms around him, thinking: Tears and fear are futile weapons; they can never bring us any tomorrows. We'll have to fight whatever comes to kill us no matter how scared we are. For ourselves and for our children. Above all else, for our children....
"I'm going back to find our clothes," she said. "You wait here for me, in the shelter of that rock, and I won't be gone long."
Then she told him what he would be too young to really understand.
"I'm not going to cry any more and I know, now, what I must do. I'm going to make sure that there is a tomorrow for you, always, to the last breath of my life."
* * * * *
The bright blue star dimmed and the others faded away. Dawn touched the sky, bringing with it a coldness that frosted the steel of the rifle in John Prentiss's hands and formed beads of ice on his gray mustache. There was a stirring in the area behind him as the weary Rejects prepared to face the new day and the sound of a child whimpering from the cold. There had been no time the evening before to gather wood for fires----
"Prowlers!"
The warning cry came from an outer guard and black shadows were suddenly sweeping out of the dark dawn.
They were things that might have been half wolf, half tiger; each of them three hundred pounds of incredible ferocity with eyes blazing like yellow fire in their white-fanged tiger-wolf faces. They came like the wind, in a flowing black wave, and ripped through the outer guard line as though it had not existed. The inner guards fired in a chattering roll of gunshots, trying to turn them, and Prentiss's rifle licked out pale tongues of flame as he added his own fire. The prowlers came on, breaking through, but part of them went down and the others were swerved by the fire so that they struck only the outer edge of the area where the Rejects were grouped.
At that distance they blended into the dark ground so that he could not find them in the sights of his rifle. He could only watch helplessly and see a dark-haired woman caught in their path, trying to run with a child in her arms and already knowing it was too late. A man was running toward her, slow in the high gravity, an axe in his hands and his cursing a raging, savage snarl. For a moment her white face was turned in helpless appeal to him and the others; then the prowlers were upon her and she fell, deliberately, going to the ground with her child hugged in her arms beneath her so that her body would protect it.
The prowlers passed over her, pausing for an instant to slash the life from her, and raced on again. They vanished back into the outer darkness, the farther guards firing futilely, and there was a silence but for the distant, hysterical sobbing of a woman.
It had happened within seconds; the fifth prowler attack that night and the mildest.
* * * * *
Full dawn had come by the time he replaced the guards killed by the last attack and made the rounds of the other guard lines. He came back by the place where the prowlers had killed the woman, walking wearily against the pull of gravity. She lay with her dark hair tumbled and stained with blood, her white face turned up to the reddening sky, and he saw her clearly for the first time.
It was Irene.
He stopped, gripping the cold steel of the rifle and not feeling the rear sight as it cut into his hand.
Irene.... He had not known she was on Ragnarok. He had not seen her in the darkness of the night and he had hoped she and Billy were safe among the Acceptables with Dale.
There was the sound of footsteps and a bold-faced girl in a red skirt stopped beside him, her glance going over him curiously.
"The little boy," he asked, "do you know if he's all right?"
"The prowlers cut up his face but he'll be all right," she said. "I came back after his clothes."
"Are you going to look after him?"
"Someone has to and"--she shrugged her shoulders--"I guess I was soft enough to elect myself for the job. Why--was his mother a friend of yours?"
"She was my daughter," he said.
"Oh." For a moment the bold, brassy look was gone from her face, like a mask that had slipped. "I'm sorry. And I'll take care of Billy."
* * * * *
The first objection to his assumption of leadership occurred an hour later. The prowlers had withdrawn with the coming of full daylight and wood had been carried from the trees to build fires. Mary, one of the volunteer cooks, was asking two men to carry her some water when he approached. The smaller man picked up one of the clumsy containers, hastily improvised from canvas, and started toward the creek. The other, a big, thick-chested man, did not move.
"We'll have to have water," Mary said. "People are hungry and cold and sick."
The man continued to squat by the fire, his hands extended to its warmth. "Name someone else," he said.
"But----"
She looked at Prentiss in uncertainty. He went to the thick-chested man, knowing there would be violence and welcoming it as something to help drive away the vision of Irene's pale, cold face under the red sky.
"She asked you to get her some water," he said. "Get it."
The man looked up at him, studying him with deliberate insolence, then he got to his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched challengingly.
"I'll have to set you straight, old timer," he said. "No one has appointed you the head cheese around here. Now, there's the container you want filled and over there"--he made a small motion with one hand--"is the creek. Do you know what to do?"
"Yes," he said. "I know what to do."
He brought the butt of the rifle smashing up. It struck the man under the chin and there was a sharp cracking sound as his jawbone snapped. For a fraction of a second there was an expression of stupefied amazement on his face then his eyes glazed and he slumped to the ground with his broken jaw setting askew.
"All right," he said to Mary. "Now you go ahead and name somebody else."
* * * * *
He found that the prowlers had killed seventy during the night. One hundred more had died from the Hell Fever that often followed exposure and killed within an hour.
He went the half mile to the group that had arrived on the second cruiser as soon as he had eaten a delayed breakfast. He saw, before he had quite reached the other group, that the Constellation's Lieutenant Commander, Vincent Lake, was in charge of it.
Lake, a tall, hard-jawed man with pale blue eyes under pale brows, walked forth to meet him as soon as he recognized him.
"Glad to see you're still alive," Lake greeted him. "I thought that second Gern blast got you along with the others."
"I was visiting midship and wasn't home when it happened," he said.
He looked at Lake's group of Rejects, in their misery and uncertainty so much like his own, and asked, "How was it last night?"
"Bad--damned bad," Lake said. "Prowlers and Hell Fever, and no wood for fires. Two hundred died last night."
"I came down to see if anyone was in charge here and to tell them that we'll have to move into the woods at once--today. We'll have plenty of wood for the fires there, some protection from the wind, and by combining our defenses we can stand off the prowlers better."
Lake agreed. When the brief discussion of plans was finished he asked, "How much do you know about Ragnarok?"
"Not much," Prentiss answered. "We didn't stay to study it very long. There are no heavy metals on Ragnarok's other sun. Its position in the advance of the resources of any value. We gave Ragnarok a quick survey and when the sixth man died we marked it on the chart as uninhabitable and went on our way.
"As you probably know, that bright blue star is Ragnarok's other sun. It's position in the advance of the yellow sun shows the season to be early spring. When summer comes Ragnarok will swing between the two suns and the heat will be something no human has ever endured. Nor the cold, when winter comes.
"I know of no edible plants, although there might be some. There are a few species of rodent-like animals--they're scavengers--and a herbivore we called the woods goat. The prowlers are the dominant form of life on Ragnarok and I suspect their intelligence is a good deal higher than we would like it to be. There will be a constant battle for survival with them.
"There's another animal, not as intelligent as the prowlers but just as dangerous--the unicorn. The unicorns are big and fast and they travel in herds. I haven't seen any here so far--I hope we don't. At the lower elevations are the swamp crawlers. They're unadulterated nightmares. I hope they don't go to these higher elevations in the summer. The prowlers and the Hell Fever, the gravity and heat and cold and starvation, will be enough for us to have to fight."
"I see," Lake said. He smiled, a smile that was as bleak as moonlight on an arctic glacier. "Earth-type--remember the promise the Gerns made the Rejects?" He looked out across the camp, at the snow whipping from the frosty hills, at the dead and the dying, and a little girl trying vainly to awaken her brother.
"They were condemned, without reason, without a chance to live," he said. "So many of them are so young ... and when you're young it's too soon to have to die."
* * * * *
Prentiss returned to his own group. The dead were buried in shallow graves and inventory was taken of the promised "ample supplies." These were only the few personal possessions the Rejects had been permitted to take plus a small amount of food the Gerns had taken from the Constellation's stores. The Gerns had been forced to provide the Rejects with at least a little food--had they openly left them to starve, the Acceptables, whose families were among the Rejects, might have rebelled.
Inventory of the firearms and ammunition showed the total to be discouragingly small. They would have to learn how to make and use bows and arrows as soon as possible.
With the first party of guards and workmen following him, Prentiss went to the tributary valley that emptied into the central valley a mile to the north. It was as good a camp site as could be hoped for; wide and thickly spotted with groves of trees, a creek running down its center.
The workmen began the construction of shelters and he climbed up the side of the nearer hill. He reached its top, his breath coming fast in the gravity that was the equivalent of a burden half his own weight, and saw what the surrounding terrain was like.
To the south, beyond the barren valley, the land could be seen dropping in its long sweep to the southern lowlands where the unicorns and swamp crawlers lived. To the north the hills climbed gently for miles, then ended under the steeply sloping face of an immense plateau. The plateau reached from western to eastern horizon, still white with the snows of winter and looming so high above the world below that the clouds brushed it and half obscured it.
He went back down the hill as Lake's men appeared. They started work on what would be a continuation of his own camp and he told Lake what he had seen from the hill.
"We're between the lowlands and the highlands," he said. "This will be as near to a temperate altitude as Ragnarok has. We survive here--or else. There's no other place for us to go."
An overcast darkened the sky at noon and the wind died down to almost nothing. There was a feeling of waiting tension in the air and he went back to the Rejects, to speed their move into the woods. They were already going in scattered groups, accompanied by prowler guards, but there was no organization and it would be too long before the last of them were safely in the new camp.
He could not be two places at once--he needed a subleader to oversee the move of the Rejects and their possessions into the woods and their placement after they got there.
He found the man he wanted already helping the Rejects get started: a thin, quiet man named Henry Anders who had fought well against the prowlers the night before, even though his determination had been greater than his marksmanship. He was the type people instinctively liked and trusted; a good choice for the subleader whose job it would be to handle the multitude of details in camp while he, Prentiss, and a second subleader he would select, handled the defense of the camp and the hunting.
"I don't like this overcast," he told Anders. "Something's brewing. Get everyone moved and at work helping build shelters as soon as you can."
"I can have most of them there within an hour or two," Anders said. "Some of the older people, though, will have to take it slow. This gravity--it's already getting the hearts of some of them."
"How are the children taking the gravity?" he asked.
"The babies and the very young--it's hard to tell about them yet. But the children from about four on up get tired quickly, go to sleep, and when they wake up they've sort of bounced back out of it."
"Maybe they can adapt to some extent to this gravity." He thought of what Lake had said that morning: So many of them are so young ... and when you're young it's too soon to have to die. "Maybe the Gerns made a mistake--maybe Terran children aren't as easy to kill as they thought. It's your job and mine and others to give the children the chance to prove the Gerns wrong."
He went his way again to pass by the place where Julia, the girl who had become Billy's foster-mother, was preparing to go to the new camp.
It was the second time for him to see Billy that morning. The first time Billy had still been stunned with grief, and at the sight of his grandfather he had been unable to keep from breaking.
"The Gern hit her," he had sobbed, his torn face bleeding anew as it twisted in crying. "He hurt her, and Daddy was gone and then--and then the other things killed her----"
But now he had had a little time to accept what had happened and he was changed. He was someone much older, almost a man, trapped for a while in the body of a five-year-old boy.
"I guess this is all, Billy," Julia was saying as she gathered up her scanty possessions and Irene's bag. "Get your teddy bear and we'll go."
Billy went to his teddy bear and knelt down to pick it up. Then he stopped and said something that sounded like "No." He laid the teddy bear back down, wiping a little dust from its face as in a last gesture of farewell, and stood up to face Julia empty-handed.
"I don't think I'll want to play with my teddy bear any more," he said. "I don't think I'll ever want to play at all anymore."
Then he went to walk beside her, leaving his teddy bear lying on the ground behind him and with it leaving forever the tears and laughter of childhood.
* * * * *
The overcast deepened, and at midafternoon dark storm clouds came driving in from the west. Efforts were intensified to complete the move before the storm broke, both in his section of the camp and in Lake's. The shelters would be of critical importance and they were being built of the materials most quickly available; dead limbs, brush, and the limited amount of canvas and blankets the Rejects had. They would be inadequate protection but there was no time to build anything better.
It seemed only a few minutes until the black clouds were overhead, rolling and racing at an incredible velocity. With them came the deep roar of the high wind that drove them and the wind on the ground began to stir restlessly in response, like some monster awakening to the call of its kind.
Prentiss knew already who he wanted as his other subleader. He found him hard at work helping build shelters; Howard Craig, a powerfully muscled man with a face as hard and grim as a cliff of granite. It had been Craig who had tried to save Irene from the prowlers that morning with only an axe as a weapon.
Prentiss knew him slightly--and Craig still did not know Irene had been his daughter. Craig had been one of the field engineers for what would have been the Athena Geological Survey. He had had a wife, a frail, blonde girl who had been the first of all to die of Hell Fever the night before, and he still had their three small children.
"We'll stop with the shelters we already have built," he told Craig. "It will take all the time left to us to reinforce them against the wind. I need someone to help me, in addition to Anders. You're the one I want.
"Send some young and fast-moving men back to last night's camp to cut all the strips of prowler skins they can get. Everything about the shelters will have to be lashed down to something solid. See if you can find some experienced outdoorsmen to help you check the jobs.
"And tell Anders that women and children only will be placed in the shelters. There will be no room for anyone else and if any man, no matter what the excuse, crowds out a woman or child I'll personally kill him."
"You needn't bother," Craig said. He smiled with savage mirthlessness. "I'll be glad to take care of any such incidents."
Prentiss saw to it that the piles of wood for the guard fires were ready to be lighted when the time came. He ordered all guards to their stations, there to get what rest they could. They would have no rest at all after darkness came.
He met Lake at the north end of his own group's camp, where it merged with Lake's group and no guard line was needed. Lake told him that his camp would be as well prepared as possible under the circumstances within another hour. By then the wind in the trees was growing swiftly stronger, slapping harder and harder at the shelters, and it seemed doubtful that the storm would hold off for an hour.
But Lake was given his hour, plus half of another. Then deep dusk came, although it was not quite sundown. Prentiss ordered all the guard fires lighted and all the women and children into the shelters. Fifteen minutes later the storm finally broke.
It came as a roaring downpour of cold rain. Complete darkness came with it and the wind rose to a velocity that made the trees lean. An hour went by and the wind increased, smashing at the shelters with a violence they had not been built to withstand. The prowler skin lashings held but the canvas and blankets were ripped into streamers that cracked like rifle shots in the wind before they were torn completely loose and flung into the night.
One by one the guard fires went out and the rain continued, growing colder and driven in almost horizontal sheets by the wind. The women and children huddled in chilled misery in what meager protection the torn shelters still gave and there was nothing that could be done to help them.
The rain turned to snow at midnight, a howling blizzard through which Prentiss's light could penetrate but a few feet as he made his rounds. He walked with slogging weariness, forcing himself on. He was no longer young--he was fifty--and he had had little rest.
He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve more sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could have shunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. He had lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knife he could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much less effort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had been repugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostile worlds might help the others to survive.
So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding the fact that he would be shortening his already short time to live on Ragnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade the individual to stand aside and let the group die.
The snow stopped an hour later and the wind died to a frigid moaning. The clouds thinned, broke apart, and the giant star looked down upon the land with its cold, blue light.
The prowlers came then.
They feinted against the east and west guard lines, then hit the south line in massed, ferocious attack. Twenty got through, past the slaughtered south guards, and charged into the interior of the camp. As they did so the call, prearranged by him in case of such an event, went up the guard lines:
"Emergency guards, east and west--close in!"
In the camp, above the triumphant, demoniac yammering of the prowlers, came the screams of women, the thinner cries of children, and the shouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers with knives and clubs. Then the emergency guards--every third man from the east and west lines--came plunging through the snow, firing as they came.
The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward the guards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly with blood spurting from a severed artery and splashing dark in the starlight on the blue-white snow. The air was filled with the cracking of gunfire and the deep, savage snarling of the prowlers. Half of the prowlers broke through, leaving seven dead guards behind them. The others lay in the snow where they had fallen and the surviving emergency guards turned to hurry back to their stations, reloading as they went.
The wounded woman had crumpled down in the snow and a first aid man knelt over her. He straightened, shaking his head, and joined the others as they searched for injured among the prowlers' victims.
They found no injured; only the dead. The prowlers killed with grim efficiency.
* * * * *
"John----"
John Chiara, the young doctor, hurried toward him. His dark eyes were worried behind his frosted glasses and his eyebrows were coated with ice.
"The wood is soaked," he said. "It's going to be some time before we can get fires going. There are babies that will freeze to death before then."
Prentiss looked at the prowlers lying in the snow and motioned toward them. "They're warm. Have their guts and lungs taken out."
"What----"
Then Chiara's eyes lighted with comprehension and he hurried away without further questions.
Prentiss went on, to make the rounds of the guards. When he returned he saw that his order had been obeyed.
The prowlers lay in the snow as before, their savage faces still twisted in their dying snarls, but snug and warm inside them babies slept.
* * * * *
The prowlers attacked again and again and when the wan sun lifted to shine down on the white, frozen land there were five hundred dead in Prentiss's camp: three hundred by Hell Fever and two hundred by prowler attacks.
Five hundred--and that had been only one night on Ragnarok.
Lake reported over six hundred dead. "I hope," he said with bitter hatred, "that the Gerns slept comfortably last night."
"We'll have to build a wall around the camp to hold out the prowlers," Prentiss said. "We don't dare keep using up what little ammunition we have at the rate we've used it the last two nights."
"That will be a big job in this gravity," Lake said. "We'll have to crowd both groups in together to let its circumference be as small as possible."
It was the way Prentiss had planned to do it. One thing would have to be settled with Lake: there could not be two independent leaders over the merged groups.
Lake, watching him, said, "I think we can get along. Alien worlds are your specialty rather than mine. And according to the Ragnarok law of averages, there will be only one of us pretty soon, anyway."
All were moved to the center of the camp area that day and when the prowlers came that night they found a ring of guards and fires through which they could penetrate only with heavy sacrifices.
There was warmth to the sun the next morning and the snow began to melt. Work was commenced on the stockade wall. It would have to be twelve feet high so the prowlers could not jump over it and, since the prowlers had the sharp claws and climbing ability of cats, its top would have to be surmounted with a row of sharp outward-and-downward projecting stakes. These would be set in sockets in the top rail and tied down with strips of prowler skin.
The trees east of camp were festooned for a great distance with the remnants of canvas and cloth the wind had left there. A party of boys, protected by the usual prowler guards, was sent out to climb the trees and recover it. All of it, down to the smallest fragment, was turned over to the women who were physically incapable of helping work on the stockade wall. They began patiently sewing the rags and tatters back into usable form again.
The first hunting party went out and returned with six of the tawny-yellow sharp-horned woods goats, each as large as an Earth deer. The hunters reported the woods goats to be hard to stalk and dangerous when cornered. One hunter was killed and another injured because of not knowing that.
They also brought in a few of the rabbit-sized scavenger animals. They were all legs and teeth and bristly fur, the meat almost inedible. It would be a waste of the limited ammunition to shoot any more of them.
There was a black barked tree which the Dunbar Expedition had called the lance tree because of its slender, straightly outthrust limbs. Its wood was as hard as hickory and as springy as cedar. Prentiss found two amateur archers who were sure they could make efficient bows and arrows out of the lance tree limbs. He gave them the job, together with helpers.
The days turned suddenly hot, with nights that still went below freezing. The Hell Fever took a constant, relentless toll. They needed adequate shelters--but the dwindling supply of ammunition and the nightly prowler attacks made the need for a stockade wall even more imperative. The shelters would have to wait.
He went looking for Dr. Chiara one evening and found him just leaving one of the makeshift shelters.
A boy lay inside it, his face flushed with Hell Fever and his eyes too bright and too dark as he looked up into the face of his mother who sat beside him. She was dry-eyed and silent as she looked down at him but she was holding his hand in hers, tightly, desperately, as though she might that way somehow keep him from leaving her.
Prentiss walked beside Chiara and when the shelter was behind them he asked, "There's no hope?"
"None," Chiara said. "There never is with Hell Fever."
Chiara had changed. He was no longer the stocky, cheerful man he had been on the Constellation, whose brown eyes had smiled at the world through thick glasses and who had laughed and joked as he assured his patients that all would soon be well with them. He was thin and his face was haggard with worry. He had, in his quiet way, been fully as valiant as any of those who had fought the prowlers. He had worked day and night to fight a form of death he could not see and against which he had no weapon.
"The boy is dying," Chiara said. "He knows it and his mother knows it. I told them the medicine I gave him might help. It was a lie, to try to make it a little easier for both of them before the end comes. The medicine I gave him was a salt tablet--that's all I have."
And then, with the first bitterness Prentiss had ever seen him display, Chiara said, "You call me 'Doctor.' Everyone does. I'm not--I'm only a first-year intern. I do the best I know how to do but it isn't enough--it will never be enough."
"What you have to learn here is something no Earth doctor knows or could teach you," he said. "You have to have time to learn--and you need equipment and drugs."
"If I could have antibiotics and other drugs ... I wanted to get a supply from the dispensary but the Gerns wouldn't let me go."
"Some of the Ragnarok plants might be of value if a person could find the right ones. I just came from a talk with Anders about that. He'll provide you with anything possible in the way of equipment and supplies for research--anything in the camp you need to try to save lives. He'll be at your shelter tonight to see what you want. Do you want to try it?"
"Yes--of course." Chiara's eyes lighted with new hope. "It might take a long time to find a cure--maybe we never would--but I'd like to have help so I could try. I'd like to be able, some day once again, to say to a scared kid, 'Take this medicine and in the morning you'll be better,' and know I told the truth."
The nightly prowler attacks continued and the supply of ammunition diminished. It would be some time before men were skilled in the use of the bows and arrows that were being made; and work on the wall was pushed ahead with all speed possible. No one was exempt from labor on it who could as much as carry the pointed stakes. Children down to the youngest worked alongside the men and women.
The work was made many times more exhausting by the 1.5 gravity. People moved heavily at their jobs and even at night there was no surcease from the gravity. They could only go into a coma-like sleep in which there was no real rest and from which they awoke tired and aching. Each morning there would be some who did not awaken at all, though their hearts had been sound enough for working on Earth or Athena.
The killing labor was recognized as necessary, however, and there were no complaints until the morning he was accosted by Peter Bemmon.
He had seen Bemmon several times on the Constellation; a big, soft-faced man who had attached much importance to his role as a minor member of the Athena Planning Board. But even on the Constellation Bemmon had felt he merited a still higher position, and his ingratiating attitude when before his superiors had become one of fault-finding insinuations concerning their ability as compared with his when their backs were turned.
This resentment had taken new form on Ragnarok, where his former position was of utterly no importance to anyone and his lack of any skills or outdoor experience made him only one worker among others.
The sun was shining mercilessly hot the day Bemmon chose to challenge Prentiss's wisdom as leader. Bemmon was cutting and sharpening stakes, a job the sometimes-too-lenient Anders had given him when Bemmon had insisted his heart was on the verge of failure from doing heavier work. Prentiss was in a hurry and would have gone on past him but Bemmon halted him with a sharp command:
"You--wait a minute!"
Bemmon had a hatchet in his hand, but only one stake lay on the ground; and his face was red with anger, not exertion. Prentiss stopped, wondering if Bemmon was going to ask for a broken jaw, and Bemmon came to him.
"How long," Bemmon asked, anger making his voice a little thick, "do you think I'll tolerate this absurd situation?"
"What situation?" Prentiss asked.
"This stupid insistence upon confining me to manual labor. I'm the single member on Ragnarok of the Athena Planning Board and surely you can see that this bumbling confusion of these people"--Bemmon indicated the hurrying, laboring men, women and children around them--"can be transformed into efficient, organized effort only through proper supervision. Yet my abilities along such lines are ignored and I've been forced to work as a common laborer--a wood chopper!"
He flung the hatchet down viciously, into the rocks at his feet, breathing heavily with resentment and challenge. "I demand the respect to which I'm entitled."
"Look," Prentiss said.
He pointed to the group just then going past them. A sixteen-year-old girl was bent almost double under the weight of the pole she was carrying, her once pretty face flushed and sweating. Behind her two twelve-year-old boys were dragging a still larger pole. Behind them came several small children, each of them carrying as many of the pointed stakes as he or she could walk under, no matter if it was only one. All of them were trying to hurry, to accomplish as much as possible, and no one was complaining even though they were already staggering with weariness.
"So you think you're entitled to more respect?" Prentiss asked. "Those kids would work harder if you were giving them orders from under the shade of a tree--is that what you want?"
Bemmon's lips thinned and hatred was like a sheen on his face. Prentiss looked from the single stake Bemmon had cut that morning to Bemmon's white, unblistered hands. He looked at the hatchet that Bemmon had thrown down in the rocks and at the V notch broken in its keen-edged blade. It had been the best of the very few hatchets they had....
"The next time you even nick that hatchet I'm going to split your skull with it," he said. "Pick it up and get back to work. I mean work. You'll have broken blisters on every finger tonight or you'll go on the log-carrying force tomorrow. Now, move!"
What Bemmon had thought to be his wrath deserted him before Prentiss's fury. He stooped to obey the order but the hatred remained on his face and when the hatchet was in his hands he made a last attempt to bluster:
"The day may come when we'll refuse to tolerate any longer your sadistic displays of authority."
"Good," Prentiss said. "Anyone who doesn't like my style is welcome to try to change it--or to try to replace me. With knives or clubs, rifles or broken hatchets, Bemmon--any way you want it and any time you want it."
"I----" Bemmon's eyes went from the hatchet in his half raised hand to the long knife in Prentiss's belt. He swallowed with a convulsive jerk of his Adam's apple and his hatchet-bearing arm suddenly wilted. "I don't want to fight--to replace you----"
He swallowed again and his face forced itself into a sickly attempt at an ingratiating smile. "I didn't mean to imply any disrespect for you or the good job you're doing. I'm very sorry."
Then he hurried away, like a man glad to escape, and began to chop stakes with amazing speed.
But the sullen hatred had not been concealed by the ingratiating smile; and Prentiss knew Bemmon was a man who would always be his enemy.
* * * * *
The days dragged by in the weary routine, but overworked muscles slowly strengthened and people moved with a little less laborious effort. On the twentieth day the wall was finally completed and the camp was prowler proof.
But the spring weather was a mad succession of heat and cold and storm that caused the Hell Fever to take its toll each day and there was no relaxation from the grueling labor. Weatherproof shelters had to be built as rapidly as possible.
So the work of constructing them began; wearily, sometimes almost hopelessly, but without complaint other than to hate and curse the Gerns more than ever.
There was no more trouble from Bemmon; Prentiss had almost forgotten him when he was publicly challenged one night by a burly, threatening man named Haggar.
"You've bragged that you'll fight any man who dares disagree with you," Haggar said loudly. "Well, here I am. We'll use knives and before they even have time to bury you tonight I'm goin' to have your stooges kicked out and replaced with men who'll give us competent leadership instead of blunderin' authoritarianism."
Prentiss noticed that Haggar seemed to have a little difficulty pronouncing the last word, as though he had learned it only recently.
"I'll be glad to accommodate you," Prentiss said mildly. "Go get yourself a knife."
Haggar already had one, a long-bladed butcher knife, and the duel began. Haggar was surprisingly adept with his knife but he had never had the training and experience in combat that interstellar explorers such as Prentiss had. Haggar was good, but considerably far from good enough.
Prentiss did not kill him. He had no compunctions about doing such a thing, but it would have been an unnecessary waste of needed manpower. He gave Haggar a carefully painful and bloody lesson that thoroughly banished all his lust for conflict without seriously injuring him. The duel was over within a minute after it began.
Bemmon, who had witnessed the challenge with keen interest and then watched Haggar's defeat with agitation, became excessively friendly and flattering toward Prentiss afterward. Prentiss felt sure, although he had no proof, that it had been Bemmon who had spurred the simple-minded Haggar into challenging him to a duel.
If so, the sight of what had happened to Haggar must have effectively dampened Bemmon's desire for revenge because he became almost a model worker.
* * * * *
As Lake had predicted, he and Prentiss worked together well. Lake calmly took a secondary role, not at all interested in possession of authority but only in the survival of the Rejects. He spoke of the surrender of the Constellation only once, to say:
"I knew there could be only Ragnarok in this section of space. I had to order four thousand people to go like sheep to what was to be their place of execution so that four thousand more could live as slaves. That was my last act as an officer."
Prentiss suspected that Lake found it impossible not to blame himself subconsciously for what circumstances had forced him to do. It was irrational--but conscientious men were quite often a little irrational in their sense of responsibility.
Lake had two subleaders: a genial, red-haired man named Ben Barber, who would have been a farmer on Athena but who made a good subleader on Ragnarok; and a lithe, cat-like man named Karl Schroeder.
Schroeder claimed to be twenty-four but not even the scars on his face could make him look more than twenty-one. He smiled often, a little too often. Prentiss had seen smiles like that before. Schroeder was the type who could smile while he killed a man--and he probably had.
But, if Schroeder was a born fighter and perhaps killer, they were characteristics that he expended entirely upon the prowlers. He was Lake's right hand man; a deadly marksman and utterly without fear.
One evening, when Lake had given Schroeder some instructions concerning the next day's activities, Schroeder answered him with the half-mocking smile and the words, "I'll see that it's done, Commander."
"Not 'Commander,'" Lake said. "I--all of us--left our ranks, titles and honors on the Constellation. The past is dead for us."
"I see," Schroeder said. The smile faded away and he looked into Lake's eyes as he asked, "And what about our past dishonors, disgraces and such?"
"They were left on the Constellation, too," Lake said. "If anyone wants dishonor he'll have to earn it all over again."
"That sounds fair," Schroeder said. "That sounds as fair as anyone could ever ask for."
He turned away and Prentiss saw what he had noticed before: Schroeder's black hair was coming out light brown at the roots. It was a color that would better match his light complexion and it was the color of hair that a man named Schrader, wanted by the police on Venus, had had.
Hair could be dyed, identification cards could be forged--but it was all something Prentiss did not care to pry into until and if Schroeder gave him reason to. Schroeder was a hard and dangerous man, despite his youth, and sometimes men of that type, when the chips were down, exhibited a higher sense of duty than the soft men who spoke piously of respect for Society--and then were afraid to face danger to protect the society and the people they claimed to respect.
* * * * *
A lone prowler came on the eleventh night following the wall's completion. It came silently, in the dead of night, and it learned how to reach in and tear apart the leather lashings that held the pointed stakes in place and then jerk the stakes out of their sockets. It was seen as it was removing the third stake--which would have made a large enough opening for it to come through--and shot. It fell back and managed to escape into the woods, although staggering and bleeding.
The next night the stockade was attacked by dozens of prowlers who simultaneously began removing the pointed stakes in the same manner employed by the prowler of the night before. Their attack was turned back with heavy losses on both sides and with a dismayingly large expenditure of precious ammunition.
There could be no doubt about how the band of prowlers had learned to remove the stakes: the prowler of the night before had told them before it died. It was doubtful that the prowlers had a spoken language, but they had some means of communication. They worked together and they were highly intelligent, probably about halfway between dog and man.
The prowlers were going to be an enemy even more formidable than Prentiss had thought.
The missing stakes were replaced the next day and the others were tied down more securely. Once again the camp was prowler proof--but only for so long as armed guards patrolled inside the walls to kill attacking prowlers during the short time it would take them to remove the stakes.
The hunting parties suffered unusually heavy losses from prowler attacks that day and that evening, as the guards patrolled inside the walls, Lake said to Prentiss:
"The prowlers are so damnably persistent. It isn't that they're hungry--they don't kill us to eat us. They don't have any reason to kill us--they just hate us."
"They have a reason," Prentiss said. "They're doing the same thing we're doing: fighting for survival."
Lake's pale brows lifted in question.
"The prowlers are the rulers of Ragnarok," Prentiss said. "They fought their way up here, as men did on Earth, until they're master of every creature on their world. Even of the unicorns and swamp crawlers. But now we've come and they're intelligent enough to know that we're accustomed to being the dominant species, ourselves.
"There can't be two dominant species on the same world--and they know it. Men or prowlers--in the end one is going to have to go down before the other."
"I suppose you're right," Lake said. He looked at the guards, a fourth of them already reduced to bows and arrows that they had not yet had time to learn how to use. "If we win the battle for supremacy it will be a long fight, maybe over a period of centuries. And if the prowlers win--it may all be over within a year or two."
* * * * *
The giant blue star that was the other component of Ragnarok's binary grew swiftly in size as it preceded the yellow sun farther each morning. When summer came the blue star would be a sun as hot as the yellow sun and Ragnarok would be between them. The yellow sun would burn the land by day and the blue sun would sear it by the night that would not be night. Then would come the brief fall, followed by the long, frozen winter when the yellow sun would shine pale and cold, far to the south, and the blue sun would be a star again, two hundred and fifty million miles away and invisible behind the cold yellow sun.
The Hell Fever lessened with the completion of the shelters but it still killed each day. Chiara and his helpers worked with unfaltering determination to find a cure for it but the cure, if there was one, eluded them. The graves in the cemetery were forty long by forty wide and more were added each day. To all the fact became grimly obvious: they were swiftly dying out and they had yet to face Ragnarok at its worst.
The old survival instincts asserted themselves and there were marriages among the younger ones. One of the first to marry was Julia.
She stopped to talk to Prentiss one evening. She still wore the red skirt, now faded and patched, but her face was tired and thoughtful and no longer bold.
"Is it true, John," she asked, "that only a few of us might be able to have children here and that most of us who tried to have children in this gravity would die for it?"
"It's true," he said. "But you already knew that when you married."
"Yes ... I knew it." There was a little silence. "All my life I've had fun and done as I pleased. The human race didn't need me and we both knew it. But now--none of us can be apart from the others or be afraid of anything. If we're selfish and afraid there will come a time when the last of us will die and there will be nothing on Ragnarok to show we were ever here.
"I don't want it to end like that. I want there to be children, to live after we're gone. So I'm going to try to have a child. I'm not afraid and I won't be."
When he did not reply at once she said, almost self-consciously, "Coming from me that all sounds a little silly, I suppose."
"It sounds wise and splendid, Julia," he said, "and it's what I thought you were going to say."
* * * * *
Full spring came and the vegetation burst into leaf and bud and bloom, quickly, for its growth instincts knew in their mindless way how short was the time to grow and reproduce before the brown death of summer came. The prowlers were suddenly gone one day, to follow the spring north, and for a week men could walk and work outside the stockade without the protection of armed guards.
Then the new peril appeared, the one they had not expected: the unicorns.
The stockade wall was a blue-black rectangle behind them and the blue star burned with the brilliance of a dozen moons, lighting the woods in blue shadow and azure light. Prentiss and the hunter walked a little in front of the two riflemen, winding to keep in the starlit glades.
"It was on the other side of the next grove of trees," the hunter said in a low voice. "Fred was getting ready to bring in the rest of the woods goat. He shouldn't have been more than ten minutes behind me--and it's been over an hour."
They rounded the grove of trees. At first it seemed there was nothing before them but the empty, grassy glade. Then they saw it lying on the ground no more than twenty feet in front of them.
It was--it had been--a man. He was broken and stamped into hideous shapelessness and something had torn off his arms.
For a moment there was dead silence, then the hunter whispered, "What did that?"
The answer came in a savage, squealing scream and the pound of cloven hooves. A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrous charging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at the shoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlight glinting along the curving, vicious length of its single horn.
"Unicorn!" Prentiss said, and jerked up his rifle.
The rifles cracked in a ragged volley. The unicorn squealed in fury and struck the hunter, catching him on its horn and hurling him thirty feet. One of the riflemen went down under the unicorn's hooves, his cry ending almost as soon as it began.
The unicorn ripped the sod in deep furrows as it whirled back to Prentiss and the remaining rifleman; not turning in the manner of four-footed beasts of Earth but rearing and spinning on its hind feet. It towered above them as it whirled, the tip of its horn fifteen feet above the ground and its hooves swinging around like great clubs.
Prentiss shot again, his sights on what he hoped would be a vital area, and the rifleman shot an instant later.
The shots went true. The unicorn's swing brought it on around but it collapsed, falling to the ground with jarring heaviness.
"We got it!" the rifleman said. "We----"
It half scrambled to its feet and made a noise; a call that went out through the night like the blast of a mighty trumpet. Then it dropped back to the ground, to die while its call was still echoing from the nearer hills.
From the east came an answering trumpet blast; a trumpeting that was sounded again from the south and from the north. Then there came a low and muffled drumming, like the pounding of thousands of hooves.
The rifleman's face was blue-white in the starlight. "The others are coming--we'll have to run for it!"
He turned, and began to run toward the distant bulk of the stockade.
"No!" Prentiss commanded, quick and harsh. "Not the stockade!"
The rifleman kept running, seeming not to hear him in his panic. Prentiss called to him once more:
"Not the stockade--you'll lead the unicorns into it!"
Again the rifleman seemed not to hear him.
The unicorns were coming in sight, converging in from the north and east and south, the rumble of their hooves swelling to a thunder that filled the night. The rifleman would reach the stockade only a little ahead of them and they would go through the wall as though it had been made of paper.
For a little while the area inside the stockade would be filled with dust, with the squealing of the swirling, charging unicorns and the screams of the dying. Those inside the stockade would have no chance whatever of escaping. Within two minutes it would be over, the last child would have been found among the shattered shelters and trampled into lifeless shapelessness in the bloody ground.
Within two minutes all human life on Ragnarok would be gone.
There was only one thing for him to do.
He dropped to one knee so his aim would be steady and the sights of his rifle caught the running man's back. He pressed the trigger and the rifle cracked viciously as it bucked against his shoulder.
The man spun and fell hard to the ground. He twisted, to raise himself up a little and look back, his face white and accusing and unbelieving.
"You shot me!"
Then he fell forward and lay without moving.
Prentiss turned back to face the unicorns and to look at the trees in the nearby grove. He saw what he already knew, they were young trees and too small to offer any escape for him. There was no place to run, no place to hide.
There was nothing he could do but wait; nothing he could do but stand in the blue starlight and watch the devil's herd pound toward him and think, in the last moments of his life, how swiftly and unexpectedly death could come to man on Ragnarok.
* * * * *
The unicorns held the Rejects prisoners in their stockade the rest of the night and all the next day. Lake had seen the shooting of the rifleman and had watched the unicorn herd kill John Prentiss and then trample the dead rifleman.
He had already given the order to build a quick series of fires around the inside of the stockade walls when the unicorns paused to tear their victims to pieces; grunting and squealing in triumph as bones crushed between their teeth and they flung the pieces to one side.
The fires were started and green wood was thrown on them, to make them smoulder and smoke for as long as possible. Then the unicorns were coming on to the stockade and every person inside it went into the concealment of the shelters.
Lake had already given his last order: There would be absolute quiet until and if the unicorns left; a quiet that would be enforced with fist or club wherever necessary.
The unicorns were still outside when morning came. The fires could not be refueled; the sight of a man moving inside the stockade would bring the entire herd charging through. The hours dragged by, the smoke from the dying fires dwindled to thin streamers. The unicorns grew increasingly bolder and suspicious, crowding closer to the walls and peering through the openings between the rails.
The sun was setting when one of the unicorns trumpeted; a sound different from that of the call to battle. The others threw up their heads to listen, then they turned and drifted away. Within minutes the entire herd was gone out of sight through the woods, toward the north.
Lake waited and watched until he was sure the unicorns were gone for good. Then he ordered the All Clear given and hurried to the south wall, to look down across the barren valley and hope he would not see what he expected to see.
Barber came up behind him, to sigh with relief. "That was close. It's hard to make so many people stay absolutely quiet for hour after hour. Especially the children--they don't understand."
"We'll have to leave," Lake said.
"Leave?" Barber asked. "We can make this stockade strong enough to hold out unicorns."
"Look to the south," Lake told him.
Barber did so and saw what Lake had already seen; a broad, low cloud of dust moving slowly toward them.
"Another herd of unicorns," Lake said. "John didn't know they migrated--the Dunbar Expedition wasn't here long enough to learn that. There'll be herd after herd coming through and no time for us to strengthen the walls. We'll have to leave tonight."
* * * * *
Preparations were made for the departure; preparations that consisted mainly of providing each person with as much in the way of food or supplies as he or she could carry. In the 1.5 gravity, that was not much.
They left when the blue star rose. They filed out through the northern gate and the rear guard closed it behind them. There was almost no conversation among them. Some of them turned to take a last look at what had been the only home they had ever known on Ragnarok, then they all faced forward again, to the northwest, where the foothills of the plateau might offer them sanctuary.
They found their sanctuary on the second day; a limestone ridge honey-combed with caves. Men were sent back at once to carry the food and supplies left in the stockade to the new home.
They returned, to report that the second herd of unicorns had broken down the walls and ripped the interior of the stockade into wreckage. Much of the food and supplies had been totally destroyed.
Lake sent them back twice more to bring everything, down to the last piece of bent metal or torn cloth. They would find uses for all of it in the future.
* * * * *
The cave system was extensive, containing room for several times their number. The deeper portions of the caves could not be lived in until ventilation ducts were made, but the outer caves were more than sufficient in number. Work was begun to clear them of fallen rubble, to pry down all loose material overhead and to level the floors. A spring came out of the ridge not far from the caves and the approach to the caves was so narrow and steep that unicorns could scramble up it only with difficulty and one at a time. And should they ever reach the natural terrace in front of the caves they would be too large to enter and could do no more than stand outside and make targets of themselves for the bowmen within.
Anders was in charge of making the caves livable, his working force restricted almost entirely to women and children. Lake sent Barber out, with a small detachment of men, to observe the woods goats and learn what plants they ate. And then learn, by experimenting, if such plants could be safely eaten by humans.
The need for salt would be tremendously increased when summer came. Having once experienced a saltless two weeks in the desert Lake doubted that any of them could survive without it. All hunting parties, as well as Barber's party, were ordered to investigate all deposits that might contain salt as well as any stream or pond that was white along the banks.
The hunting parties were of paramount importance and they were kept out to the limits of their endurance. Every man physically able to do so accompanied them. Those who could not kill game could carry it back to the caves. There was no time to spare; already the unicorns were decreasing in numbers and the woods goats were ranging farther and farther north.
At the end of twenty days Lake went in search of Barber and his party, worried about them. Their mission was one that could be as dangerous as any hunting trip. There was no proof that humans and Ragnarok creatures were so similar as to guarantee that food for one might not be poison for the other. It was a very necessary mission, however; dried meat, alone, would bring grave deficiency diseases during the summer which dried herbs and fruits would help prevent.
When he located Barber's party he found Barber lying under a tree, pale and weak from his latest experiment but recovering.
"I was the guinea pig yesterday," Barber said. "Some little purple berries that the woods goats nibble at sometimes, maybe to get a touch of some certain vitamin or something. I ate too many, I guess, because they hit my heart like the kick of a mule."
"Did you find anything at all encouraging?" Lake asked.
"We found four different herbs that are the most violent cathartics you ever dreamed of. And a little silvery fern that tastes like vanilla flavored candy and paralyzes you stiff as a board on the third swallow. It's an hour before you come back out of it.
"But on the good side we found three different kinds of herbs that seem to be all right. We've been digging them up and hanging them in the trees to dry."
Lake tried the edible herbs and found them to be something like spinach in taste. There was a chance they might contain the vitamins and minerals needed. Since the hunting parties were living exclusively on meat he would have to point out the edible herbs to all of them so they would know what to eat should any of them feel the effects of diet deficiency.
He traveled alone as he visited the various hunting parties, finding such travel to be safer each day as the dwindling of the unicorns neared the vanishing point. It was a safety he did not welcome; it meant the last of the game would be gone north long before sufficient meat was taken.
None of the hunting parties could report good luck. The woods goats, swift and elusive at best, were vanishing with the unicorns. The last cartridge had been fired and the bowmen, while improving all the time, were far from expert. The unicorns, which should have been their major source of meat, were invulnerable to arrows unless shot at short range in the side of the neck just behind the head. And at short range the unicorns invariably charged and presented no such target.
He made the long, hard climb up the plateau's southern face, to stand at last on top. It was treeless, a flat, green table that stretched to the north for as far as he could see. A mountain range, still capped with snow, lay perhaps a hundred miles to the northwest; in the distance it looked like a white, low-lying cloud on the horizon. No other mountains or hills marred the endless sweep of the high plain.
The grass was thick and here and there were little streams of water produced by the recently melted snow. It was a paradise land for the herbivores of Ragnarok but for men it was a harsh, forbidding place. At that elevation the air was so thin that only a moderate amount of exertion made the heart and lungs labor painfully. Hard and prolonged exertion would be impossible.
It seemed unlikely that men could hunt and dare unicorn attacks at such an elevation but two hunting parties were ahead of him; one under the grim Craig and one under the reckless Schroeder, both parties stripped down to the youngest, strongest men among all the Rejects.
He found Schroeder early one morning, leading his hunters toward a small band of woods goats. Two unicorns were grazing in between and the hunters were swinging downwind from them. Schroeder saw him coming and walked back a little way to meet him.
"Welcome to our breathtaking land," Schroeder greeted him. "How are things going with the rest of the hunting parties?"
Schroeder was gaunt and there was weariness beneath his still lithe movements. His whiskers were an untamed sorrel bristling and across his cheekbone was the ugly scar of a half healed wound. Another gash was ripped in his arm and something had battered one ear. He reminded Lake of a battle-scarred, indomitable tomcat who would never, for as long as he lived, want to relinquish the joy of conflict and danger.
"So far," he answered, "you and Craig are the only parties to manage to tackle the plateau."
He asked about Schroeder's luck and learned it had been much better than that of the others due to killing three unicorns by a method Schroeder had thought of.
"Since the bowmen have to be to one side of the unicorns to kill them," Schroeder said, "it only calls for a man to be the decoy and let the unicorns chase him between the hidden bowmen. If there's no more than one or two unicorns and if the decoy doesn't have to run very far and if the bowmen don't miss it works well."
"Judging from your beat-up condition," Lake said, "you must have been the decoy every time."
"Well----" Schroeder shrugged his shoulders. "It was my idea."
"I've been wondering about another way to get in shots at close range," Lake said. "Take the skin of a woods goat, give it the original shape as near as possible, and a bowman inside it might be able to fake a grazing woods goat until he got the shot he wanted.
"The unicorns might never suspect where the arrows came from," he concluded. "And then, of course, they might."
"I'll try it before the day is over, on those two unicorns over there," Schroeder said. "At this elevation and in this gravity my own method is just a little bit rough on a man."
* * * * *
Lake found Craig and his men several miles to the west, all of them gaunt and bearded as Schroeder had been.
"We've had hell," Craig said. "It seems that every time we spot a few woods goats there will be a dozen unicorns in between. If only we had rifles for the unicorns...."
Lake told him of the plan to hide under woods goats' skins and of the decoy system used by Schroeder.
"Maybe we won't have to use Schroeder's method," he said. "We'll see if the other works--I'll give it the first try."
This he was not to do. Less than an hour later one of the men who helped dry the meat and carry it to the caves returned to report the camp stricken by a strange, sudden malady that was killing a hundred a day. Dr. Chiara, who had collapsed while driving himself on to care for the sick, was sure it was a deficiency disease. Anders was down with it, helpless, and Bemmon had assumed command; setting up daily work quotas for those still on their feet and refusing to heed Chiara's requests concerning treatment of the disease.
Lake made the trip back to the caves in a fraction of the length of time it had taken him to reach the plateau, walking until he was ready to drop and then pausing only for an hour or two of rest. He spotted Barber's camp when coming down off the plateau and he swung to one side, to tell Barber to have a supply of the herbs sent to the caves at once.
He reached the caves, to find half the camp in bed and the other half dragging about listlessly at the tasks given them by Bemmon. Anders was in grave condition, too weak to rise, and Dr. Chiara was dying.
He squatted down beside Chiara's pallet and knew there could be no hope for him. On Chiara's pale face and in his eyes was the shadow of his own foreknowledge.
"I finally saw what it was"--Chiara's words were very low, hard to hear--"and I told Bemmon what to do. It's a deficiency disease, complicated by the gravity into some form not known on Earth."
He stopped to rest and Lake waited.
"Beri-beri--pellagra--we had deficiency diseases on Earth. But none so fatal--so quickly. I told Bemmon--ration out fruits and vegetables to everybody. Hurry--or it will be too late."
Again he stopped to rest, the last vestige of color gone from his face.
"And you?" Lake asked, already knowing the answer.
"For me--too late. I kept thinking of viruses--should have seen the obvious sooner. Just like----"
His lips turned up a little at the corners and the Chiara of the dead past smiled for the last time at Lake.
"Just like a damned fool intern...."
That was all, then, and the chamber was suddenly very quiet. Lake stood up to leave, and to speak the words that Chiara could never hear:
"We're going to need you and miss you--Doctor."
* * * * *
He found Bemmon in the food storage cavern, supervising the work of two teen-age boys with critical officiousness although he was making no move to help them. At sight of Lake he hurried forward, the ingratiating smile sliding across his face.
"I'm glad you're back," he said. "I had to take charge when Anders got sick and he had everything in such a mess. I've been working day and night to undo his mistakes and get the work properly under way again."
Lake looked at the two thin-faced boys who had taken advantage of the opportunity to rest. They leaned wearily against the heavy pole table Bemmon had had them moving, their eyes already dull with the incipient sickness and watching him in mute appeal.
"Have you obeyed Chiara's order?" he asked.
"Ah--no," Bemmon said. "I felt it best to ignore it."
"Why?" Lake asked.
"It would be a senseless waste of our small supply of fruit and vegetable foods to give them to people already dying. I'm afraid"--the ingratiating smile came again--"we've been letting him exercise an authority he isn't entitled to. He's really hardly more than a medical student and his diagnoses are only guesses."
"He's dead," Lake said flatly. "His last order will be carried out."
He looked from the two tired boys to Bemmon, contrasting their thinness and weariness with the way Bemmon's paunch still bulged outward and his jowls still sagged with their load of fat.
"I'll send West down to take over in here," he said to Bemmon. "You come with me. You and I seem to be the only two in good health here and there's plenty of work for us to do."
The fawning expression vanished from Bemmon's face. "I see," he said. "Now that I've turned Anders's muddle into organization, you'll hand my authority over to another of your favorites and demote me back to common labor?"
"Setting up work quotas for sick and dying people isn't organization," Lake said. He spoke to the two boys, "Both of you go lie down. West will find someone else." Then to Bemmon, "Come with me. We're both going to work at common labor."
They passed by the cave where Bemmon slept. Two boys were just going into it, carrying armloads of dried grass to make a mattress under Bemmon's pallet. They moved slowly, heavily. Like the two boys in the food storage cave they were dull-eyed with the beginning of the sickness.
Lake stopped, to look more closely into the cave and verify something else he thought he had seen: Bemmon had discarded the prowler skins on his bed and in their place were soft wool blankets; perhaps the only unpatched blankets the Rejects possessed.
"Go back to your caves," he said to the boys. "Go to bed and rest."
He looked at Bemmon. Bemmon's eyes flickered away, refusing to meet his.
"What few blankets we have are for babies and the very youngest children," he said. His tone was coldly unemotional but he could not keep his fists from clenching at his sides. "You will return them at once and sleep on animal skins, as all the men and women do. And if you want grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even the young children do."
Bemmon made no answer, his face a sullen red and hatred shining in the eyes that still refused to meet Lake's.
"Gather up the blankets and return them," Lake said. "Then come on up to the central cave. We have a lot of work to do."
He could feel Bemmon's gaze burning against his back as he turned away and he thought of what John Prentiss had once said:
"I know he's no good but he never has guts enough to go quite far enough to give me an excuse to whittle him down."
* * * * *
Barber's men arrived the next day, burdened with dried herbs. These were given to the seriously ill as a supplement to the ration of fruit and vegetable foods and were given, alone, to those not yet sick. Then came the period of waiting; of hoping that it was all not too late and too little.
A noticeable change for the better began on the second day. A week went by and the sick were slowly, steadily, improving. The not-quite-sick were already back to normal health. There was no longer any doubt: the Ragnarok herbs would prevent a recurrence of the disease.
It was, Lake thought, all so simple once you knew what to do. Hundreds had died, Chiara among them, because they did not have a common herb that grew at a slightly higher elevation. Not a single life would have been lost if he could have looked a week into the future and had the herbs found and taken to the caves that much sooner.
But the disease had given no warning of its coming. Nothing, on Ragnarok, ever seemed to give warning before it killed.
Another week went by and hunters began to trickle in, gaunt and exhausted, to report all the game going north up the plateau and not a single creature left below. They were the ones who had tried and failed to withstand the high elevation of the plateau. Only two out of three hunters returned among those who had challenged the plateau. They had tried, all of them, to the best of their ability and the limits of their endurance.
The blue star was by then a small sun and the yellow sun blazed hotter each day. Grass began to brown and wither on the hillsides as the days went by and Lake knew summer was very near. The last hunting party, but for Craig's and Schroeder's, returned. They had very little meat but they brought with them a large quantity of something almost as important: salt.
They had found a deposit of it in an almost inaccessible region of cliffs and canyons. "Not even the woods goats can get in there," Stevens, the leader of that party, said. "If the salt was in an accessible place there would have been a salt lick there and goats in plenty."
"If woods goats care for salt the way Earth animals do," Lake said. "When fall comes we'll make a salt lick and find out."
Two more weeks went by and Craig and Schroeder returned with their surviving hunters. They had followed the game to the eastern end of the snow-capped mountain range but there the migration had drawn away from them, traveling farther each day than they could travel. They had almost waited too long before turning back: the grass at the southern end of the plateau was turning brown and the streams were dry. They got enough water, barely, by digging seep holes in the dry stream beds.
Lake's method of stalking unicorns under the concealment of a woods goat skin had worked well only a few times. After that the unicorns learned to swing downwind from any lone woods goats. If they smelled a man inside the goat skin they charged him and killed him.
With the return of the last hunters everything was done that could be done in preparation for summer. Inventory was taken of the total food supply and it was even smaller than Lake had feared. It would be far from enough to last until fall brought the game back from the north and he instituted rationing much stricter than before.
The heat increased as the yellow sun blazed hotter and the blue sun grew larger. Each day the vegetation was browner and a morning came when Lake could see no green wherever he looked.
They numbered eleven hundred and ten that morning, out of what had so recently been four thousand. Eleven hundred and ten thin, hungry scarecrows who, already, could do nothing more than sit listlessly in the shade and wait for the hell that was coming. He thought of the food supply, so pitifully small, and of the months it would have to last. He saw the grim, inescapable future for his charges: famine. There was nothing he could do to prevent it. He could only try to forestall complete starvation for all by cutting rations to the bare existence level.
And that would be bare existence for the stronger of them. The weaker were already doomed.
He had them all gather in front of the caves that evening when the terrace was in the shadow of the ridge. He stood before them and spoke to them:
"All of you know we have only a fraction of the amount of food we need to see us through the summer. Tomorrow the present ration will be cut in half. That will be enough to live on, just barely. If that cut isn't made the food supply will be gone long before fall and all of us will die.
"If anyone has any food of any kind it must be turned in to be added to the total supply. Some of you may have thought of your children and kept a little hidden for them. I can understand why you should do that--but you must turn it in. There may possibly be some who hid food for themselves, personally. If so, I give them the first and last warning: turn it in tonight. If any hidden cache of food is found in the future the one who hid it will be regarded as a traitor and murderer.
"All of you, but for the children, will go into the chamber next to the one where the food is stored. Each of you--and there will be no exceptions regardless of how innocent you are--will carry a bulkily folded cloth or garment. Each of you will go into the chamber alone. There will be no one in there. You will leave the food you have folded in the cloth, if any, and go out the other exit and back to your caves. No one will ever know whether the cloth you carried contained food or not. No one will ever ask.
"Our survival on this world, if we are to survive at all, can be only by working and sacrificing together. There can be no selfishness. What any of you may have done in the past is of no consequence. Tonight we start anew. From now on we trust one another without reserve.
"There will be one punishment for any who betray that trust--death."
* * * * *
Anders set the example by being the first to carry a folded cloth into the cave. Of them all, Lake heard later, only Bemmon voiced any real indignation; warning all those in his section of the line that the order was the first step toward outright dictatorship and a police-and-spy system in which Lake and the other leaders would deprive them all of freedom and dignity. Bemmon insisted upon exhibiting the emptiness of the cloth he carried; an action that, had he succeeded in persuading the others to follow his example, would have mercilessly exposed those who did have food they were returning.
But no one followed Bemmon's example and no harm was done. As for Lake, he had worries on his mind of much greater importance than Bemmon's enmity.
* * * * *
The weeks dragged by, each longer and more terrible to endure than the one before it as the heat steadily increased. Summer solstice arrived and there was no escape from the heat, even in the deepest caves. There was no night; the blue sun rose in the east as the yellow sun set in the west. There was no life of any kind to be seen, not even an insect. Nothing moved across the burned land but the swirling dust devils and shimmering, distorted mirages.
The death rate increased with appalling swiftness. The small supply of canned and dehydrated milk, fruit and vegetables was reserved exclusively for the children but it was far insufficient in quantity. The Ragnarok herbs prevented any recurrence of the fatal deficiency disease but they provided virtually no nourishment to help fight the heat and gravity. The stronger of the children lay wasted and listless on their pallets while the ones not so strong died each day.
Each day thin and hollow-eyed mothers would come to plead with him to save their children. "... it would take so little to save his life.... Please--before it's too late...."
But there was so little food left and the time was yet so long until fall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer each of them with a grim and final "No."
And watch the last hope flicker and die in their eyes and watch them turn away, to go and sit for the last hours beside their children.
Bemmon became increasingly irritable and complaining as the rationing and heat made existence a misery; insisting that Lake and the others were to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had been bungling and faint-hearted. And he implied, without actually saying so, that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamber because they did not want a competent, honest man to check up on what they were doing.
There were six hundred and three of them the blazing afternoon when the girl, Julia, could stand his constant, vindictive, fault-finding no longer. Lake heard about it shortly afterward, the way she had turned on Bemmon in a flare of temper she could control no longer and said:
"Whenever your mouth is still you can hear the children who are dying today--but you don't care. All you can think of is yourself. You claim Lake and the others were cowards--but you didn't dare hunt with them. You keep insinuating that they're cheating us and eating more than we are--but your belly is the only one that has any fat left on it----"
She never completed the sentence. Bemmon's face turned livid in sudden, wild fury and he struck her, knocking her against the rock wall so hard that she slumped unconscious to the ground.
"She's a liar!" he panted, glaring at the others. "She's a rotten liar and anybody who repeats what she said will get what she got!"
When Lake learned of what had happened he did not send for Bemmon at once. He wondered why Bemmon's reaction had been so quick and violent and there seemed to be only one answer:
Bemmon's belly was still a little fat. There could be but one way he could have kept it so.
He summoned Craig, Schroeder, Barber and Anders. They went to the chamber where Bemmon slept and there, almost at once, they found his cache. He had it buried under his pallet and hidden in cavities along the walls; dried meat, dried fruits and milk, canned vegetables. It was an amount amazingly large and many of the items had presumably been exhausted during the deficiency disease attack.
"It looks," Schroeder said, "like he didn't waste any time feathering his nest when he made himself leader."
The others said nothing but stood with grim, frozen faces, waiting for Lake's next action.
"Bring Bemmon," Lake said to Craig.
Craig returned with him two minutes later. Bemmon stiffened at the sight of his unearthed cache and color drained away from his face.
"Well?" Lake asked.
"I didn't"--Bemmon swallowed--"I didn't know it was there." And then quickly, "You can't prove I put it there. You can't prove you didn't just now bring it in yourselves to frame me."
Lake stared at Bemmon, waiting. The others watched Bemmon as Lake was doing and no one spoke. The silence deepened and Bemmon began to sweat as he tried to avoid their eyes. He looked again at the damning evidence and his defiance broke.
"It--if I hadn't taken it it would have been wasted on people who were dying," he said. He wiped at his sweating face. "I won't ever do it again--I swear I won't."
Lake spoke to Craig. "You and Barber take him to the lookout point."
"What----" Bemmon's protest was cut off as Craig and Barber took him by the arms and walked him swiftly away.
Lake turned to Anders. "Get a rope," he ordered.
Anders paled a little. "A--rope?"
"What else does he deserve?"
"Nothing," Anders said. "Not--not after what he did."
On the way out they passed the place where Julia lay. Bemmon had knocked her against the wall with such force that a sharp projection of rock had cut a deep gash in her forehead. A woman was wiping the blood from her face and she lay limply, still unconscious; a frail shadow of the bold girl she had once been with the new life she would try to give them an almost unnoticeable little bulge in her starved thinness.
* * * * *
The lookout point was an outjutting spur of the ridge, six hundred feet from the caves and in full view of them. A lone tree stood there, its dead limbs thrust like white arms through the brown foliage of the limbs that still lived. Craig and Barber waited under the tree, Bemmon between them. The lowering sun shone hot and bright on Bemmon's face as he squinted back toward the caves at the approach of Lake and the other two.
He twisted to look at Barber. "What is it--why did you bring me here?" There was the tremor of fear in his voice. "What are you going to do to me?"
Barber did not answer and Bemmon turned back toward Lake. He saw the rope in Anders' hand and his face went white with comprehension.
"No!"
He threw himself back with a violence that almost tore him loose. "No--no!"
Schroeder stepped forward to help hold him and Lake took the rope from Anders. He fashioned a noose in it while Bemmon struggled and made panting, animal sounds, his eyes fixed in horrified fascination on the rope.
When the noose was finished he threw the free end of the rope over the white limb above Bemmon. He released the noose and Barber caught it, to draw it snug around Bemmon's neck.
Bemmon stopped struggling then and sagged weakly. For a moment it appeared that he would faint. Then he worked his mouth soundlessly until words came:
"You won't--you can't--really hang me?"
Lake spoke to him:
"We're going to hang you. What you stole would have saved the lives of ten children. You've watched the children cry because they were so hungry and you've watched them become too weak to cry or care any more. You've watched them die each day and each night you've secretly eaten the food that was supposed to be theirs.
"We're going to hang you, for the murder of children and the betrayal of our trust in you. If you have anything to say, say it now."
"You can't! I had a right to live--to eat what would have been wasted on dying people!" Bemmon twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, his words quick and ragged with hysteria. "You can't hang me--I don't want to die!"
Craig answered him, with a smile that was like the thin snarl of a wolf:
"Neither did two of my children."
Lake nodded to Craig and Schroeder, not waiting any longer. They stepped back to seize the free end of the rope and Bemmon screamed at what was coming, tearing loose from the grip of Barber.
Then his scream was abruptly cut off as he was jerked into the air. There was a cracking sound and he kicked spasmodically, his head setting grotesquely to one side.
Craig and Schroeder and Barber watched him with hard, expressionless faces but Anders turned quickly away, to be suddenly and violently sick.
"He was the first to betray us," Lake said. "Snub the rope and leave him to swing there. If there are any others like him, they'll know what to expect."
The blue sun rose as they went back to the caves. Behind them Bemmon swung and twirled aimlessly on the end of the rope. Two long, pale shadows swung and twirled with him; a yellow one to the west and a blue one to the east.
Bemmon was buried the next day. Someone cursed his name and someone spit on his grave and then he was part of the dead past as they faced the suffering ahead of them.
Julia recovered, although she would always wear a ragged scar on her forehead. Anders, who had worked closely with Chiara and was trying to take his place, quieted her fears by assuring her that the baby she carried was still too small for there to be much danger of the fall causing her to lose it.
Three times during the next month the wind came roaring down out of the northwest, bringing a gray dust that filled the sky and enveloped the land in a hot, smothering gloom through which the suns could not be seen.
Once black clouds gathered in the distance, to pour out a cloudburst. The 1.5 gravity gave the wall of water that swept down the canyon a far greater force and velocity than it would have had on Earth and boulders the size of small houses were tossed into the air and shattered into fragments. But all the rain fell upon the one small area and not a drop fell at the caves.
One single factor was in their favor and but for it they could not have survived such intense, continual heat: there was no humidity. Water evaporated quickly in the hot, dry air and sweat glands operated at the highest possible degree of efficiency. As a result they drank enormous quantities of water--the average adult needed five gallons a day. All canvas had been converted into water bags and the same principle of cooling-by-evaporation gave them water that was only warm instead of sickeningly hot as it would otherwise have been.
But despite the lack of humidity the heat was still far more intense than any on Earth. It never ceased, day or night, never let them have a moment's relief. There was a limit to how long human flesh could bear up under it, no matter how valiant the will. Each day the toll of those who had reached that limit was greater, like a swiftly rising tide.
There were three hundred and forty of them, when the first rain came; the rain that meant the end of summer. The yellow sun moved southward and the blue sun shrank steadily. Grass grew again and the woods goats returned, with them the young that had been born in the north, already half the size of their mothers.
For a while there was meat, and green herbs. Then the prowlers came, to make hunting dangerous. Females with pups were seen but always at a great distance as though the prowlers, like humans, took no chances with the lives of their children.
The unicorns came close behind the first prowlers, their young amazingly large and already weaned. Hunting became doubly dangerous then but the bowmen, through necessity, were learning how to use their bows with increasing skill and deadliness.
A salt lick for the woods goats was hopefully tried, although Lake felt dubious about it. They learned that salt was something the woods goats could either take or leave alone. And when hunters were in the vicinity they left it alone.
The game was followed for many miles to the south. The hunters returned the day the first blizzard came roaring and screaming down over the edge of the plateau; the blizzard that marked the beginning of the long, frigid winter. By then they were prepared as best they could be. Wood had been carried in great quantities and the caves fitted with crude doors and a ventilation system. And they had meat--not as much as they would need but enough to prevent starvation.
Lake took inventory of the food supply when the last hunters returned and held check-up inventories at irregular and unannounced intervals. He found no shortages. He had expected none--Bemmon's grave had long since been obliterated by drifting snow but the rope still hung from the dead limb, the noose swinging and turning in the wind.
* * * * *
Anders had made a Ragnarok calendar that spring, from data given him by John Prentiss, and he had marked the corresponding Earth dates on it. By a coincidence, Christmas came near the middle of the winter. There would be the same rationing of food on Christmas day but little brown trees had been cut for the children and decorated with such ornaments as could be made from the materials at hand.
There was another blizzard roaring down off the plateau Christmas morning; a white death that thundered and howled outside the caves at a temperature of more than eighty degrees below zero. But inside the caves it was warm by the fires and under the little brown trees were toys that had been patiently whittled from wood or sewn from scraps of cloth and animal skins while the children slept. They were crude and humble toys but the pale, thin faces of the children were bright with delight when they beheld them.
There was the laughter of children at play, a sound that had not been heard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a few fleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, there was the magic of an Earth Christmas.
That night a child was born to Julia, on a pallet of dried grass and prowler skins. She asked for her baby before she died and they let her have it.
"I wasn't afraid, was I?" she asked. "But I wish it wasn't so dark--I wish I could see my baby before I go."
They took the baby from her arms when she was gone and removed from it the blanket that had kept her from learning that her child was still-born.
There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent storms of spring came. By then eighteen children had been born. Sixteen were still-born, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like any normal babies on Earth. There was only one difference: the 1.5 gravity did not seem to affect them as much as it had the Earth-born babies.
Lake, himself, married that spring; a tall, gray-eyed girl who had fought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers broke into John Prentiss's camp. And Schroeder married, the last of them all to do so.
That spring Lake sent out two classes of bowmen: those who would use the ordinary short bow and those who would use the longbows he had had made that winter. According to history the English longbowmen of medieval times had been without equal in the range and accuracy of their arrows and such extra-powerful weapons should eliminate close range stalking of woods goats and afford better protection from unicorns.
The longbows worked so well that by mid-spring he could detach Craig and three others from the hunting and send them on a prospecting expedition. Prentiss had said Ragnarok was devoid of metals but there was the hope of finding small veins the Dunbar Expedition's instruments had not detected. They would have to find metal or else, in the end, they would go back into a flint axe stage.
Craig and his men returned when the blue star was a sun again and the heat was more than men could walk and work in. They had traveled hundreds of miles in their circuit and found no metals.
"I want to look to the south when fall comes," Craig said. "Maybe it will be different down there."
They did not face famine that summer as they had the first summer. The diet of meat and dried herbs was rough and plain but there was enough of it.
Full summer came and the land was again burned and lifeless. There was nothing to do but sit wearily in the shade and endure the heat, drawing what psychological comfort they could from the fact that summer solstice was past and the suns were creeping south again even though it would be many weeks before there was any lessening of the heat.
It was then, and by accident, that Lake discovered there was something wrong about the southward movement of the suns.
He was returning from the lookout that day and he realized it was exactly a year since he and the others had walked back to the caves while Bemmon swung on the limb behind them.
It was even the same time of day; the blue sun rising in the east behind him and the yellow sun bright in his face as it touched the western horizon before him. He remembered how the yellow sun had been like the front sight of a rifle, set in the deepest V notch of the western hills--
But now, exactly a year later, it was not in the V notch. It was on the north side of the notch.
He looked to the east, at the blue sun. It seemed to him that it, too, was farther north than it had been although with it he had no landmark to check by.
But there was no doubt about the yellow sun: it was going south, as it should at that time of year, but it was lagging behind schedule. The only explanation Lake could think of was one that would mean still another threat to their survival; perhaps greater than all the others combined.
The yellow sun dropped completely behind the north slope of the V notch and he went on to the caves. He found Craig and Anders, the only two who might know anything about Ragnarok's axial tilts, and told them what he had seen.
"I made the calendar from the data John gave me," Anders said. "The Dunbar men made observations and computed the length of Ragnarok's year--I don't think they would have made any mistakes."
"If they didn't," Lake said, "we're in for something."
Craig was watching him, closely, thoughtfully. "Like the Ice Ages of Earth?" he asked.
Lake nodded and Anders said, "I don't understand."
"Each year the north pole tilts toward the sun to give us summer and away from it to give us winter," Lake said. "Which, of course, you know. But there can be still another kind of axial tilt. On Earth it occurs at intervals of thousands of years. The tilting that produces the summers and winters goes on as usual but as the centuries go by the summer tilt toward the sun grows less, the winter tilt away from it greater. The north pole leans farther and farther from the sun and ice sheets come down out of the north--an Ice Age. Then the north pole's progression away from the sun stops and the ice sheets recede as it tilts back toward the sun."
"I see," Anders said. "And if the same thing is happening here, we're going away from an ice age but at a rate thousands of times faster than on Earth."
"I don't know whether it's Ragnarok's tilt, alone, or if the orbits of the suns around each other add effects of their own over a period of years," Lake said. "The Dunbar Expedition wasn't here long enough to check up on anything like that."
"It seemed to me it was hotter this summer than last," Craig said. "Maybe only my imagination--but it won't be imagination in a few years if the tilt toward the sun continues."
"The time would come when we'd have to leave here," Lake said. "We'd have to go north up the plateau each spring. There's no timber there--nothing but grass and wind and thin air. We'd have to migrate south each fall."
"Yes ... migrate." Anders's face was old and weary in the harsh reflected light of the blue sun and his hair had turned almost white in the past year. "Only the young ones could ever adapt enough to go up the plateau to its north portion. The rest of us ... but we haven't many years, anyway. Ragnarok is for the young--and if they have to migrate back and forth like animals just to stay alive they will never have time to accomplish anything or be more than stone age nomads."
"I wish we could know how long the Big Summer will be that we're going into," Craig said. "And how long and cold the Big Winter, when Ragnarok tilts away from the sun. It wouldn't change anything--but I'd like to know."
"We'll start making and recording daily observations," Lake said. "Maybe the tilt will start back the other way before it's too late."
* * * * *
Fall seemed to come a little later that year. Craig went to the south as soon as the weather permitted but there were no minerals there; only the metal-barren hills dwindling in size until they became a prairie that sloped down and down toward the southern lowlands where all the creatures of Ragnarok spent the winter.
"I'll try again to the north when spring comes," Craig said. "Maybe that mountain on the plateau will have something."
Winter came, and Elaine died in giving him a son. The loss of Elaine was an unexpected blow; hurting more than he would ever have thought possible.
But he had a son ... and it was his responsibility to do whatever he could to insure the survival of his son and of the sons and daughters of all the others.
His outlook altered and he began to think of the future, not in terms of years to come but in terms of generations to come. Someday one of the young ones would succeed him as leader but the young ones would have only childhood memories of Earth. He was the last leader who had known Earth and the civilization of Earth as a grown man. What he did while he was leader would incline the destiny of a new race.
He would have to do whatever was possible for him to do and he would have to begin at once. The years left to him could not be many.
He was not alone; others in the caves had the same thoughts he had regarding the future even though none of them had any plan for accomplishing what they spoke of. West, who had held degrees in philosophy on Earth, said to Lake one night as they sat together by the fire:
"Have you noticed the way the children listen when the talk turns to what used to be on Earth, what might have been on Athena, and what would be if only we could find a way to escape from Ragnarok?"
"I've noticed," he said.
"These stories already contain the goal for the future generations," West went on. "Someday, somehow, they will go to Athena, to kill the Gerns there and free the Terran slaves and reclaim Athena as their own."
He had listened to them talk of the interstellar flight to Athena as they sat by their fires and worked at making bows and arrows. It was only a dream they held, yet without that dream there would be nothing before them but the vision of generation after generation living and dying on a world that could never give them more than existence.
The dream was needed. But it, alone, was not enough. How long, on Earth, had it been from the Neolithic age to advanced civilization--how long from the time men were ready to leave their caves until they were ready to go to the stars?
Twelve thousand years.
There were men and women among the Rejects who had been specialists in various fields. There were a few books that had survived the trampling of the unicorns and others could be written with ink made from the black lance tree bark upon parchment made from the thin inner skin of unicorn hides.
The knowledge contained in the books and the learning of the Rejects still living should be preserved for the future generations. With the help of that learning perhaps they really could, someday, somehow, escape from their prison and make Athena their own.
He told West of what he had been thinking. "We'll have to start a school," he said. "This winter--tomorrow."
West nodded in agreement. "And the writings should be commenced as soon as possible. Some of the textbooks will require more time to write than Ragnarok will give the authors."
A school for the children was started the next day and the writing of the books began. The parchment books would serve two purposes. One would be to teach the future generations things that would not only help them survive but would help them create a culture of their own as advanced as the harsh environment and scanty resources of Ragnarok permitted. The other would be to warn them of the danger of a return of the Gerns and to teach them all that was known about Gerns and their weapons.
Lake's main contribution would be a lengthy book: TERRAN SPACESHIPS; TYPES AND OPERATION. He postponed its writing, however, to first produce a much smaller book but one that might well be more important: INTERIOR FEATURES OF A GERN CRUISER. Terran Intelligence knew a little about Gern cruisers and as second-in-command of the Constellation he had seen and studied a copy of that report. He had an excellent memory for such things, almost photographic, and he wrote the text and drew a multitude of sketches.
He shook his head ruefully at the result. The text was good but, for clarity, the accompanying illustrations should be accurate and in perspective. And he was definitely not an artist.
He discovered that Craig could take a pen in his scarred, powerful hand and draw with the neat precision of a professional artist. He turned the sketches over to him, together with the mass of specifications. Since it might someday be of such vital importance, he would make four copies of it. The text was given to a teen-age girl, who would make three more copies of it....
Four days later Schroeder handed Lake a text with some rough sketches. The title was: OPERATION OF GERN BLASTERS.
Not even Intelligence had ever been able to examine a Gern hand blaster. But a man named Schrader, on Venus, had killed a Gern with his own blaster and then disappeared with both infuriated Gerns and Gern-intimidated Venusian police in pursuit. There had been a high reward for his capture....
He looked it over and said, "I was counting on you giving us this."
Only the barest trace of surprise showed on Schroeder's face but his eyes were intently watching Lake. "So you knew all the time who I was?"
"I knew."
"Did anyone else on the Constellation know?"
"You were recognized by one of the ship's officers. You would have been tried in two more days."
"I see," Schroeder said. "And since I was guilty and couldn't be returned to Earth or Venus I'd have been executed on the Constellation." He smiled sardonically. "And you, as second-in-command, would have been my execution's master of ceremonies."
Lake put the parchment sheets back together in their proper order. "Sometimes," he said, "a ship's officer has to do things that are contrary to all his own wishes."
Schroeder drew a deep breath, his face sombre with the memories he had kept to himself.
"It was two years ago when the Gerns were still talking friendship to the Earth government while they shoved the colonists around on Venus. This Gern ... there was a girl there and he thought he could do what he wanted to her because he was a mighty Gern and she was nothing. He did. That's why I killed him. I had to kill two Venusian police to get away--that's where I put the rope around my neck."
"It's not what we did but what we do that we'll live or die by on Ragnarok," Lake said. He handed Schroeder the sheets of parchment. "Tell Craig to make at least four copies of this. Someday our knowledge of Gern blasters may be something else we'll live or die by."
* * * * *
The school and writing were interrupted by the spring hunting. Craig made his journey to the Plateau's snow-capped mountain but he was unable to keep his promise to prospect it. The plateau was perhaps ten thousand feet in elevation and the mountain rose another ten thousand feet above the plateau. No human could climb such a mountain in a 1.5 gravity.
"I tried," he told Lake wearily when he came back. "Damn it, I never tried harder at anything in my life. It was just too much for me. Maybe some of the young ones will be better adapted and can do it when they grow up."
Craig brought back several sheets of unusually transparent mica, each sheet a foot in diameter, and a dozen large water-clear quartz crystals.
"Float, from higher up on the mountain," he said. "The mica and crystals are in place up there if we could only reach them. Other minerals, too--I panned traces in the canyon bottoms. But no iron."
Lake examined the sheets of mica. "We could make windows for the outer caves of these," he said. "Have them double thickness with a wide air space between, for insulation. As for the quartz crystals...."
"Optical instruments," Craig said. "Binoculars, microscopes--it would take us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless as those crystals. But we have no way of cutting and grinding them."
Craig went to the east that fall and to the west the next spring. He returned from the trip to the west with a twisted knee that would never let him go prospecting again.
"It will take years to find the metals we need," he said. "The indications are that we never will but I wanted to keep on trying. Now, my damned knee has me chained to these caves...."
He reconciled himself to his lameness and confinement as best he could and finished his textbook: GEOLOGY AND MINERAL IDENTIFICATION.
He also taught a geology class during the winters. It was in the winter of the year four on Ragnarok that a nine-year-old boy entered his class; the silent, scar-faced Billy Humbolt.
He was by far the youngest of Craig's students, and the most attentive. Lake was present one day when Craig asked, curiously:
"It's not often a boy your age is so interested in mineralogy and geology, Billy. Is there something more than just interest?"
"I have to learn all about minerals," Billy said with matter-of-fact seriousness, "so that when I'm grown I can find the metals for us to make a ship."
"And then?" Craig asked.
"And then we'd go to Athena, to kill the Gerns who caused my mother to die, and my grandfather, and Julia, and all the others. And to free my father and the other slaves if they're still alive."
"I see," Craig said.
He did not smile. His face was shadowed and old as he looked at the boy and beyond him; seeing again, perhaps, the frail blonde girl and the two children that the first quick, violent months had taken from him.
"I hope you succeed," he said. "I wish I was young so I could dream of the same thing. But I'm not ... so let's get back to the identification of the ores that will be needed to make a ship to go to Athena and to make blasters to kill Gerns after you get there."
Lake had a corral built early the following spring, with camouflaged wings, to trap some of the woods goats when they came. It would be an immense forward step toward conquering their new environment if they could domesticate the goats and have goat herds near the caves all through the year. Gathering enough grass to last a herd of goats through the winter would be a problem--but first, before they worried about that, they would have to see if the goats could survive the summer and winter extremes of heat and cold.
They trapped ten goats that spring. They built them brush sunshades--before summer was over the winds would have stripped the trees of most of their dry, brown leaves--and a stream of water was diverted through the corral.
It was all work in vain. The goats died from the heat in early summer, together with the young that had been born.
When fall came they trapped six more goats. They built them shelters that would be as warm as possible and carried them a large supply of the tall grass from along the creek banks; enough to last them through the winter. But the cold was too much for the goats and the second blizzard killed them all.
The next spring and fall, and with much more difficulty, they tried the experiment with pairs of unicorns. The results were the same.
Which meant they would remain a race of hunters. Ragnarok would not permit them to be herdsmen.
* * * * *
The years went by, each much like the one before it but for the rapid aging of the Old Ones, as Lake and the others called themselves, and the growing up of the Young Ones. No woman among the Old Ones could any longer have children, but six more normal, healthy children had been born. Like the first two, they were not affected by the gravity as Earth-born babies had been.
Among the Young Ones, Lake saw, was a distinguishable difference. Those who had been very young the day the Gerns left them to die had adapted better than those who had been a few years older.
The environment of Ragnarok had struck at the very young with merciless savagery. It had subjected them to a test of survival that was without precedent on Earth. It had killed them by the hundreds but among them had been those whose young flesh and blood and organs had resisted death by adapting to the greatest extent possible.
The day of the Old Ones was almost done and the future would soon be in the hands of the Young Ones. They were the ninety unconquerables out of what had been four thousand Rejects; the first generation of what would be a new race.
It seemed to Lake that the years came and went ever faster as the Old Ones dwindled in numbers at an accelerating rate. Anders had died in the sixth year, his heart failing him one night as he worked patiently in his crude little laboratory at carrying on the work started by Chiara to find a cure for the Hell Fever. Barber, trying to develop a strain of herbs that would grow in the lower elevation of the caves, was killed by a unicorn as he worked in his test plot below the caves. Craig went limping out one spring day on the eighth year to look at a new mineral a hunter had found a mile from the caves. A sudden cold rain blew up, chilling him before he could return, and he died of Hell Fever the same day.
Schroeder was killed by prowlers the same year, dying with his back to a tree and a bloody knife in his hand. It was the way he would have wanted to go--once he had said to Lake:
"When my times comes I would rather it be against the prowlers. They fight hard and kill quick and then they're through with you. They don't tear you up after you're dead and slobber and gloat over the pieces, the way the unicorns do."
The springs came a little earlier each year, the falls a little later, and the observations showed the suns progressing steadily northward. But the winters, though shorter, were seemingly as cold as ever. The long summers reached such a degree of heat on the ninth year that Lake knew they could endure no more than two or three years more of the increasing heat.
Then, in the summer of the tenth year, the tilting of Ragnarok--the apparent northward progress of the suns--stopped. They were in the middle of what Craig had called Big Summer and they could endure it--just barely. They would not have to leave the caves.
The suns started their drift southward. The observations were continued and carefully recorded. Big Fall was coming and behind it would be Big Winter.
Big Winter ... the threat of it worried Lake. How far to the south would the suns go--how long would they stay? Would the time come when the plateau would be buried under hundreds of feet of snow and the caves enclosed in glacial ice?
There was no way he could ever know or even guess. Only those of the future would ever know.
On the twelfth year only Lake and West were left of the Old Ones. By then there were eighty-three left of the Young Ones, eight Ragnarok-born children of the Old Ones and four Ragnarok-born children of the Young Ones. Not counting himself and West, there were ninety-five of them.
It was not many to be the beginnings of a race that would face an ice age of unknown proportions and have over them, always, the threat of a chance return of the Gerns.
The winter of the fifteenth year came and he was truly alone, the last of the Old Ones. White-haired and aged far beyond his years, he was still leader. But that winter he could do little other than sit by his fire and feel the gravity dragging at his heart. He knew, long before spring, that it was time he chose his successor.
He had hoped to live to see his son take his place--but Jim was only thirteen. Among the others was one he had been watching since the day he told Craig he would find metals to build a ship and kill the Gerns: Bill Humbolt.
Bill Humbolt was not the oldest among those who would make leaders but he was the most versatile of them all, the most thoughtful and stubbornly determined. He reminded Lake of that fierce old man who had been his grandfather and had it not been for the scars that twisted his face into grim ugliness he would have looked much like him.
A violent storm was roaring outside the caves the night he told the others that he wanted Bill Humbolt to be his successor. There were no objections and, without ceremony and with few words, he terminated his fifteen years of leadership.
He left the others, his son among them, and went back to the cave where he slept. His fire was low, down to dying embers, but he was too tired to build it up again. He lay down on his pallet and saw, with neither surprise nor fear, that his time was much nearer than he had thought. It was already at hand.
He lay back and let the lassitude enclose him, not fighting it. He had done the best he could for the others and now the weary journey was over.
His thoughts dissolved into the memory of the day fifteen years before. The roaring of the storm became the thunder of the Gern cruisers as they disappeared into the gray sky. Four thousand Rejects stood in the cold wind and watched them go, the children not yet understanding that they had been condemned to die. Somehow, his own son was among them----
He tried feebly to rise. There was work to do--a lot of work to do....
* * * * *
PART 2
* * * * *
It was early morning as Bill Humbolt sat by the fire in his cave and studied the map Craig had made of the plateau's mountain. Craig had left the mountain nameless and he dipped his pen in ink to write: Craig Mountains.
"Bill----"
Delmont Anders entered very quietly, what he had to tell already evident on his face.
"He died last night, Bill."
It was something he had been expecting to come at any time but the lack of surprise did not diminish the sense of loss. Lake had been the last of the Old Ones, the last of those who had worked and fought and shortened the years of their lives that the Young Ones might have a chance to live. Now he was gone--now a brief era was ended, a valiant, bloody chapter written and finished.
And he was the new leader who would decree how the next chapter should be written, only four years older than the boy who was looking at him with an unconscious appeal for reassurance on his face....
"You'd better tell Jim," he said. "Then, a little later, I want to talk to everyone about the things we'll start doing as soon as spring comes."
"You mean, the hunting?" Delmont asked.
"No--more than just the hunting."
He sat for a while after Delmont left, looking back down the years that had preceded that day, back to that first morning on Ragnarok.
He had set a goal for himself that morning when he left his toy bear in the dust behind him and walked beside Julia into the new and perilous way of life. He had promised himself that some day he would watch the Gerns die and beg for mercy as they died and he would give them the same mercy they had given his mother.
As he grew older he realized that his hatred, alone, was a futile thing. There would have to be a way of leaving Ragnarok and there would have to be weapons with which to fight the Gerns. These would be things impossible and beyond his reach unless he had the help of all the others in united, coordinated effort.
To make certain of that united effort he would have to be their leader. So for eleven years he had studied and trained until there was no one who could use a bow or spear quite as well as he could, no one who could travel as far in a day or spot a unicorn ambush as quickly. And there was no one, with the exception of George Ord, who had studied as many textbooks as he had.
He had reached his first goal--he was leader. For all of them there existed the second goal: the hope of someday leaving Ragnarok and taking Athena from the Gerns. For many of them, perhaps, it was only wishful dreaming but for him it was the prime driving force of his life.
There was so much for them to do and their lives were so short in which to do it. For so long as he was leader they would not waste a day in idle wishing....
* * * * *
When the others were gathered to hear what he had to say he spoke to them:
"We're going to continue where the Old Ones had to leave off. We're better adapted than they were and we're going to find metals to make a ship if there are any to be found.
"Somewhere on Ragnarok, on the northwest side of a range similar to the Craig Mountains on the plateau, is a deep valley that the Dunbar Expedition called the Chasm. They didn't investigate it closely since their instruments showed no metals there but they saw strata in one place that was red; an iron discoloration. Maybe we can find a vein there that was too small for them to have paid any attention to. So we'll go over the Craigs as soon as the snow melts from them."
"That will be in early summer," George Ord said, his black eyes thoughtful. "Whoever goes will have to time their return for either just before the prowlers and unicorns come back from the north or wait until they've all migrated down off the plateau."
It was something Humbolt had been thinking about and wishing they could remedy. Men could elude unicorn attacks wherever there were trees large enough to offer safety and even prowler attacks could be warded off wherever there were trees for refuge; spears holding back the prowlers who would climb the trees while arrows picked off the ones on the ground. But there were no trees on the plateau, and to be caught by a band of prowlers or unicorns there was certain death for any small party of two or three. For that reason no small parties had ever gone up on the plateau except when the unicorns and prowlers were gone or nearly so. It was an inconvenience and it would continue for as long as their weapons were the slow-to-reload bows.
"You're supposed to be our combination inventor-craftsman," he said to George. "No one else can compare with you in that respect. Besides, you're not exactly enthusiastic about such hard work as mountain climbing. So from now on you'll do the kind of work you're best fitted for. Your first job is to make us a better bow. Make it like a crossbow, with a sliding action to draw and cock the string and with a magazine of arrows mounted on top of it."
George studied the idea thoughtfully. "The general principle is simple," he said. "I'll see what I can do."
"How many of us will go over the Craig Mountains, Bill?" Dan Barber asked.
"You and I," Humbolt answered. "A three-man party under Bob Craig will go into the Western Hills and another party under Johnny Stevens will go into the Eastern Hills."
He looked toward the adjoining cave where the guns had been stored for so long, coated with unicorn tallow to protect them from rust.
"We could make gun powder if we could find a deposit of saltpeter. We already know where there's a little sulphur. The guns would have to be converted to flintlocks, though, since we don't have what we need for cartridge priming material. Worse, we'd have to use ceramic bullets. They would be inefficient--too light, and destructive to the bores. But we would need powder for mining if we ever found any iron. And, if we can't have metal bullets to shoot the Gerns, we can have bombs to blast them with."
"Suppose," Johnny Stevens said, "that we never do find the metals to make a ship. How will we ever leave Ragnarok if that happens?"
"There's another way--a possible way--of leaving here without a ship of our own. If there are no metals we'll have to try it."
"Why wait?" Bob Craig demanded. "Why not try it now?"
"Because the odds would be about ten thousand to one in favor of the Gerns. But we'll try it if everything else fails."
* * * * *
George made, altered, and rejected four different types of crossbows before he perfected a reloading bow that met his critical approval. He brought it to where Humbolt stood outside the caves early one spring day when the grass was sending up the first green shoots on the southern hillsides and the long winter was finally dying.
"Here it is," he said, handing Humbolt the bow. "Try it."
He took it, noting the fine balance of it. Projecting down from the center of the bow, at right angles to it, was a stock shaped to fit the grip of the left hand. Under the crossbar was a sliding stock for the right hand, shaped like the butt of a pistol and fitted with a trigger. Mounted slightly above and to one side of the crossbar was a magazine containing ten short arrows.
The pistol grip was in position near the forestock. He pulled it back the length of the crossbar and it brought the string with it, stretching it taut. There was a click as the trigger mechanism locked the bowstring in place and at the same time a concealed spring arrangement shoved an arrow into place against the string.
He took quick aim at a distant tree and pressed the trigger. There was a twang as the arrow was ejected. He jerked the sliding pistol grip forward and back to reload, pressing the trigger an instant later. Another arrow went its way.
By the time he had fired the tenth arrow in the magazine he was shooting at the rate of one arrow per second. On the trunk of the distant tree, like a bristle of stiff whiskers, the ten arrows were driven deep into the wood in an area no larger than the chest of a prowler or head of a unicorn.
"This is better than I hoped for," he said to George. "One man with one of these would equal six men with ordinary bows."
"I'm going to add another feature," George said. "Bundles of arrows, ten to the bundle in special holders, to carry in the quivers. To reload the magazine you'd just slap down a new bundle of arrows, in no more time than it would take to put one arrow in an ordinary bow. I figured that with practice a man should be able to get off forty arrows in not much more than twenty seconds."
George took the bow and went back in the cave to add his new feature. Humbolt stared after him, thinking, If he can make something like that out of wood and unicorn gut, what would he be able to give us if he could have metal?
Perhaps George would never have the opportunity to show what he could do with metal. But Humbolt already felt sure that George's genius would, if it ever became necessary, make possible the alternate plan for leaving Ragnarok.
* * * * *
The weeks dragged into months and at last enough snow was gone from the Craigs that Humbolt and Dan Barber could start. They met no opposition. The prowlers had long since disappeared into the north and the unicorns were very scarce. They had no occasion to test the effectiveness of the new automatic crossbows in combat; a lack of opportunity that irked Barber.
"Any other time, if we had ordinary bows," he complained, "the unicorns would be popping up to charge us from all directions."
"Don't fret," Humbolt consoled him. "This fall, when we come back, they will be."
They reached the mountain and stopped near its foot where a creek came down, its water high and muddy with melting snows. There they hunted until they had obtained all the meat they could carry. They would see no more game when they went up the mountain's canyons. A poisonous weed replaced most of the grass in all the canyons and the animals of Ragnarok had learned long before to shun the mountain.
They found the canyon that Craig and his men had tried to explore and started up it. It was there that Craig had discovered the quartz and mica and so far as he had been able to tell the head of that canyon would be the lowest of all the passes over the mountain.
The canyon went up the mountain diagonally so that the climb was not steep although it was constant. They began to see mica and quartz crystals in the creek bed and at noon on the second day they passed the last stunted tree. Nothing grew higher than that point but the thorny poison weeds and they were scarce.
The air was noticeably thinner there and their burdens heavier. A short distance beyond they came to a small rock monument; Craig's turn-back point.
The next day they found the quartz crystals in place. A mile farther was the vein the mica had come from. Of the other minerals Craig had hoped to find, however, there were only traces.
The fourth day was an eternity of struggling up the now-steeper canyon under loads that seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds; forcing their protesting legs to carry them fifty steps at a time, at the end of which they would stop to rest while their lungs labored to suck in the thin air in quick, panting breaths.
It would have been much easier to have gone around the mountain. But the Chasm was supposed to be like a huge cavity scooped out of the plateau beyond the mountain, rimmed with sheer cliffs a mile high. Only on the side next to the mountain was there a slope leading down into it.
They stopped for the night where the creek ended in a small spring. There the snow still clung to the canyon's walls and there the canyon curved, offering them the promise of the summit just around the bend as it had been doing all day.
The sun was hot and bright the next morning as they made their slow way on again. The canyon straightened, the steep walls of it flattening out to make a pair of ragged shoulders with a saddle between them.
They climbed to the summit of the saddle and there, suddenly before them, was the other side of the world--and the Chasm.
Far below them was a plateau, stretching endlessly like the one they had left behind them. But the chasm dominated all else. It was a gigantic, sheer-walled valley, a hundred miles long by forty miles wide, sunk deep in the plateau with the tops of its mile-high walls level with the floor of the plateau. The mountain under them dropped swiftly away, sloping down and down to the level of the plateau and then on, down and down again, to the bottom of the chasm that was so deep its floor was half hidden by the morning shadows.
"My God!" Barber said. "It must be over three miles under us to the bottom, on the vertical. Ten miles of thirty-three per cent grade--if we go down we'll never get out again."
"You can turn back here if you want to," Humbolt said.
"Turn back?" Barber's red whiskers seemed to bristle. "Who in hell said anything about turning back?"
"Nobody," Humbolt said, smiling a little at Barber's quick flash of anger.
He studied the chasm, wishing that they could have some way of cutting the quartz crystals and making binoculars. It was a long way to look with the naked eye....
Here and there the chasm thrust out arms into the plateau. All the arms were short, however, and even at their heads the cliffs were vertical. The morning shadows prevented a clear view of much of the chasm and he could see no sign of the red-stained strata that they were searching for.
In the southwest corner of the chasm, far away and almost imperceptible, he saw a faint cloud rising up from the chasm's floor. It was impossible to tell what it was and it faded away as he watched.
Barber saw it, too, and said, "It looked like smoke. Do you suppose there could be people--or some kind of intelligent things--living down there?"
"It might have been the vapor from hot springs, condensed by the cool morning air," he said. "Whatever it was, we'll look into it when we get there."
The climb down the steep slope into the chasm was swifter than that up the canyon but no more pleasant. Carrying a heavy pack down such a grade exerted a torturous strain upon the backs of the legs.
The heat increased steadily as they descended. They reached the floor of the valley the next day and the noonday heat was so great that Humbolt wondered if they might not have trapped themselves into what the summer would soon transform into a monstrous oven where no life at all could exist. There could never be any choice, of course--the mountains were passable only when the weather was hot.
The floor of the valley was silt, sand and gravel--they would find nothing there. They set out on a circuit of the chasm's walls, following along close to the base.
In many places the mile-high walls were without a single ledge to break their vertical faces. When they came to the first such place they saw that the ground near the base was riddled with queer little pits, like tiny craters of the moon. As they looked there was a crack like a cannon shot and the ground beside them erupted into an explosion of sand and gravel. When the dust had cleared away there was a new crater where none had been before.
Humbolt wiped the blood from his face where a flying fragment had cut it and said, "The heat of the sun loosens rocks up on the rim. When one falls a mile in a one point five gravity, it's traveling like a meteor."
They went on, through the danger zone. As with the peril of the chasm's heat, there was no choice. Only by observing the material that littered the base of the cliffs could they know what minerals, if any, might be above them.
On the fifteenth day they saw the red-stained stratum. Humbolt quickened his pace, hurrying forward in advance of Barber. The stratum was too high up on the wall to be reached but it was not necessary to examine it in place--the base of the cliff was piled thick with fragments from it.
He felt the first touch of discouragement as he looked at them. They were a sandstone, light in weight. The iron present was only what the Dunbar Expedition had thought it to be; a mere discoloration.
They made their way slowly along the foot of the cliff, examining piece after piece in the hope of finding something more than iron stains. There was no variation, however, and a mile farther on they came to the end of the red stratum. Beyond that point the rocks were gray, without a vestige of iron.
"So that," Barber said, looking back the way they had come, "is what we were going to build a ship out of--iron stains!"
Humbolt did not answer. For him it was more than a disappointment. It was the death of a dream he had held since the year he was nine and had heard that the Dunbar Expedition had seen iron-stained rock in a deep chasm--the only iron-stained rock on the face of Ragnarok. Surely, he had thought, there would be enough iron there to build a small ship. For eleven years he had worked toward the day when he would find it. Now, he had found it--and it was nothing. The ship was as far away as ever....
But discouragement was as useless as iron-stained sandstone. He shook it off and turned to Barber.
"Let's go," he said. "Maybe we'll find something by the time we circle the chasm."
For seven days they risked the danger of death from downward plunging rocks and found nothing. On the eighth day they found the treasure that was not treasure.
They stopped for the evening just within the mouth of one of the chasm's tributaries. Humbolt went out to get a drink where a trickle of water ran through the sand and as he knelt down he saw the flash of something red under him, almost buried in the sand.
He lifted it out. It was a stone half the size of his hand; darkly translucent and glowing in the light of the setting sun like blood.
It was a ruby.
He looked, and saw another gleam a little farther up the stream. It was another ruby, almost as large as the first one. Near it was a flawless blue sapphire. Scattered here and there were smaller rubies and sapphires, down to the size of grains of sand.
He went farther upstream and saw specimens of still another stone. They were colorless but burning with internal fires. He rubbed one of them hard across the ruby he still carried and there was a gritting sound as it cut a deep scratch in the ruby.
"I'll be damned," he said aloud.
There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby--the diamond.
* * * * *
It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside their packs.
"What did you find to keep you out so late?" Barber asked curiously.
He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires and diamonds at Barber's feet.
"Take a look," he said. "On a civilized world what you see there would buy us a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they're just pretty rocks.
"Except the diamonds," he added "At least we now have something to cut those quartz crystals with."
* * * * *
They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning but they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the gray-black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonado variety. Then they resumed their circling of the chasm's walls.
The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at night was there any relief from it and the nights were growing swiftly shorter as the blue sun rose earlier each morning. When the yellow sun rose the chasm became a blazing furnace around the edge of which they crept like ants in some gigantic oven.
There was no life in any form to be seen; no animal or bush or blade of grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered, too, and sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already falling down upon them.
They found no more minerals of any kind and they came at last to the place where they had seen the smoke or vapor.
* * * * *
There the walls of the chasm drew back to form a little valley a mile long by half a mile wide. The walls did not drop vertically to the floor there but sloped out at the base into a fantastic formation of natural roofs and arches that reached almost to the center of the valley from each side. Green things grew in the shade under the arches and sparkling waterfalls cascaded down over many of them. A small creek carried the water out of the valley, going out into the chasm a little way before the hot sands absorbed it.
They stood and watched for some time, but there was no movement in the valley other than the waving of the green plants as a breeze stirred them. Once the breeze shifted to bring them the fresh, sweet scent of growing things and urge them to come closer.
"A place like that doesn't belong here," Barber said in a low voice. "But it's there. I wonder what else is there?"
"Shade and cool water," Humbolt said. "And maybe things that don't like strangers. Let's go find out."
They watched warily as they walked, their crossbows in their hands. At the closer range they saw that the roofs and arches were the outer remains of a system of natural caves that went back into the valley's walls. The green vegetation grew wherever the roofs gave part-time shade, consisting mainly of a holly-leafed bush with purple flowers and a tall plant resembling corn.
Under some of the roofs the corn was mature, the orange colored grains visible. Under others it was no more than half grown. He saw the reason and said to Barber:
"There are both warm and cold springs here. The plants watered by the warm springs would grow almost the year around; the ones watered by the cold springs only in the summer. And what we saw from the mountain top would have been vapor rising from the warm springs."
They passed under arch after arch without seeing any life. When they came to the valley's upper end and still had seen nothing it seemed evident that there was little danger of an encounter with any intelligent-and-hostile creatures. Apparently nothing at all lived in the little valley.
Humbolt stopped under a broad arch where the breeze was made cool and moist by the spray of water it had come through. Barber went on, to look under the adjoining arch.
Caves led into the wall from both arches and as he stood there Humbolt saw something lying in the mouth of the nearest cave. It was a little mound of orange corn; lying in a neat pile as though whatever had left it there had intended to come back after it.
He looked toward the other arch but Barber was somewhere out of sight. He doubted that whatever had left the corn could be much of a menace--dangerous animals were more apt to eat flesh than corn--but he went to the cave with his crossbow ready.
He stopped at the mouth of the cave to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness inside it. As he did so the things inside came out to meet him.
They emerged into full view; six little animals the size of squirrels, each of them a different color. They walked on short hind legs like miniature bears and the dark eyes in the bear-chipmunk faces were fixed on him with intense interest. They stopped five feet in front of him, there to stand in a neat row and continue the fascinated staring up at him.
The yellow one in the center scratched absently at its stomach with a furry paw and he lowered the bow, feeling a little foolish at having bothered to raise it against animals so small and harmless.
Then he half brought it up again as the yellow one opened its mouth and said in a tone that held distinct anticipation:
"I think we'll eat you for supper."
He darted glances to right and left but there was nothing near him except the six little animals. The yellow one, having spoken, was staring silently at him with only curiosity on its furry face. He wondered if some miasma or some scent from the vegetation in the valley had warped his mind into sudden insanity and asked:
"You think you'll do what?"
It opened its mouth again, to stutter, "I--I----" Then, with a note of alarm, "Hey...."
It said no more and the next sound was that of Barber hurrying toward him and calling, "Hey--Bill--where are you?"
"Here," he answered, and he was already sure that he knew why the little animal had spoken to him.
Barber came up and saw the six chipmunk-bears. "Six of them!" he exclaimed. "There's one in the next cave--the damned thing spoke to me!"
"I thought so," he replied. "You told it we'd have it for supper and then it said, 'You think you'll do what?' didn't it?"
Barber's face showed surprise. "How did you know that?"
"They're telepathic between one another," he said. "The yellow one there repeated what the one you spoke to heard you say and it repeated what the yellow one heard me say. It has to be telepathy between them."
"Telepathy----" Barber stared at the six little animals, who stared back with their fascinated curiosity undiminished. "But why should they want to repeat aloud what they receive telepathically?"
"I don't know. Maybe at some stage in their evolution only part of them were telepaths and the telepaths broadcasted danger warnings to the others that way. So far as that goes, why does a parrot repeat what it hears?"
There was a scurry of movement behind Barber and another of the little animals, a white one, hurried past them. It went to the yellow one and they stood close together as they stared up. Apparently they were mates....
"That's the other one--those are the two that mocked us," Barber said, and thereby gave them the name by which they would be known: mockers.
* * * * *
The mockers were fresh meat--but they accepted the humans with such friendliness and trust that Barber lost all his desire to have one for supper or for any other time. They had a limited supply of dried meat and there would be plenty of orange corn. They would not go hungry.
They discovered that the mockers had living quarters in both the cool caves and the ones warmed by the hot springs. There was evidence that they hibernated during the winters in the warm caves.
There were no minerals in the mockers' valley and they set out to continue their circuit of the chasm. They did not get far until the heat had become so great that the chasm's tributaries began going dry. They turned back then, to wait in the little valley until the fall rains came.
* * * * *
When the long summer was ended by the first rain they resumed their journey. They took a supply of the orange corn and two of the mockers; the yellow one and its mate. The other mockers watched them leave, standing silent and solemn in front of their caves as though they feared they might never see their two fellows or the humans again.
The two mockers were pleasant company, riding on their shoulders and chattering any nonsense that came to mind. And sometimes saying things that were not at all nonsense, making Humbolt wonder if mockers could partly read human minds and dimly understand the meaning of some of the things they said.
They found a place where saltpeter was very thinly and erratically distributed. They scraped off all the films of it that were visible and procured a small amount. They completed their circuit and reached the foot of the long, steep slope of the Craigs without finding anything more.
It was an awesome climb that lay before them; up a grade so steep and barred with so many low ledges that when their legs refused to carry them farther they crawled. The heat was still very serious and there would be no water until they came to the spring beyond the mountain's summit. A burning wind, born on the blazing floor of the chasm, followed them up the mountain all day. Their leather canteens were almost dry when night came and they were no more than a third of the way to the top.
The mockers had become silent as the elevation increased and when they stopped for the night Humbolt saw that they would never live to cross the mountain. They were breathing fast, their hearts racing, as they tried to extract enough oxygen from the thin air. They drank a few drops of water but they would not touch the corn he offered them.
The white mocker died at midmorning the next day as they stopped for a rest. The yellow one crawled feebly to her side and died a few minutes later.
"So that's that," Humbolt said, looking down at them. "The only things on Ragnarok that ever trusted us and wanted to be our friends--and we killed them."
They drank the last of their water and went on. They made dry camp that night and dreams of cold streams of water tormented their exhausted sleep. The next day was a hellish eternity in which they walked and fell and crawled and walked and fell again.
Barber weakened steadily, his breathing growing to a rattling panting. He spoke once that afternoon, to try to smile with dry, swollen lips and say between his panting gasps, "It would be hell--to have to die--so thirsty like this."
After that he fell with increasing frequency, each time slower and weaker in getting up again. Half a mile short of the summit he fell for the last time. He tried to get up, failed, and tried to crawl. He failed at that, too, and collapsed face down in the rocky soil.
Humbolt went to him and said between his own labored intakes of breath, "Wait, Dan--I'll go on--bring you back water."
Barber raised himself with a great effort and looked up. "No use," he said. "My heart--too much----"
He fell forward again and that time he was very still, his desperate panting no more.
* * * * *
It seemed to Humbolt that it was half a lifetime later that he finally reached the spring and the cold, clear water. He drank, the most ecstatic pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Then the pleasure drained away as he seemed to see Dan Barber trying to smile and seemed to hear him say, "It would be hell--to have to die--so thirsty like this."
He rested for two days before he was in condition to continue on his way. He reached the plateau and saw that the woods goats had been migrating south for some time. On the second morning he climbed up a gentle roll in the plain and met three unicorns face to face.
They charged at once, squealing with anticipation. Had he been equipped with an ordinary bow he would have been killed within seconds. But the automatic crossbow poured a rain of arrows into the faces of the unicorns that caused them to swing aside in pain and enraged astonishment. The moment they had swung enough to expose the area just behind their heads the arrows became fatal.
One unicorn escaped, three arrows bristling in its face. It watched him from a distance for a little while, squealing and shaking its head in baffled fury. Then it turned and disappeared over a swell in the plain, running like a deer.
He resumed his southward march, hurrying faster than before. The unicorn had headed north and that could be for but one purpose: to bring enough reinforcements to finish the job.
* * * * *
He reached the caves at night. No one was up but George Ord, working late in his combination workshop-laboratory.
George looked up at the sound of his entrance and saw that he was alone. "So Dan didn't make it?" he asked.
"The chasm got him," he answered. And then, wearily, "The chasm--we found the damned thing."
"The red stratum----"
"It was only iron stains."
"I made a little pilot smelter while you were gone," George said. "I was hoping the red stratum would be ore. The other prospecting parties--none of them found anything."
"We'll try again next spring," he said. "We'll find it somewhere, no matter how long it takes."
"Our time may not be so long. The observations show the sun to be farther south than ever."
"Then we'll make double use of the time we do have. We'll cut the hunting parties to the limit and send out more prospecting parties. We're going to have a ship to meet the Gerns again."
"Sometimes," George said, his black eyes studying him thoughtfully, "I think that's all you live for, Bill: for the day when you can kill Gerns."
George said it as a statement of a fact, without censure, but Humbolt could not keep an edge of harshness out of his voice as he answered:
"For as long as I'm leader that's all we're all going to live for."
He followed the game south that fall, taking with him Bob Craig and young Anders. Hundreds of miles south of the caves they came to the lowlands; a land of much water and vegetation and vast herds of unicorns and woods goats. It was an exceedingly dangerous country, due to the concentration of unicorns and prowlers, and only the automatic crossbows combined with never ceasing vigilance enabled them to survive.
There they saw the crawlers; hideous things that crawled on multiple legs like three-ton centipedes, their mouths set with six mandibles and dripping a stinking saliva. The bite of a crawler was poisonous, instantly paralyzing even to a unicorn, though not instantly killing them. The crawlers ate their victims at once, however, ripping the helpless and still living flesh from its bones.
Although the unicorns feared the crawlers, the prowlers hated them with a fanatical intensity and made use of their superior quickness to kill every crawler they found; ripping at the crawler until the crawler, in an insanity of rage, bit itself and died of its own poison.
They had taken one of the powerful longbows with them, in addition to their crossbows, and they killed a crawler with it one day. As they did so a band of twenty prowlers came suddenly upon them.
Twenty prowlers, with the advantage of surprise at short range, could have slaughtered them. Instead, the prowlers continued on their way without as much as a challenging snarl.
"Now why," Bob Craig wondered, "did they do that?"
"They saw we had just killed a crawler," Humbolt said. "The crawlers are their enemies and I guess letting us live was their way of showing appreciation."
Their further explorations of the lowlands revealed no minerals--nothing but alluvial material of unknown depth--and there was no reason to stay longer except that return to the caves was impossible until spring came. They built attack-proof shelters in the trees and settled down to wait out the winter.
They started north with the first wave of woods goats, nothing but lack of success to show for their months of time and effort.
When they were almost to the caves they came to the barren valley where the Gerns had herded the Rejects out of the cruisers and to the place where the stockade had been. It was a lonely place, the stockade walls fallen and scattered and the graves of Humbolt's mother and all the others long since obliterated by the hooves of the unicorn legions. Bitter memories were reawakened, tinged by the years with nostalgia, and the stockade was far behind them before the dark mood left him.
The orange corn was planted that spring and the number of prospecting parties was doubled.
The corn sprouted, grew feebly, and died before maturity. The prospecting parties returned one by one, each to report no success. He decided, that fall, that time was too precious to waste--they would have to use the alternate plan he had spoken of.
He went to George Ord and asked him if it would be possible to build a hyperspace transmitter with the materials they had.
"It's the one way we could have a chance to leave here without a ship of our own," he said. "By luring a Gern cruiser here and then taking it away from them."
George shook his head. "A hyperspace transmitter might be built, given enough years of time. But it would be useless without power. It would take a generator of such size that we'd have to melt down every gun, knife, axe, every piece of steel and iron we have. And then we'd be five hundred pounds short. On top of that, we'd have to have at least three hundred pounds more of copper for additional wire."
"I didn't realize it would take such a large generator," he said after a silence. "I was sure we could have a transmitter."
"Get me the metal and we can," George said. He sighed restlessly and there was almost hatred in his eyes as he looked at the inclosing walls of the cave. "You're not the only one who would like to leave our prison. Get me eight hundred pounds of copper and iron and I'll make the transmitter, some way."
Eight hundred pounds of metal.... On Ragnarok that was like asking for the sun.
The years went by and each year there was the same determined effort, the same lack of success. And each year the suns were farther south, marking the coming of the end of any efforts other than the one to survive.
In the year thirty, when fall came earlier than ever before, he was forced to admit to himself the bleak and bitter fact: he and the others were not of the generation that would escape from Ragnarok. They were Earth-born--they were not adapted to Ragnarok and could not scour a world of 1.5 gravity for metals that might not exist.
And vengeance was a luxury he could not have.
A question grew in his mind where there had been only his hatred for the Gerns before. What would become of the future generations on Ragnarok?
With the question a scene from his childhood kept coming back to him; a late summer evening in the first year on Ragnarok and Julia sitting beside him in the warm starlight....
"You're my son, Billy," she had said. "The first I ever had. Now, before so very long, maybe I'll have another one."
Hesitantly, not wanting to believe, he had asked, "What some of them said about how you might die then--it won't really happen, will it, Julia?"
"It ... might." Then her arm had gone around him and she had said, "If I do I'll leave in my place a life that's more important than mine ever was.
"Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you, if you should ever be leader. Remember that it's only through the children that we can ever survive and whip this world. Protect them while they're small and helpless and teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing when they're a little older. Never, never let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok. Someday, even if it's a hundred years from now, the Gerns will come again and they must be ready to fight, for their freedom and for their lives."
He had been too young then to understand how truly she had spoken and when he was old enough his hatred for the Gerns had blinded him to everything but his own desires. Now, he could see....
The children of each generation would be better adapted to Ragnarok and full adaptation would eventually come. But all the generations of the future would be potential slaves of the Gern Empire, free only so long as they remained unnoticed.
It was inconceivable that the Gerns should never pass by Ragnarok through all time to come. And when they finally came the slow, uneventful progression of decades and centuries might have brought a false sense of security to the people of Ragnarok, might have turned the stories of what the Gerns did to the Rejects into legends and then into myths that no one any longer believed.
The Gerns would have to be brought to Ragnarok before that could happen.
* * * * *
He went to George Ord again and said:
"There's one kind of transmitter we could make a generator for--a plain normal-space transmitter, dot-dash, without a receiver."
George laid down the diamond cutting wheel he had been working on.
"It would take two hundred years for the signal to get to Athena at the speed of light," he said. "Then, forty days after it got there, a Gern cruiser would come hell-bent to investigate."
"I want the ones of the future to know that the Gerns will be here no later than two hundred years from now. And with always the chance that a Gern cruiser in space might pick up the signal at any time before then."
"I see," George said. "The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, to make them remember."
"You know what would happen to them if they ever forgot. You're as old as I am--you know what the Gerns did to us."
"I'm older than you are," George said. "I was nine when the Gerns left us here. They kept my father and mother and my sister was only three. I tried to keep her warm by holding her but the Hell Fever got her that first night. She was too young to understand why I couldn't help her more...."
Hatred burned in his eyes at the memory, like some fire that had been banked but had never died. "Yes, I remember the Gerns and what they did. I wouldn't want it to have to happen to others--the transmitter will be made so that it won't."
* * * * *
The guns were melted down, together with other items of iron and steel, to make the castings for the generator. Ceramic pipes were made to carry water from the spring to a waterwheel. The long, slow job of converting the miscellany of electronic devices, many of them broken, into the components of a transmitter proceeded.
It was five years before the transmitter was ready for testing. It was early fall of the year thirty-five then, and the water that gushed from the pipe splashed in cold drops against Humbolt as the waterwheel was set in motion.
The generator began to hum and George observed the output of it and the transmitter as registered by the various meters he had made.
"Weak, but it will reach the Gern monitor station on Athena," he said, "It's ready to send--what do you want to say?"
"Make it something short," he said. "Make it, 'Ragnarok calling.'"
George poised his finger over the transmitting key. "This will set forces in motion that can never be recalled. What we do here this morning is going to cause a lot of Gerns--or Ragnarok people--to die."
"It will be the Gerns who die," he said. "Send the signal."
"Like you, I believe the same thing," George said. "I have to believe it because that's the way I want it to be. I hope we're right. It's something we'll never know."
He began depressing the key.
* * * * *
A boy was given the job of operating the key and the signal went out daily until the freezing of winter stopped the waterwheel that powered the generator.
The sending of the signals was resumed when spring came and the prospecting parties continued their vain search for metals.
The suns continued moving south and each year the springs came later, the falls earlier. In the spring of forty-five he saw that he would have to make his final decision.
By then they had dwindled until they numbered only sixty-eight; the Young Ones gray and rapidly growing old. There was no longer any use to continue the prospecting--if any metals were to be found they were at the north end of the plateau where the snow no longer melted during the summer. They were too few to do more than prepare for what the Old Ones had feared they might have to face--Big Winter. That would require the work of all of them.
Sheets of mica were brought down from the Craigs, the summits of which were deeply buried under snow even in midsummer. Stoves were made of fireclay and mica, which would give both heat and light and would be more efficient than the open fireplaces. The innermost caves were prepared for occupation, with multiple doors to hold out the cold and with laboriously excavated ventilation ducts and smoke outlets.
There were sixty of them in the fall of fifty, when all had been done that could be done to prepare for what might come.
* * * * *
"There aren't many of the Earth-born left now," Bob Craig said to him one night as they sat in the flickering light of a stove. "And there hasn't been time for there to be many of the Ragnarok-born. The Gerns wouldn't get many slaves if they should come now."
"They could use however many they found," he answered. "The younger ones, who are the best adapted to this gravity, would be exceptionally strong and quick on a one-gravity world. There are dangerous jobs where a strong, quick slave is a lot more efficient and expendable than complex, expensive machines."
"And they would want some specimens for scientific study," Jim Lake said. "They would want to cut into the young ones and see how they're built that they're adapted to this one and a half gravity world."
He smiled with the cold mirthlessness that always reminded Humbolt of his father--of the Lake who had been the Constellation's lieutenant commander. "According to the books the Gerns never did try to make it a secret that when a Gern doctor or biologist cuts into the muscles or organs of a non-Gern to see what makes them tick, he wants them to be still alive and ticking as he does so."
Seventeen-year-old Don Chiara spoke, to say slowly, thoughtfully:
"Slavery and vivisection.... If the Gerns should come now when there are so few of us, and if we should fight the best we could and lose, it would be better for whoever was the last of us left to put a knife in the hearts of the women and children than to let the Gerns have them."
No one made any answer. There was no answer to make, no alternative to suggest.
"In the future there will be more of us and it will be different," he said at last. "On Earth the Gerns were always stronger and faster than humans but when the Gerns come to Ragnarok they're going to find a race that isn't really human any more. They're going to find a race before which they'll be like woods goats before prowlers."
"If only they don't come too soon," Craig said.
"That was the chance that had to be taken," he replied.
He wondered again as he spoke, as he had wondered so often in the past years, if he had given them all their death sentence when he ordered the transmitter built. Yet, the future generations could not be permitted to forget ... and steel could not be tempered without first thrusting it into the fire.
* * * * *
He was the last of the Young Ones when he awoke one night in the fall of fifty-six and found himself burning with the Hell Fever. He did not summon any of the others. They could do nothing for him and he had already done all he could for them.
He had done all he could for them ... and now he would leave forty-nine men, women and children to face the unknown forces of Big Winter while over them hung the sword he had forged; the increasing danger of detection by the Gerns.
The question came again, sharp with the knowledge that it was far too late for him to change any of it. Did I arrange the execution of my people?
Then, through the red haze of the fever, Julia spoke to him out of the past; sitting again beside him in the summer twilight and saying:
Remember me, Billy, and this evening, and what I said to you ... teach them to fight and be afraid of nothing ... never let them forget how they came to be on Ragnarok....
She seemed very near and real and the doubt faded and was gone. Teach them to fight ... never let them forget.... The men of Ragnarok were only fur-clad hunters who crouched in caves but they would grow in numbers as time went by. Each generation would be stronger than the generation before it and he had set forces in motion that would bring the last generation the trial of combat and the opportunity for freedom. How well they fought on that day would determine their destiny but he was certain, once again, what that destiny would be.
It would be to walk as conquerors before beaten and humbled Gerns.
* * * * *
It was winter of the year eighty-five and the temperature was one hundred and six degrees below zero. Walter Humbolt stood in front of the ice tunnel that led back through the glacier to the caves and looked up into the sky.
It was noon but there was no sun in the starlit sky. Many weeks before the sun had slipped below the southern horizon. For a little while a dim halo had marked its passage each day; then that, too, had faded away. But now it was time for the halo to appear again, to herald the sun's returning.
Frost filled the sky, making the stars flicker as it swirled endlessly downward. He blinked against it, his eyelashes trying to freeze to his lower eyelids at the movement, and turned to look at the north.
There the northern lights were a gigantic curtain that filled a third of the sky, rippling and waving in folds that pulsated in red and green, rose and lavender and violet. Their reflection gleamed on the glacier that sloped down from the caves and glowed softly on the other glacier; the one that covered the transmitter station. The transmitter had long ago been taken into the caves but the generator and waterwheel were still there, frozen in a tomb of ice.
For three years the glacier had been growing before the caves and the plateau's southern face had been buried under snow for ten years. Only a few woods goats ever came as far north as the country south of the caves and they stayed only during the brief period between the last snow of spring and the first snow of fall. Their winter home was somewhere down near the equator. What had been called the Southern Lowlands was a frozen, lifeless waste.
Once they had thought about going to the valley in the chasm where the mockers would be hibernating in their warm caves. But even if they could have gone up the plateau and performed the incredible feat of crossing the glacier-covered, blizzard-ripped Craigs, they would have found no food in the mockers' valley--only a little corn the mockers had stored away, which would soon have been exhausted.
There was no place for them to live but in the caves or as nomads migrating with the animals. And if they migrated to the equator each year they would have to leave behind them all the books and tools and everything that might someday have given them a civilized way of life and might someday have shown them how to escape from their prison.
He looked again to the south where the halo should be, thinking: They should have made their decision in there by now. I'm their leader--but I can't force them to stay here against their will. I could only ask them to consider what it would mean if we left here.
Snow creaked underfoot as he moved restlessly. He saw something lying under the blanket of frost and went to it. It was an arrow that someone had dropped. He picked it up, carefully, because the intense cold had made the shaft as brittle as glass. It would regain its normal strength when taken into the caves----
There was the sound of steps and Fred Schroeder came out of the tunnel, dressed as he was dressed in bulky furs. Schroeder looked to the south and said, "It seems to be starting to get a little lighter there."
He saw that it was; a small, faint paling of the black sky.
"They talked over what you and I told them," Schroeder said. "And about how we've struggled to stay here this long and how, even if the sun should stop drifting south this year, it will be years of ice and cold at the caves before Big Spring comes."
"If we leave here the glacier will cover the caves and fill them with ice," he said. "All we ever had will be buried back in there and all we'll have left will be our bows and arrows and animal skins. We'll be taking a one-way road back into the stone age, for ourselves and our children and their children."
"They know that," Schroeder said. "We both told them."
He paused. They watched the sky to the south turn lighter. The northern lights flamed unnoticed behind them as the pale halo of the invisible sun slowly brightened to its maximum. Their faces were white with near-freezing then and they turned to go back into the caves. "They had made their decision," Schroeder went on. "I guess you and I did them an injustice when we thought they had lost their determination, when we thought they might want to hand their children a flint axe and say, 'Here--take this and let it be the symbol of all you are or all you will ever be.'
"Their decision was unanimous--we'll stay for as long as it's possible for us to survive here."
* * * * *
Howard Lake listened to Teacher Morgan West read from the diary of Walter Humbolt, written during the terrible winter of thirty-five years before:
"Each morning the light to the south was brighter. On the seventh morning we saw the sun--and it was not due until the eighth morning!
"It will be years before we can stop fighting the enclosure of the glacier but we have reached and passed the dead of Big Winter. We have reached the bottom and the only direction we can go in the future is up.
"And so," West said, closing the book, "we are here in the caves tonight because of the stubbornness of Humbolt and Schroeder and all the others. Had they thought only of their own welfare, had they conceded defeat and gone into the migratory way of life, we would be sitting beside grass campfires somewhere to the south tonight, our way of life containing no plans or aspirations greater than to follow the game back and forth through the years.
"Now, let's go outside to finish tonight's lesson."
Teacher West led the way into the starlit night just outside the caves, Howard Lake and the other children following him. West pointed to the sky where the star group they called the Athena Constellation blazed like a huge arrowhead high in the east.
"There," he said, "beyond the top of the arrowhead, is where we were going when the Gerns stopped us a hundred and twenty years ago and left us to die on Ragnarok. It's so far that Athena's sun can't be seen from here, so far that it will be another hundred and fifteen years before our first signal gets there. Why is it, then, that you and all the other groups of children have to learn such things as history, physics, the Gern language, and the way to fire a Gern blaster?"
The hand of every child went up. West selected eight-year-old Clifton Humbolt. "Tell us, Clifton," he said.
"Because," Clifton answered, "a Gern cruiser might pass by a few light-years out at any time and pick up our signals. So we have to know all we can about them and how to fight them because there aren't very many of us yet."
"The Gerns will come to kill us," little Marie Chiara said, her dark eyes large and earnest. "They'll come to kill us and to make slaves out of the ones they don't kill, like they did with the others a long time ago. They're awful mean and awful smart and we have to be smarter than they are."
Howard looked again at the Athena constellation, thinking, I hope they come just as soon as I'm old enough to fight them, or even tonight....
"Teacher," he asked, "how would a Gern cruiser look if it came tonight? Would it come from the Athena arrowhead?"
"It probably would," West answered. "You would see its rocket blast, like a bright trail of fire----"
A bright trail of fire burst suddenly into being, coming from the constellation of Athena and lighting up the woods and hills and their startled faces as it arced down toward them.
"It's them!" a treble voice exclaimed and there was a quick flurry of movement as Howard and the other older children shoved the younger children behind them.
Then the light vanished, leaving a dimming glow where it had been.
"Only a meteor," West said. He looked at the line of older children who were standing protectingly in front of the younger ones, rocks in their hands with which to ward off the Gerns, and he smiled in the way he had when he was pleased with them.
Howard watched the meteor trail fade swiftly into invisibility and felt his heartbeats slow from the first wild thrill to gray disappointment. Only a meteor....
But someday he might be leader and by then, surely, the Gerns would come. If not, he would find some way to make them come.
* * * * *
Ten years later Howard Lake was leader. There were three hundred and fifty of them then and Big Spring was on its way to becoming Big Summer. The snow was gone from the southern end of the plateau and once again game migrated up the valleys east of the caves.
There were many things to be done now that Big Winter was past and they could have the chance to do them. They needed a larger pottery kiln, a larger workshop with a wooden lathe, more diamonds to make cutting wheels, more quartz crystals to make binoculars and microscopes. They could again explore the field of inorganic chemistry, even though results in the past had produced nothing of value, and they could, within a few years, resume the metal prospecting up the plateau--the most important project of all.
Their weapons seemed to be as perfect as was possible but when the Gerns came they would need some quick and certain means of communication between the various units that would fight the Gerns. A leader who could not communicate with his forces and coordinate their actions would be helpless. And they had on Ragnarok a form of communication, if trained, that the Gerns could not detect or interfere with electronically: the mockers.
The Craigs were still white and impassable with snow that summer but the snow was receding higher each year. Five years later, in the summer of one hundred and thirty-five, the Craigs were passable for a few weeks.
Lake led a party of eight over them and down into the chasm. They took with them two small cages, constructed of wood and glass and made airtight with the strong medusabush glue. Each cage was equipped with a simple air pump and a pressure gauge.
They brought back two pairs of mockers as interested and trusting captives, together with a supply of the orange corn and a large amount of diamonds. The mockers, in their pressure-maintained cages, were not even aware of the increase in elevation as they were carried over the high summit of the Craigs.
To Lake and the men with him the climb back up the long, steep slope of the mountain was a stiff climb to make in one day but no more than that. It was hard to believe that it had taken Humbolt and Barber almost three days to climb it and that Barber had died in the attempt. It reminded him of the old crossbows that Humbolt and the others had used. They were thin, with a light pull, such as the present generation boys used. It must have required courage for the old ones to dare unicorn attacks with bows so thin that only the small area behind the unicorn's jaws was vulnerable to their arrows....
* * * * *
When the caves were reached, a very gradual reduction of pressure in the mocker cages was started; one that would cover a period of weeks. One pair of mockers survived and had two young ones that fall. The young mockers, like the first generation of Ragnarok-born children of many years before, were more adapted to their environment than their parents were.
The orange corn was planted, using an adaptation method somewhat similar to that used with the mockers. It might have worked had the orange corn not required such a long period of time in which to reach maturity. When winter came only a few grains had formed.
They were saved for next year's seeds, to continue the slow adaptation process.
By the fifth year the youngest generation of mockers was well adapted to the elevation of the caves but for a susceptibility to a quickly fatal form of pneumonia which made it necessary to keep them from exposing themselves to the cold or to any sudden changes of temperature.
Their intelligence was surprising and they seemed to be partially receptive to human thoughts, as Bill Humbolt had written. By the end of the fifteenth year their training had reached such a stage of perfection that a mocker would transmit or not transmit with only the unspoken thought of its master to tell it which it should be. In addition, they would transmit the message to whichever mocker their master's thought directed. Presumably all mockers received the message but only the mocker to whom it was addressed would repeat it aloud.
They had their method of communication. They had their automatic crossbows for quick, close fighting, and their long range longbows. They were fully adapted to the 1.5 gravity and their reflexes were almost like those of prowlers--Ragnarok had long ago separated the quick from the dead.
There were eight hundred and nineteen of them that year, in the early spring of one hundred and fifty, and they were ready and impatient for the coming of the Gerns.
Then the transmitter, which had been in operation again for many years, failed one day.
George Craig had finished checking it when Lake arrived. He looked up from his instruments, remarkably similar in appearance to a sketch of the old George Ord--a resemblance that had been passed down to him by his mother--and said:
"The entire circuit is either gone or ready to go. It's already operated for a lot longer than it should have."
"It doesn't matter," Lake said. "It's served its purpose. We won't rebuild it."
George watched him questioningly.
"It's served its purpose," he said again. "It didn't let us forget that the Gerns will come again. But that isn't enough, now. The first signal won't reach Athena until the year two thirty-five. It will be the dead of Big Winter again then. They'll have to fight the Gerns with bows and arrows that the cold will make as brittle as glass. They won't have a chance."
"No," George said. "They won't have a chance. But what can we do to change it?"
"It's something I've been thinking about," he said. "We'll build a hyperspace transmitter and bring the Gerns before Big Winter comes."
"We will?" George asked, lifting his dark eyebrows. "And what do we use for the three hundred pounds of copper and five hundred pounds of iron we would have to have to make the generator?"
"Surely we can find five hundred pounds of iron somewhere on Ragnarok. The north end of the plateau might be the best bet. As for the copper--I doubt that we'll ever find it. But there are seams of a bauxite-like clay in the Western hills--they're certain to contain aluminum to at least some extent. So we'll make the wires of aluminum."
"The ore would have to be refined to pure aluminum oxide before it could be smelted," George said. "And you can't smelt aluminum ore in an ordinary furnace--only in an electric furnace with a generator that can supply a high amperage. And we would have to have cryolite ore to serve as the solvent in the smelting process."
"There's a seam of cryolite in the Eastern Hills, according to the old maps," said Lake. "We could make a larger generator by melting down everything we have. It wouldn't be big enough to power the hyperspace transmitter but it should be big enough to smelt aluminum ore."
George considered the idea. "I think we can do it."
"How long until we can send the signal?" he asked.
"Given the extra metal we need, the building of the generator is a simple job. The transmitter is what will take years--maybe as long as fifty."
Fifty years....
"Can't anything be done to make it sooner?" he asked.
"I know," George said. "You would like for the Gerns to come while you're still here. So would every man on Ragnarok. But even on Earth the building of a hyperspace transmitter was a long, slow job, with all the materials they needed and all the special tools and equipment. Here we'll have to do everything by hand and for materials we have only broken and burned-out odds and ends. It will take about fifty years--it can't be helped."
Fifty years ... but that would bring the Gerns before Big Winter came again. And there was the rapidly increasing chance that a Gern cruiser would at any day intercept the first signals. They were already more than halfway to Athena.
"Melt down the generator," he said. "Start making a bigger one. Tomorrow men will go out after bauxite and cryolite and four of us will go up the plateau to look for iron."
* * * * *
Lake selected Gene Taylor, Tony Chiara and Steve Schroeder to go with him. They were well on their way by daylight the next morning, on the shoulder of each of them a mocker which observed the activity and new scenes with bright, interested eyes.
They traveled light, since they would have fresh meat all the way, and carried herbs and corn only for the mockers. Once, generations before, it had been necessary for men to eat herbs to prevent deficiency diseases but now the deficiency diseases, like Hell Fever, were unknown to them.
They carried no compasses since the radiations of the two suns constantly created magnetic storms that caused compass needles to swing as much as twenty degrees within an hour. Each of them carried a pair of powerful binoculars, however; binoculars that had been diamond-carved from the ivory-like black unicorn horn and set with lenses and prisms of diamond-cut quartz.
The foremost bands of woods goats followed the advance of spring up the plateau and they followed the woods goats. They could not go ahead of the goats--the goats were already pressing close behind the melting of the snow. No hills or ridges were seen as the weeks went by and it seemed to Lake that they would walk forever across the endless rolling floor of the plain.
Early summer came and they walked across a land that was green and pleasantly cool at a time when the vegetation around the caves would be burned brown and lifeless. The woods goats grew less in number then as some of them stopped for the rest of the summer in their chosen latitudes.
They continued on and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two days later; a land of rolling green hills, scarred here and there with ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily higher as it went into the north.
They camped that night in a little vale. The floor of it was white with the bones of woods goats that had tarried too long the fall before and got caught by an early blizzard. There was still flesh on the bones and scavenger rodents scuttled among the carcasses, feasting.
"We'll split up now," he told the others the next morning.
He assigned each of them his position; Steve Schroeder to parallel his course thirty miles to his right, Gene Taylor to go thirty miles to his left, and Tony Chiara to go thirty miles to the left of Taylor.
"We'll try to hold those distances," he said. "We can't look over the country in detail that way but it will give us a good general survey of it. We don't have too much time left by now and we'll make as many miles into the north as we can each day. The woods goats will tell us when it's time for us to turn back."
They parted company with casual farewells but for Steve Schroeder, who smiled sardonically at the bones of the woods goats in the vale and asked:
"Who's supposed to tell the woods goats?"
* * * * *
Tip, the black, white-nosed mocker on Lake's shoulder, kept twisting his neck to watch the departure of the others until he had crossed the next hill and the others were hidden from view.
"All right, Tip," he said then. "You can unwind your neck now."
"Unwind--all right--all right," Tip said. Then, with a sudden burst of energy which was characteristic of mockers, he began to jiggle up and down and chant in time with his movements, "All right all right all right all right----"
"Shut up!" he commanded. "If you want to talk nonsense I don't care--but don't say 'all right' any more."
"All right," Tip agreed amiably, settling down. "Shut up if you want to talk nonsense. I don't care."
"And don't slaughter the punctuation like that. You change the meaning entirely."
"But don't say all right any more," Tip went on, ignoring him. "You change the meaning entirely."
Then, with another surge of animation, Tip began to fish in his jacket pocket with little hand-like paws. "Tip hungry--Tip hungry."
Lake unbuttoned the pocket and gave Tip a herb leaf. "I notice there's no nonsensical chatter when you want to ask for something to eat."
Tip took the herb leaf but he spoke again before he began to eat; slowly, as though trying seriously to express a thought:
"Tip hungry--no nonsensical."
"Sometimes," he said, turning his head to look at Tip, "you mockers give me the peculiar feeling that you're right on the edge of becoming a new and intelligent race and no fooling."
Tip wiggled his whiskers and bit into the herb leaf. "No fooling," he agreed.
* * * * *
He stopped for the night in a steep-walled hollow and built a small fire of dead moss and grass to ward off the chill that came with dark. He called the others, thinking first of Schroeder so that Tip would transmit to Schroeder's mocker:
"Steve?"
"Here," Tip answered, in a detectable imitation of Schroeder's voice. "No luck."
He thought of Gene Taylor and called, "Gene?"
There was no answer and he called Chiara. "Tony--could you see any of Gene's route today?"
"Part of it," Chiara answered. "I saw a herd of unicorns over that way. Why--doesn't he answer?"
"No."
"Then," Chiara said, "they must have got him."
"Did you find anything today, Tony?" he asked.
"Nothing but pure andesite. Not even an iron stain."
It was the same kind of barren formation that he, himself, had been walking over all day. But he had not expected success so soon....
He tried once again to call Gene Taylor:
"Gene ... Gene ... are you there, Gene?"
There was no answer. He knew there would never be.
* * * * *
The days became weeks with dismaying swiftness as they penetrated farther into the north. The hills became more rugged and there were intrusions of granite and other formations to promise a chance of finding metal; a promise that urged them on faster as their time grew shorter.
Twice he saw something white in the distance. Once it was the bones of another band of woods goats that had huddled together and frozen to death in some early blizzard of the past and once it was the bones of a dozen unicorns.
The nights grew chillier and the suns moved faster and faster to the south. The animals began to migrate, an almost imperceptible movement in the beginning but one that increased each day. The first frost came and the migration began in earnest. By the third day it was a hurrying tide.
Tip was strangely silent that day. He did not speak until the noon sun had cleared the cold, heavy mists of morning. When he spoke it was to give a message from Chiara:
"Howard ... last report ... Goldie is dying ... pneumonia...."
Goldie was Chiara's mocker, his only means of communication--and there would be no way to tell him when they were turning back.
"Turn back today, Tony," he said. "Steve and I will go on for a few days more."
There was no answer and he said quickly, "Turn back--turn back! Acknowledge that, Tony."
"Turning back ..." the acknowledgment came. "... tried to save her...."
The message stopped and there was a silence that Chiara's mocker would never break again. He walked on, with Tip sitting very small and quiet on his shoulder. He had crossed another hill before Tip moved, to press up close to him the way mockers did when they were lonely and to hold tightly to him.
"What is it, Tip?" he asked.
"Goldie is dying," Tip said. And then again, like a soft, sad whisper, "Goldie is dying...."
"She was your mate.... I'm sorry."
Tip made a little whimpering sound, and the man reached up to stroke his silky side.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm sorry as hell, little fellow."
* * * * *
For two days Tip sat lonely and silent on his shoulder, no longer interested in the new scenes nor any longer relieving the monotony with his chatter. He refused to eat until the morning of the third day.
By then the exodus of woods goats and unicorns had dwindled to almost nothing; the sky a leaden gray through which the sun could not be seen. That evening he saw what he was sure would be the last band of woods goats and shot one of them.
When he went to it he was almost afraid to believe what he saw.
The hair above its feet was red, discolored with the stain of iron-bearing clay.
He examined it more closely and saw that the goat had apparently watered at a spring where the mud was material washed down from an iron-bearing vein or formation. It had done so fairly recently--there were still tiny particles of clay adhering to the hair.
The wind stirred, cold and damp with its warning of an approaching storm. He looked to the north, where the evening had turned the gray clouds black, and called Schroeder:
"Steve--any luck?"
"None," Schroeder answered.
"I just killed a goat," he said. "It has iron stains on its legs it got at some spring farther north. I'm going on to try to find it. You can turn back in the morning."
"No," Schroeder objected. "I can angle over and catch up with you in a couple of days."
"You'll turn back in the morning," he said. "I'm going to try to find this iron. But if I get caught by a blizzard it will be up to you to tell them at the caves that I found iron and to tell them where it is--you know the mockers can't transmit that far."
There was a short silence; then Schroeder said, "All right--I see. I'll head south in the morning."
Lake took a route the next day that would most likely be the one the woods goats had come down, stopping on each ridge top to study the country ahead of him through his binoculars. It was cloudy all day but at sunset the sun appeared very briefly, to send its last rays across the hills and redden them in mockery of the iron he sought.
Far ahead of him, small even through the glasses and made visible only because of the position of the sun, was a spot at the base of a hill that was redder than the sunset had made the other hills.
He was confident it would be the red clay he was searching for and he hurried on, not stopping until darkness made further progress impossible.
Tip slept inside his jacket, curled up against his chest, while the wind blew raw and cold all through the night. He was on his way again at the first touch of daylight, the sky darker than ever and the wind spinning random flakes of snow before him.
He stopped to look back to the south once, thinking, If I turn back now I might get out before the blizzard hits.
Then the other thought came: These hills all look the same. It I don't go to the iron while I'm this close and know where it is, it might be years before I or anyone else could find it again.
He went on and did not look back again for the rest of the day.
By midafternoon the higher hills around him were hidden under the clouds and the snow was coming harder and faster as the wind drove the flakes against his face. It began to snow with a heaviness that brought a half darkness when he came finally to the hill he had seen through the glasses.
A spring was at the base of it, bubbling out of red clay. Above it the red dirt led a hundred feet to a dike of granite and stopped. He hurried up the hillside that was rapidly whitening with snow and saw the vein.
It set against the dike, short and narrow but red-black with the iron it contained. He picked up a piece and felt the weight of it. It was heavy--it was pure iron oxide.
He called Schroeder and asked, "Are you down out of the high hills, Steve?"
"I'm in the lower ones," Schroeder answered, the words coming a little muffled from where Tip lay inside his jacket. "It looks black as hell up your way."
"I found the iron, Steve. Listen--these are the nearest to landmarks I can give you...."
When he had finished he said, "That's the best I can do. You can't see the red clay except when the sun is low in the southwest but I'm going to build a monument on top of the hill to find it by."
"About you, Howard," Steve asked, "what are your chances?"
The wind was rising to a high moaning around the ledges of the granite dike and the vein was already invisible under the snow.
"It doesn't look like they're very good," he answered. "You'll probably be leader when you come back next spring--I told the council I wanted that if anything happened to me. Keep things going the way I would have. Now--I'll have to hurry to get the monument built in time."
"All right," Schroeder said. "So long, Howard ... good luck."
He climbed to the top of the hill and saw boulders there he could use to build the monument. They were large--he might crush Tip against his chest in picking them up--and he took off his jacket, to wrap it around Tip and leave him lying on the ground.
He worked until he was panting for breath, the wind driving the snow harder and harder against him until the cold seemed to have penetrated to the bone. He worked until the monument was too high for his numb hands to lift any more boulders to its top. By then it was tall enough that it should serve its purpose.
He went back to look for Tip, the ground already four inches deep in snow and the darkness almost complete.
"Tip," he called. "Tip--Tip----" He walked back and forth across the hillside in the area where he thought he had left him, stumbling over rocks buried in the snow and invisible in the darkness, calling against the wind and thinking, I can't leave him to die alone here.
Then, from a bulge he had not seen in the snow under him, there came a frightened, lonely wail:
"Tip cold--Tip cold----"
He raked the snow off his jacket and unwrapped Tip, to put him inside his shirt next to his bare skin. Tip's paws were like ice and he was shivering violently, the first symptom of the pneumonia that killed mockers so quickly.
Tip coughed, a wrenching, rattling little sound, and whimpered, "Hurt--hurt----"
"I know," he said. "Your lungs hurt--damn it to hell, I wish I could have let you go home with Steve."
He put on the cold jacket and went down the hill. There was nothing with which he could make a fire--only the short half-green grass, already buried under the snow. He turned south at the bottom of the hill, determining the direction by the wind, and began the stubborn march southward that could have but one ending.
He walked until his cold-numbed legs would carry him no farther. The snow was warm when he fell for the last time; warm and soft as it drifted over him, and his mind was clouded with a pleasant drowsiness.
This isn't so bad, he thought, and there was something like surprise through the drowsiness. I can't regret doing what I had to do--doing it the best I could....
Tip was no longer coughing and the thought of Tip was the only one that was tinged with regret: I hope he wasn't still hurting when he died.
He felt Tip still very feebly against his chest then, and he did not know if it was his imagination or if in that last dreamlike state it was Tip's thought that came to him; warm and close and reassuring him:
No hurt no cold now--all right now--we sleep now....
* * * * *
PART 3
* * * * *
When spring came Steve Schroeder was leader, as Lake had wanted. It was a duty and a responsibility that would be under circumstances different from those of any of the leaders before him. The grim fight was over for a while. They were adapted and increasing in number; going into Big Summer and into a renascence that would last for fifty years. They would have half a century in which to develop their environment to its fullest extent. Then Big Fall would come, to destroy all they had accomplished, and the Gerns would come, to destroy them.
It was his job to make certain that by then they would be stronger than either.
* * * * *
He went north with nine men as soon as the weather permitted. It was hard to retrace the route of the summer before, without compasses, among the hills which looked all the same as far as their binoculars could reach, and it was summer when they saw the hill with the monument. They found Lake's bones a few miles south of it, scattered by the scavengers as were the little bones of his mocker. They buried them together, man and mocker, and went silently on toward the hill.
They had brought a little hand-cranked diamond drill with them to bore holes in the hard granite and black powder for blasting. They mined the vein, sorting out the ore from the waste and saving every particle.
The vein was narrow at the surface and pinched very rapidly. At a depth of six feet it was a knife-blade seam; at ten feet it was only a red discoloration in the bottom of their shaft.
"That seems to be all of it," he said to the others. "We'll send men up here next year to go deeper and farther along its course but I have an idea we've just mined all of the only iron vein on Ragnarok. It will be enough for our purpose."
They sewed the ore in strong rawhide sacks and then prospected, without success, until it was time for the last unicorn band to pass by on its way south. They trapped ten unicorns and hobbled their legs, with other ropes reaching from horn to hind leg on each side to prevent them from swinging back their heads or even lifting them high.
They had expected the capture and hobbling of the unicorns to be a difficult and dangerous job and it was. But when they were finished the unicorns were helpless. They could move awkwardly about to graze but they could not charge. They could only stand with lowered heads and fume and rumble.
The ore sacks were tied on one frosty morning and the men mounted. The horn-leg ropes were loosened so the unicorns could travel, and the unicorns went into a frenzy of bucking and rearing, squealing with rage as they tried to impale their riders.
The short spears, stabbing at the sensitive spot behind the jawbones of the unicorns, thwarted the backward flung heads and the unicorns were slowly forced into submission. The last one conceded temporary defeat and the long journey to the south started, the unicorns going in the run that they could maintain hour after hour.
Each day they pushed the unicorns until they were too weary to fight at night. Each morning, rested, the unicorns resumed the battle. It became an expected routine for both unicorns and men.
The unicorns were released when the ore was unloaded at the foot of the hill before the caves and Schroeder went to the new waterwheel, where the new generator was already in place. There George Craig told him of the unexpected obstacle that had appeared.
"We're stuck," George said. "The aluminum ore isn't what we thought it would be. It's scarce and very low grade, of such a complex nature that we can't refine it to the oxide with what we have to work with on Ragnarok."
"Have you produced any aluminum oxide at all?" Schroeder asked.
"A little. We might have enough for the wire in a hundred years if we kept at it hard enough."
"What else do you need--was there enough cryolite?" he asked.
"Not much of it, but enough. We have the generator set up, the smelting box built and the carbon lining and rods ready. We have everything we need to smelt aluminum ore--except the aluminum ore."
"Go ahead and finish up the details, such as installing the lining," he said. "We didn't get this far to be stopped now."
But the prospecting parties, making full use of the time left them before winter closed down, returned late that fall to report no sign of the ore they needed.
Spring came and he was determined they would be smelting aluminum before the summer was over even though he had no idea where the ore would be found. They needed aluminum ore of a grade high enough that they could extract the pure aluminum oxide. Specifically, they needed aluminum oxide....
Then he saw the answer to their problem, so obvious that all of them had overlooked it.
He passed by four children playing a game in front of the caves that day; some kind of a checker-like game in which differently colored rocks represented the different children. One boy was using red stones; some of the rubies that had been brought back as curios from the chasm. Rubies were of no use or value on Ragnarok; only pretty rocks for children to play with....
Only pretty rocks?--rubies and sapphires were corundum, were pure aluminum oxide!
He went to tell George and to arrange for a party of men to go into the chasm after all the rubies and sapphires they could find. The last obstacle had been surmounted.
The summer sun was hot the day the generator hummed into life. The carbon-lined smelting box was ready and the current flowed between the heavy carbon rods suspended in the cryolite and the lining, transforming the cryolite into a liquid. The crushed rubies and sapphires were fed into the box, glowing and glittering in blood-red and sky-blue scintillations of light, to be deprived by the current of their life and fire and be changed into something entirely different.
When the time came to draw off some of the metal they opened the orifice in the lower corner of the box. Molten aluminum flowed out into the ingot mold in a little stream; more beautiful to them than any gems could ever be, bright and gleaming in its promise that more than six generations of imprisonment would soon be ended.
* * * * *
The aluminum smelting continued until the supply of rubies and sapphires in the chasm had been exhausted but for small and scattered fragments. It was enough, with some aluminum above the amount needed for the wire.
It was the year one hundred and fifty-two when they smelted the aluminum. In eight more years they would reach the middle of Big Summer; the suns would start their long drift southward, not to return for one hundred and fifty years. Time was passing swiftly by for them and there was none of it to waste....
The making of ceramics was developed to an art, as was the making of different types of glass. Looms were built to spin thread and cloth from woods goat wool, and vegetable dyes were discovered. Exploration parties crossed the continent to the eastern and western seas: salty and lifeless seas that were bordered by immense deserts. No trees of any kind grew along their shores and ships could not be built to cross them.
Efforts were continued to develop an inorganic field of chemistry, with discouraging results, but in one hundred and fifty-nine the orange corn was successfully adapted to the elevation and climate of the caves.
There was enough that year to feed the mockers all winter, supply next year's seeds, and leave enough that it could be ground and baked into bread for all to taste.
It tasted strange, but good. It was, Schroeder thought, symbolic of a great forward step. It was the first time in generations that any of them had known any food but meat. The corn would make them less dependent upon hunting and, of paramount importance, it was the type of food to which they would have to become accustomed in the future--they could not carry herds of woods goats and unicorns with them on Gern battle cruisers.
The lack of metals hindered them wherever they turned in their efforts to build even the simplest machines or weapons. Despite its dubious prospects, however, they made a rifle-like gun.
The barrel of it was thick, of the hardest, toughest ceramic material they could produce. It was a cumbersome, heavy thing, firing with a flintlock action, and it could not be loaded with much powder lest the charge burst the barrel.
The flintlock ignition was not instantaneous, the lightweight porcelain bullet had far less penetrating power than an arrow, and the thing boomed and belched out a cloud of smoke that would have shown the Gerns exactly where the shooter was located.
It was an interesting curio and the firing of it was something spectacular to behold but it was a weapon apt to be much more dangerous to the man behind it than to the Gern it was aimed at. Automatic crossbows were far better.
Woods goats had been trapped and housed during the summers in shelters where sprays of water maintained a temperature cool enough for them to survive. Only the young were kept when fall came, to be sheltered through the winter in one of the caves. Each new generation was subjected to more heat in the summer and more cold in the winter than the generation before it and by the year one hundred and sixty the woods goats were well on their way toward adaptation.
The next year they trapped two unicorns, to begin the job of adapting and taming future generations of them. If they succeeded they would have utilized the resources of Ragnarok to the limit--except for what should be their most valuable ally with which to fight the Gerns: the prowlers.
For twenty years prowlers had observed a truce wherein they would not go hunting for men if men would stay away from their routes of travel. But it was a truce only and there was no indication that it could ever evolve into friendship.
Three times in the past, half-grown prowlers had been captured and caged in the hope of taming them. Each time they had paced their cages, looking longingly into the distance, refusing to eat and defiant until they died.
To prowlers, as to some men, freedom was more precious than life. And each time a prowler had been captured the free ones had retaliated with a resurgence of savage attacks.
There seemed no way that men and prowlers could ever meet on common ground. They were alien to one another, separated by the gulf of an origin on worlds two hundred and fifty light-years apart. Their only common heritage was the will of each to battle.
But in the spring of one hundred and sixty-one, for a little while one day, the gulf was bridged.
* * * * *
Schroeder was returning from a trip he had taken alone to the east, coming down the long canyon that led from the high face of the plateau to the country near the caves. He hurried, glancing back at the black clouds that had gathered so quickly on the mountain behind him. Thunder rumbled from within them, an almost continuous roll of it as the clouds poured down their deluge of water.
A cloudburst was coming and the sheer-walled canyon down which he hurried had suddenly become a death trap, its sunlit quiet soon to be transformed into roaring destruction. There was only one place along its nine-mile length where he might climb out and the time was already short in which to reach it.
He had increased his pace to a trot when he came to it, a talus of broken rock that sloped up steeply for thirty feet to a shelf. A ledge eleven feet high stood over the shelf and other, lower, ledges set back from it like climbing steps.
At the foot of the talus he stopped to listen, wondering how close behind him the water might be. He heard it coming, a sound like the roaring of a high wind up the canyon, and he scrambled up the talus of loose rock to the shelf at its top. The shelf was not high enough above the canyon's floor--he would be killed there--and he followed it fifty feet around a sharp bend. There it narrowed abruptly, to merge into the sheer wall of the canyon. Blind alley....
He ran back to the top of the talus where the edge of the ledge, ragged with projections of rock, was unreachably far above him. As he did so the roaring was suddenly a crashing, booming thunder and he saw the water coming.
It swept around the bend at perhaps a hundred miles an hour, stretching from wall to wall of the canyon, the crest of it seething and slashing and towering forty sheer feet above the canyon's floor.
A prowler was running in front of it, running for its life and losing.
There was no time to watch. He leaped upward, as high as possible, his crossbow in his hand. He caught the end of the bow over one of the sharp projections of rock on the ledge's rim and began to pull himself up, afraid to hurry lest the rock cut the bowstring in two and drop him back.
It held and he stood on the ledge, safe, as the prowler flashed up the talus below.
It darted around the blind-alley shelf and was back a moment later. It saw that its only chance would be to leap up on the ledge where he stood and it tried, handicapped by the steep, loose slope it had to jump from.
It failed and fell back. It tried again, hurling itself upward with all its strength, and its claws caught fleetingly on the rough rock a foot below the rim. It began to slide back, with no time left it for a third try.
It looked up at the rim of safety that it had not quite reached and then on up at him, its eyes bright and cold with the knowledge that it was going to die and its enemy would watch it.
Schroeder dropped flat on his stomach and reached down, past the massive black head, to seize the prowler by the back of the neck. He pulled up with all his strength and the claws of the prowler tore at the rocks as it climbed.
When it was coming up over the ledge, safe, he rolled back from it and came to his feet in one swift, wary motion, his eyes on it and his knife already in his hand. As he did so the water went past below them with a thunder that deafened. Logs and trees shot past, boulders crashed together, and things could be seen surging in the brown depths; shapeless things that had once been woods goats and the battered gray bulk of a unicorn. He saw it all with a sideward glance, his attention on the prowler.
It stepped back from the rim of the ledge and looked at him; warily, as he looked at it. With the wariness was something like question, and almost disbelief.
The ledge they stood on was narrow but it led out of the canyon and to the open land beyond. He motioned to the prowler to precede him and, hesitating a moment, it did so.
They climbed out of the canyon and out onto the grassy slope of the mountainside. The roar of the water was a distant rumble there and he stopped. The prowler did the same and they watched each other again, each of them trying to understand what the thoughts of the other might be. It was something they could not know--they were too alien to each other and had been enemies too long.
Then a gust of wind swept across them, bending and rippling the tall grass, and the prowler swung away to go with it and leave him standing alone.
His route was such that it diverged gradually from that taken by the prowler. He went through a grove of trees and emerged into an open glade on the other side. Up on the ridge to his right he saw something black for a moment, already far away.
He was thirty feet from the next grove of trees when he saw the gray shadow waiting silently for his coming within them.
Unicorn!
His crossbow rattled as he jerked back the pistol grip. The unicorn charged, the underbrush crackling as it tore through it and a vine whipping like a rope from its lowered horn.
His first arrow went into its chest. It lurched, fatally wounded but still coming, and he jerked back on the pistol grip for the quick shot that would stop it.
The rock-frayed bow string broke with a singing sound and the bow ends snapped harmlessly forward.
He had counted on the bow and its failure came a fraction of a second too late for him to dodge far enough. His sideward leap was short, and the horn caught him in midair, ripping across his ribs and breaking them, shattering the bone of his left arm and tearing the flesh. He was hurled fifteen feet and he struck the ground with a stunning impact, pain washing over him in a blinding wave.
Through it, dimly, he saw the unicorn fall and heard its dying trumpet blast as it called to another. He heard an answering call somewhere in the distance and then the faraway drumming of hooves.
He fought back the blindness and used his good arm to lift himself up. His bow was useless, his spear lay broken under the unicorn, and his knife was gone. His left arm swung helplessly and he could not climb the limbless lower trunk of a lance tree with only one arm.
He went forward, limping, trying to hurry to find his knife while the drumming of hooves raced toward him. It would be a battle already lost that he would make with the short knife but he would have blood for his going....
The grass grew tall and thick, hiding the knife until he could hear the unicorn crashing through the trees. He saw it ten feet ahead of him as the unicorn tore out from the edge of the woods thirty feet away.
It squealed, shrill with triumph, and the horn swept up to impale him. There was no time left to reach the knife, no time left for anything but the last fleeting sight of sunshine and glade and arching blue sky----
Something from behind him shot past and up at the unicorn's throat, a thing that was snarling black savagery with yellow eyes blazing and white fangs slashing--the prowler!
It ripped at the unicorn's throat, swerving its charge, and the unicorn plunged past him. The unicorn swung back, all the triumph gone from its squeal, and the prowler struck again. They became a swirling blur, the horn of the unicorn swinging and stabbing and the attacks of the prowler like the swift, relentless thrusting of a rapier.
He went to his knife and when he turned back with it in his hand the battle was already over.
The unicorn fell and the prowler turned away from it. One foreleg was bathed in blood and its chest was heaving with a panting so fast that it could not have been caused by the fight with the unicorn.
It must have been watching me, he thought, with a strange feeling of wonder. It was watching from the ridge and it ran all the way.
Its yellow eyes flickered to the knife in his hand. He dropped the knife in the grass and walked forward, unarmed, wanting the prowler to know that he understood; that for them in that moment the gulf of two hundred and fifty light-years did not exist.
He stopped near it and squatted in the grass to begin binding up his broken arm so the bones would not grate together. It watched him, then it began to lick at its bloody shoulder; standing so close to him that he could have reached out and touched it.
Again he felt the sense of wonder. They were alone together in the glade, he and a prowler, each caring for his hurts. There was a bond between them that for a little while made them like brothers. There was a bridge for a little while across the gulf that had never been bridged before....
When he had finished with his arm and the prowler had lessened the bleeding of its shoulder it took a step back toward the ridge. He stood up, knowing it was going to leave.
"I suppose the score is even now," he said to it, "and we'll never see each other again. So good hunting--and thanks."
It made a sound in its throat; a queer sound that was neither bark nor growl, and he had the feeling it was trying to tell him something. Then it turned and was gone like a black shadow across the grass and he was alone again.
He picked up his knife and bow and began the long, painful journey back to the caves, looking again and again at the ridge behind him and thinking: They have a code of ethics. They fight for their survival--but they pay their debts.
Ragnarok was big enough for both men and prowlers. They could live together in friendship as men and dogs of Earth lived together. It might take a long time to win the trust of the prowlers but surely it could be done.
He came to the rocky trail that led to the caves and there he took a last look at the ridge behind him; feeling a poignant sense of loss and wondering if he would ever see the prowler again or ever again know the strange, wild companionship he had known that day.
Perhaps he never would ... but the time would come on Ragnarok when children would play in the grass with prowler pups and the time would come when men and prowlers, side by side, would face the Gerns.
* * * * *
In the year that followed there were two incidents when a prowler had the opportunity to kill a hunter on prowler territory and did not do so. There was no way of knowing if the prowler in each case had been the one he had saved from the cloudburst or if the prowlers, as a whole, were respecting what a human had done for one of them.
Schroeder thought of again trying to capture prowler pups--very young ones--and decided it would be a stupid plan. Such an act would destroy all that had been done toward winning the trust of the prowlers. It would be better to wait, even though time was growing short, and find some other way.
The fall of one hundred and sixty-three came and the suns were noticeably moving south. That was the fall that his third child, a girl, was born. She was named Julia, after the Julia of long ago, and she was of the last generation that would be born in the caves.
Plans were already under way to build a town in the valley a mile from the caves. The unicorn-proof stockade wall that would enclose it was already under construction, being made of stone blocks. The houses would be of diamond-sawed stone, thick-walled, with dead-air spaces between the double walls to insulate against heat and cold. Tall, wide canopies of lance tree poles and the palm-like medusabush leaves would be built over all the houses to supply additional shade.
The woods goats were fully adapted that year and domesticated to such an extent that they had no desire to migrate with the wild goats. There was a small herd of them then, enough to supply a limited amount of milk, cheese and wool.
The adaptation of the unicorns proceeded in the following years, but not their domestication. It was their nature to be ill-tempered and treacherous and only the threat of the spears in the hands of their drivers forced them to work; work that they could have done easily had they not diverted so much effort each day to trying to turn on their masters and kill them. Each night they were put in a massive-walled corral, for they were almost as dangerous as wild unicorns.
The slow, painstaking work on the transmitter continued while the suns moved farther south each year. The move from the caves to the new town was made in one hundred and seventy-nine, the year that Schroeder's wife died.
His two sons were grown and married and Julia, at sixteen, was a woman by Ragnarok standards; blue-eyed and black-haired as her mother, a Craig, had been, and strikingly pretty in a wild, reckless way. She married Will Humbolt that spring, leaving her father alone in the new house in the new town.
Four months later she came to him to announce with pride and excitement:
"I'm going to have a baby in only six months! If it's a boy he'll be the right age to be leader when the Gerns come and we're going to name him John, after the John who was the first leader we ever had on Ragnarok."
Her words brought to his mind a question and he thought of what old Dale Craig, the leader who had preceded Lake, had written:
We have survived, the generations that the Gerns thought would never be born. But we must never forget the characteristics that insured that survival: an unswerving loyalty of every individual to all the others and the courage to fight, and die if necessary.
In any year, now, the Gerns will come. There will be no one to help us. Those on Athena are slaves and it is probable that Earth has been enslaved by now. We will stand or fall alone. But if we of today could know that the ones who meet the Gerns will still have the courage and loyalty that made our survival possible, then we would know that the Gerns are already defeated....
The era of danger and violence was over for a little while. The younger generation had grown up during a time of peaceful development of their environment. It was a peace that the coming of the Gerns would shatter--but had it softened the courage and loyalty of the younger generation?
A week later he was given his answer.
He was climbing up the hill that morning, high above the town below, when he saw the blue of Julia's wool blouse in the distance. She was sitting up on a hillside, an open book in her lap and her short spear lying beside her.
He frowned at the sight. The main southward migration of unicorns was over but there were often lone stragglers who might appear at any time. He had warned her that someday a unicorn would kill her--but she was reckless by nature and given to restless moods in which she could not stand the confinement of the town.
She jerked up her head as he watched, as though at a faint sound, and he saw the first movement within the trees behind her--a unicorn.
It lunged forward, its stealth abandoned as she heard it, and she came to her feet in a swift, smooth movement; the spear in her hand and the book spilling to the ground.
The unicorn's squeal rang out and she whirled to face it, with two seconds to live. He reached for his bow, knowing his help would come too late.
She did the only thing possible that might enable her to survive: she shifted her balance to take advantage of the fact that a human could jump to one side a little more quickly than a four-footed beast in headlong charge. As she did so she brought up the spear for the thrust into the vulnerable area just behind the jawbone.
It seemed the needle point of the black horn was no more than an arm's length from her stomach when she jumped aside with the lithe quickness of a prowler, swinging as she jumped and thrusting the spear with all her strength into the unicorn's neck.
The thrust was true and the spear went deep. She released it and flung herself backward to dodge the flying hooves. The force of the unicorn's charge took it past her but its legs collapsed under it and it crashed to the ground, sliding a little way before it stopped. It kicked once and lay still.
She went to it, to retrieve her spear, and even from the distance there was an air of pride about her as she walked past her bulky victim.
Then she saw the book, knocked to one side by the unicorn's hooves. Tatters of its pages were blowing in the wind and she stiffened, her face growing pale. She ran to it to pick it up, the unicorn forgotten.
She was trying to smooth the torn leaves when he reached her. It had been one of the old textbooks, printed on real paper, and it was fragile with age. She had been trusted by the librarian to take good care of it. Now, page after page was torn and unreadable....
She looked up at him, shame and misery on her face.
"Father," she said. "The book--I----"
He saw that the unicorn was a bull considerably larger than the average. Men had in the past killed unicorns with spears but never, before, had a sixteen-year-old girl done so....
He looked back at her, keeping his face emotionless, and asked sternly, "You what?"
"I guess--I guess I didn't have any right to take the book out of town. I wish I hadn't...."
"You promised to take good care of it," he told her coldly. "Your promise was believed and you were trusted to keep it."
"But--but I didn't mean to damage it--I didn't mean to!" She was suddenly very near to tears. "I'm not a--a bemmon!"
"Go back to town," he ordered. "Tonight bring the book to the town hall and tell the council what happened to it."
She swallowed and said in a faint voice, "Yes, father."
She turned and started slowly back down the hill, not seeing the unicorn as she passed it, the bloody spear trailing disconsolately behind her and her head hanging in shame.
He watched her go and it was safe for him to smile. When night came and she stood before the council, ashamed to lift her eyes to look at them, he would have to be grim and stern as he told her how she had been trusted and how she had betrayed that trust. But now, as he watched her go down the hill, he could smile with his pride in her and know that his question was answered; that the younger generation had lost neither courage nor loyalty.
* * * * *
Julia saved a child's life that spring and almost lost her own. The child was playing under a half-completed canopy when a sudden, violent wind struck it and transformed it into a death-trap of cracking, falling timbers. She reached him in time to fling him to safety but the collapsing roof caught her before she could make her own escape.
Her chest and throat were torn by the jagged ends of the broken poles and for a day and a night her life was a feebly flickering spark. She began to rally on the second night and on the third morning she was able to speak for the first time, her eyes dark and tortured with her fear:
"My baby--what did it do to him?"
She convalesced slowly, haunted by the fear. Her son was born five weeks later and her fears proved to have been groundless. He was perfectly normal and healthy.
And hungry--and her slowly healing breasts would be dry for weeks to come.
By a coincidence that had never happened before and could never happen again there was not a single feeding-time foster-mother available for the baby. There were many expectant mothers but only three women had young babies--and each of the three had twins to feed.
But there was a small supply of frozen goat milk in the ice house, enough to see young Johnny through until it was time for the goat herd to give milk. He would have to live on short rations until then but it could not be helped.
* * * * *
Johnny was a month old when the opportunity came for the men of Ragnarok to have their ultimate ally.
The last of the unicorns were going north and the prowlers had long since gone. The blue star was lighting the night like a small sun when the breeze coming through Schroeder's window brought the distant squealing of unicorns.
He listened, wondering. It was a sound that did not belong. Everyone was safely in the town, most of them in bed, and there should be nothing outside the stockade for the unicorns to fight.
He armed himself with spear and crossbow and went outside. He let himself out through the east gate and went toward the sounds of battle. They grew louder as he approached, more furious, as though the battle was reaching its climax.
He crossed the creek and went through the trees beyond. There, in a small clearing no more than half a mile from the town, he came upon the scene.
A lone prowler was making a stand against two unicorns. Two other unicorns lay on the ground, dead, and behind the prowler was the dark shape of its mate lying lifelessly in the grass. There was blood on the prowler, purple in the blue starlight, and gloating rang in the squeals of the unicorns as they lunged at it. The leaps of the prowler were faltering as it fought them, the last desperate defiance of an animal already dying.
He brought up the bow and sent a volley of arrows into the unicorns. Their gloating squeals died and they fell. The prowler staggered and fell beside them.
It was breathing its last when he reached it but in the way it looked up at him he had the feeling that it wanted to tell him something, that it was trying hard to live long enough to do so. It died with the strange appeal in its eyes and not until then did he see the scar on its shoulder; a scar such as might have been made long ago by the rip of a unicorn's horn.
It was the prowler he had known nineteen years before.
The ground was trampled all around by the unicorns, showing that the prowlers had been besieged all day. He went to the other prowler and saw it was a female. Her breasts showed that she had had pups recently but she had been dead at least two days. Her hind legs had been broken sometime that spring and they were still only half healed, twisted and almost useless.
Then, that was why the two of them were so far behind the other prowlers. Prowlers, like the wolves, coyotes and foxes of Earth, mated for life and the male helped take care of the young. She had been injured somewhere to the south, perhaps in a fight with unicorns, and her mate had stayed with her as she hobbled her slow way along and killed game for her. The pups had been born and they had had to stop. Then the unicorns had found them and the female had been too crippled to fight....
He looked for the pups, expecting to find them trampled and dead. But they were alive, hidden under the roots of a small tree near their mother.
Prowler pups--alive!
They were very young, small and blind and helpless. He picked them up and his elation drained away as he looked at them. They made little sounds of hunger, almost inaudible, and they moved feebly, trying to find their mother's breasts and already so weak that they could not lift their heads.
Small chunks of fresh meat had been left beside the pups and he thought of what the prowler's emotions must have been as his mate lay dead on the ground and he carried meat to their young, knowing they were too small to eat it but helpless to do anything else for them.
And he knew why there had been the appeal in the eyes of the prowler as it died and what it had tried to tell him: Save them ... as you once saved me.
He carried the pups back past the prowler and looked down at it in passing. "I'll do my best," he said.
When he reached his house he laid the pups on his bed and built a fire. There was no milk to give them--the goats would not have young for at least another two weeks--but perhaps they could eat a soup of some kind. He put water on to boil and began shredding meat to make them a rich broth.
One of them was a male, the other a female, and if he could save them they would fight beside the men of Ragnarok when the Gerns came. He thought of what he would name them as he worked. He would name the female Sigyn, after Loki's faithful wife who went with him when the gods condemned him to Hel, the Teutonic underworld. And he would name the male Fenrir, after the monster wolf who would fight beside Loki when Loki led the forces of Hel in the final battle on the day of Ragnarok.
But when the broth was prepared, and cooled enough, the pups could not eat it. He tried making it weaker, tried it mixed with corn and herb soup, tried corn and herb soups alone. They could eat nothing he prepared for them.
When gray daylight entered the room he had tried everything possible and had failed. He sat wearily in his chair and watched them, defeated. They were no longer crying in their hunger and when he touched them they did not move as they had done before.
They would be dead before the day was over and the only chance men had ever had to have prowlers as their friends and allies would be gone.
The first rays of sunrise were coming into the room, revealing fully the frail thinness of the pups, when there was a step outside and Julia's voice:
"Father?"
"Come in, Julia," he said, not moving.
She entered, still a pale shadow of the reckless girl who had fought a unicorn, even though she was slowly regaining her normal health. She carried young Johnny in one arm, in her other hand his little bottle of milk. Johnny was hungry--there was never quite enough milk for him--but he was not crying. Ragnarok children did not cry....
She saw the pups and her eyes went wide.
"Prowlers--baby prowlers! Where did you get them?"
He told her and she went to them, to look down at them and say, "If you and their father hadn't helped each other that day they wouldn't be here, nor you, nor I, nor Johnny--none of us in this room."
"They won't live out the day," he said. "They have to have milk--and there isn't any."
She reached down to touch them and they seemed to sense that she was someone different. They stirred, making tiny whimpering sounds and trying to move their heads to nuzzle at her fingers.
Compassion came to her face, like a soft light.
"They're so young," she said. "So terribly young to have to die...."
She looked at Johnny and at the little bottle that held his too-small morning ration of milk.
"Johnny--Johnny----" Her words were almost a whisper. "You're hungry--but we can't let them die. And someday, for this, they will fight for your life."
She sat on the bed and placed the pups in her lap beside Johnny. She lifted a little black head with gentle fingers and a little pink mouth ceased whimpering as it found the nipple of Johnny's bottle.
Johnny's gray eyes darkened with the storm of approaching protest. Then the other pup touched his hand, crying in its hunger, and the protest faded as surprise and something like sudden understanding came into his eyes.
Julia withdrew the bottle from the first pup and transferred it to the second one. Its crying ceased and Johnny leaned forward to touch it again, and the one beside it.
He made his decision with an approving sound and leaned back against his mother's shoulder, patiently awaiting his own turn and their presence accepted as though they had been born his brother and sister.
* * * * *
The golden light of the new day shone on them, on his daughter and grandson and the prowler pups, and in it he saw the bright omen for the future.
His own role was nearing its end but he had seen the people of Ragnarok conquer their environment in so far as Big Winter would ever let it be conquered. The last generation was being born, the generation that would meet the Gerns, and now they would have their final ally. Perhaps it would be Johnny who led them on that day, as the omen seemed to prophesy.
He was the son of a line of leaders, born to a mother who had fought and killed a unicorn. He had gone hungry to share what little he had with the young of Ragnarok's most proud and savage species and Fenrir and Sigyn would fight beside him on the day he led the forces of the hell-world in the battle with the Gerns who thought they were gods.
Could the Gerns hope to have a leader to match?
* * * * *
PART 4
* * * * *
John Humbolt, leader, stood on the wide stockade wall and watched the lowering sun touch the western horizon--far south of where it had set when he was a child. Big Summer was over and now, in the year two hundred, they were already three years into Big Fall. The Craigs had been impassable with snow for five years and the country at the north end of the plateau, where the iron had been found, had been buried under never-melting snow and growing glaciers for twenty years.
There came the soft tinkling of ceramic bells as the herd of milk goats came down off the hills. Two children were following and six prowlers walked with them, to protect them from wild unicorns.
There were not many of the goats. Each year the winters were longer, requiring the stocking of a larger supply of hay. The time would come when the summers would be so short and the winters so long that they could not keep goats at all. And by then, when Big Winter had closed in on them, the summer seasons would be too short for the growing of the orange corn. They would have nothing left but the hunting.
They had, he knew, reached and passed the zenith of the development of their environment. From a low of forty-nine men, women and children in dark caves they had risen to a town of six thousand. For a few years they had had a way of life that was almost a civilization but the inevitable decline was already under way. The years of frozen sterility of Big Winter were coming and no amount of determination or ingenuity could alter them. Six thousand would have to live by hunting--and one hundred, in the first Big Winter, had found barely enough game.
They would have to migrate in one of two different ways: they could go to the south as nomad hunters--or they could go to other, fairer, worlds in ships they took from the Gerns.
The choice was very easy to make and they were almost ready.
In the workshop at the farther edge of town the hyperspace transmitter was nearing completion. The little smelter was waiting to receive the lathe and other iron and steel and turn them into the castings for the generator. Their weapons were ready, the mockers were trained, the prowlers were waiting. And in the massive corral beyond town forty half-tame unicorns trampled the ground and hated the world, wanting to kill something. They had learned to be afraid of Ragnarok men but they would not be afraid to kill Gerns....
The children with the goats reached the stockade and two of the prowlers, Fenrir and Sigyn, turned to see him standing on the wall. He made a little motion with his hand and they came running, to leap up beside him on the ten-foot-high wall.
"So you've been checking up on how well the young ones guard the children?" he asked.
Sigyn lolled out her tongue and her white teeth grinned at him in answer. Fenrir, always the grimmer of the two, made a sound in his throat in reply.
Prowlers developed something like a telepathic rapport with their masters and could sense their thoughts and understand relatively complex instructions. Their intelligence was greater, and of a far more mature order, than that of the little mockers but their vocal cords were not capable of making the sounds necessary for speech.
He rested his hands on their shoulders, where their ebony fur was frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing movement but they were getting old--they were only a few weeks short of his own age. He could not remember when they had not been with him....
Sometimes it seemed to him he could remember those hungry days when he and Fenrir and Sigyn shared together in his mother's lap--but it was probably only his imagination from having heard the story told so often. But he could remember for certain when he was learning to walk and Fenrir and Sigyn, full grown then, walked tall and black beside him. He could remember playing with Sigyn's pups and he could remember Sigyn watching over them all, sometimes giving her pups a bath and his face a washing with equal disregard for their and his protests. Above all he could remember the times when he was almost grown; the wild, free days when he and Fenrir and Sigyn had roamed the mountains together. With a bow and a knife and two prowlers beside him he had felt that there was nothing on Ragnarok that they could not conquer; that there was nothing in the universe they could not defy together....
* * * * *
There was a flicker of black movement and a young messenger prowler came running from the direction of the council hall, a speckle-faced mocker clinging to its back. It leaped up on the wall beside him and the mocker, one that had been trained to remember and repeat messages verbatim, took a breath so deep that its cheeks bulged out. It spoke, in a quick rush like a child that is afraid it might forget some of the words:
"You will please come to the council hall to lead the discussion regarding the last preparations for the meeting with the Gerns. The transmitter is completed."
* * * * *
The lathe was torn down the next day and the smelter began to roar with its forced draft. Excitement and anticipation ran through the town like a fever. It would take perhaps twenty days to build the generator, working day and night so that not an hour of time would be lost, forty days for the signal to reach Athena, and forty days for the Gern cruiser to reach Ragnarok----
In one hundred days the Gerns would be there!
The men who would engage in the fight for the cruiser quit trimming their beards. Later, when it was time for the Gerns to appear, they would discard their woolen garments for ones of goat skin. The Gerns would regard them as primitive inferiors at best and it might be of advantage to heighten the impression. It would make the awakening of the Gerns a little more shocking.
An underground passage, leading from the town to the concealment of the woods in the distance, had long ago been dug. Through it the women and children would go when the Gerns arrived.
There was a level area of ground, just beyond the south wall of town, where the cruiser would be almost certain to land. The town had been built with that thought in mind. Woods were not far from both sides of the landing site and unicorn corrals were hidden in them. From the corrals would come the rear flanking attack against the Gerns.
The prowlers, of course, would be scattered among all the forces.
* * * * *
The generator was completed and installed on the nineteenth night. Charley Craig, a giant of a man whose red beard gave him a genially murderous appearance, opened the valve of the water pipe. The new wooden turbine stirred and belts and pulleys began to spin. The generator hummed, the needles of the dials climbed, flickered, and steadied.
Norman Lake looked from them to Humbolt, his pale gray eyes coldly satisfied. "Full output," he said. "We have the power we need this time."
Jim Chiara was at the transmitter and they waited while he threw switches and studied dials. Every component of the transmitter had been tested but they had not had the power to test the complete assembly.
"That's it," he said at last, looking up at them. "She's ready, after almost two hundred years of wanting her."
Humbolt wondered what the signal should be and saw no reason why it should not be the same one that had been sent out with such hope a hundred and sixty-five years ago.
"All right, Jim," he said. "Let the Gerns know we're waiting for them--make it 'Ragnarok calling' again."
The transmitter key rattled and the all-wave signal that the Gerns could not fail to receive went out at a velocity of five light-years a day:
Ragnarok calling--Ragnarok calling--Ragnarok calling--
It was the longest summer Humbolt had ever experienced. He was not alone in his impatience--among all of them the restlessness flamed higher as the slow days dragged by, making it almost impossible to go about their routine duties. The gentle mockers sensed the anticipation of their masters for the coming battle and they became nervous and apprehensive. The prowlers sensed it and they paced about the town in the dark of night; watching, listening, on ceaseless guard against the mysterious enemy their masters waited for. Even the unicorns seemed to sense what was coming and they rumbled and squealed in their corrals at night, red-eyed with the lust for blood and sometimes attacking the log walls with blows that shook the ground.
The interminable days went their slow succession and summer gave way to fall. The hundredth day dawned, cold and gray with the approach of winter; the day of the Gerns.
But no cruiser came that day, nor the next. He stood again on the stockade wall in the evening of the third day, Fenrir and Sigyn beside him. He listened for the first dim, distant sound of the Gern cruiser and heard only the moaning of the wind around him.
Winter was coming. Always, on Ragnarok, winter was coming or the brown death of summer. Ragnarok was a harsh and barren prison, and no amount of desire could ever make it otherwise. Only the coming of a Gern cruiser could ever offer them the bloody, violent opportunity to regain their freedom.
But what if the cruiser never came?
It was a thought too dark and hopeless to be held. They were not asking a large favor of fate, after two hundred years of striving for it; only the chance to challenge the Gern Empire with bows and knives....
Fenrir stiffened, the fur lifting on his shoulders and a muted growl coming from him. Then Humbolt heard the first whisper of sound; a faint, faraway roaring that was not the wind.
He watched and listened and the sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly. It rode down on its rockets of flame, filling the valley with its thunder, and his heart hammered with exultation.
It had come--the cruiser had come!
He turned and dropped the ten feet to the ground inside the stockade. The warning signal was being sounded from the center of town; a unicorn horn that gave out the call they had used in the practice alarms. Already the women and children would be hurrying along the tunnels that led to the temporary safety of the woods beyond town. The Gerns might use their turret blasters to destroy the town and all in it before the night was over. There was no way of knowing what might happen before it ended. But whatever it was, it would be the action they had all been wanting.
He ran to where the others would be gathering, Fenrir and Sigyn loping beside him and the horn ringing wild and savage and triumphant as it announced the end of two centuries of waiting.
* * * * *
The cruiser settled to earth in the area where it had been expected to land, towering high above the town with its turret blasters looking down upon the houses.
Charley Craig and Norman Lake were waiting for him on the high steps of his own house in the center of town where the elevation gave them a good view of the ship yet where the fringes of the canopy would conceal them from the ship's scanners. They were heavily armed, their prowlers beside them and their mockers on their shoulders.
Elsewhere, under the connected rows of concealing canopies, armed men were hurrying to their prearranged stations. Most of them were accompanied by prowlers, bristling and snarling as they looked at the alien ship. A few men were deliberately making themselves visible not far away, going about unimportant tasks with only occasional and carefully disinterested glances toward the ship. They were the bait, to lure the first detachment into the center of town....
"Well?" Norman Lake asked, his pale eyes restless with his hunger for violence. "There's our ship--when do we take her?"
"Just as soon as we get them outside it," he said. "We'll use the plan we first had--wait until they send a full force to rescue the first detachment and then hit them with everything we have."
His black, white-nosed mocker was standing in the open doorway and watching the hurrying men and prowlers with worried interest: Tip, the great-great-great-great grandson of the mocker that had died with Howard Lake north of the plateau. He reached down to pick him up and set him on his shoulder, and said:
"Jim?"
"The longbows are ready," Tip's treble imitation of Jim Chiara's voice answered. "We'll black out their searchlights when the time comes."
"Andy?" he asked.
"The last of us for this section are coming in now," Andy Taylor answered.
He made his check of all the subleaders, then looked up to the roof to ask, "All set, Jimmy?"
Jimmy Stevens' grinning face appeared over the edge. "Ten crossbows are cocked and waiting up here. Bring us our targets."
They waited, while the evening deepened into near-dusk. Then the airlock of the cruiser slid open and thirteen Gerns emerged, the one leading them wearing the resplendent uniform of a subcommander.
"There they come," he said to Lake and Craig. "It looks like we'll be able to trap them in here and force the commander to send out a full-sized force. We'll all attack at the sound of the horn and if you can hit their rear flanks hard enough with the unicorns to give us a chance to split them from this end some of us should make it to the ship before they realize up in the control room that they should close the airlocks.
"Now"--he looked at the Gerns who were coming straight toward the stockade wall, ignoring the gate to their right--"you'd better be on your way. We'll meet again before long in the ship."
Fenrir and Sigyn looked from the advancing Gerns to him with question in their eyes after Lake and Craig were gone, Fenrir growling restlessly.
"Pretty soon," he said to them. "Right now it would be better if they didn't see you. Wait inside, both of you." They went reluctantly inside, to merge with the darkness of the interior. Only an occasional yellow gleam of their eyes showed that they were crouched to spring just inside the doorway.
He called to the nearest unarmed man, not loud enough to be heard by the Gerns:
"Cliff--you and Sam Anders come here. Tell the rest to fade out of sight and get armed."
Cliff Schroeder passed the command along and he and Sam Anders approached. He looked back at the Gerns and saw they were within a hundred feet of the--for them--unscalable wall of the stockade. They were coming without hesitation----
A pale blue beam lashed down from one of the cruiser's turrets and a fifty foot section of the wall erupted into dust with a sound like thunder. The wind swept the dust aside in a gigantic cloud and the Gerns came through the gap, looking neither to right nor left.
"That, I suppose," Sam Anders said from beside him, "was Lesson Number One for degenerate savages like us: Gerns, like gods, are not to be hindered by man-made barriers."
The Gerns walked with a peculiar gait that puzzled him until he saw what it was. They were trying to come with the arrogant military stride affected by the Gerns and in the 1.5 gravity they were succeeding in achieving only a heavy clumping.
They advanced steadily and as they drew closer he saw that in the right hand of each Gern soldier was a blaster while in the left hand of each could be seen the metallic glitter of chains.
Schroeder smiled thinly. "It looks like they want to subject about a dozen of us to some painful questioning."
No one else was any longer in sight and the Gerns came straight toward the three on the steps. They stopped forty feet away at a word of command from the officer and Gerns and Ragnarok men exchanged silent stares; the faces of the Ragnarok men bearded and expressionless, the faces of the Gerns hairless and reflecting a contemptuous curiosity.
"Narth!" The communicator on the Gern officer's belt spoke with metallic authority. "What do they look like? Did we come two hundred light-years to view some animated vegetables?"
"No, Commander," Narth answered. "I think the discard of the Rejects two hundred years ago has produced for us an unexpected reward. There are three natives under the canopy before me and their physical perfection and complete adaptation to this hellish gravity is astonishing."
"They could be used to replace expensive machines on some of the outer world mines," the commander said, "providing their intelligence isn't too abysmally low. What about that?"
"They can surely be taught to perform simple manual labor," Narth answered.
"Get on with your job," the commander said. "Try to pick some of the most intelligent looking ones for questioning--I can't believe these cattle sent that message and they're going to tell us who did. And pick some young, strong ones for the medical staff to examine--ones that won't curl up and die after the first few cuts of the knife."
"We'll chain these three first," Narth said. He lifted his hand in an imperious gesture to Humbolt and the other two and ordered in accented Terran: "Come here!"
No one moved and he said again, sharply, "Come here!"
Again no one moved and the minor officer beside Narth said, "Apparently they can't even understand Terran now."
"Then we'll give them some action they can understand," Narth snapped, his face flushing with irritation. "We'll drag them out by their heels!"
The Gerns advanced purposefully, three of them holstering their blasters to make their chains ready. When they had passed under the canopy and could not be seen from the ship Humbolt spoke:
"All right, Jimmy."
The Gerns froze in midstride, suspicion flashing across their faces.
"Look up on the roof," he said in Gern.
They looked, and the suspicion became gaping dismay.
"You can be our prisoners or you can be corpses," he said. "We don't care which."
The urgent hiss of Narth's command broke their indecision:
"Kill them!"
Six of them tried to obey, bringing up their blasters in movements that seemed curiously heavy and slow, as though the gravity of Ragnarok had turned their arms to wood. Three of them almost lifted their blasters high enough to fire at the steps in front of them before arrows went through their throats. The other three did not get that far.
Narth and the remaining six went rigidly motionless and he said to them:
"Drop your blasters--quick!"
Their blasters thumped to the ground and Jimmy Stevens and his bowmen slid off the roof. Within a minute the Gerns were bound with their own chains, but for the officer, and the blasters were in the hands of the Ragnarok men.
Jimmy looked down the row of Gerns and shook his head. "So these are Gerns?" he said. "It was like trapping a band of woods goats."
"Young ones," Schroeder amended. "And almost as dangerous."
Narth's face flushed at the words and his eyes went to the ship. The sight of it seemed to restore his courage and his lips drew back in a snarl.
"You fools--you stupid, megalomaniac dung-heaps--do you think you can kill Gerns and live to boast about it?"
"Keep quiet," Humbolt ordered, studying him with curiosity. Narth, like all the Gerns, was different from what they had expected. It was true the Gerns had strode into their town with an attempt at arrogance but they were harmless in appearance, soft of face and belly, and the snarling of the red-faced Narth was like the bluster of a cornered scavenger-rodent.
"I promise you this," Narth was saying viciously, "if you don't release us and return our weapons this instant I'll personally oversee the extermination of you and every savage in this village with the most painful death science can contrive and I'll----"
Humbolt reached out his hand and flicked Narth under the chin. Narth's teeth cracked loudly together and his face twisted with the pain of a bitten tongue.
"Tie him up, Jess," he said to a man near him. "If he opens his mouth again, shove your foot in it."
He spoke to Schroeder. "We'll keep three of the blasters and send two to each of the other front groups. Have that done."
Dusk was deepening into darkness and he called Chiara again. "They'll turn on their searchlights any minute and make the town as light as day," he said. "If you can keep them blacked out until some of us have reached the ship, I think we'll have won."
"They'll be kept blacked out," Chiara said. "With some flint-headed arrows left over for the Gerns."
He called Lake and Craig, to be told they were ready and waiting.
"But we're having hell keeping the unicorns quiet," Craig said. "They want to get to killing something."
He pressed the switch of the communicator but it was dead. They had, of course, transferred to some other wave length so he could not hear the commands. It was something he had already anticipated....
Fenrir and Sigyn were still obediently inside the doorway, almost frantic with desire to rejoin him. He spoke to them and they bounded out, snarling at three Gerns in passing and causing them to blanch to a dead-white color.
He set Tip on Sigyn's shoulders and said, "Sigyn, there's a job for you and Tip to do. A dangerous job. Listen--both of you...."
The yellow eyes of Sigyn and the dark eyes of the little mocker looked into his as he spoke to them and accompanied his words with the strongest, clearest mental images he could project:
"Sigyn, take Tip to the not-men thing. Leave him hidden in the grass to one side of the big hole in it. Tip, you wait there. When the not-men come out you listen, and tell what they say.
"Now, do you both understand?"
Sigyn made a sound that meant she did but Tip clutched at his wrist with little paws suddenly gone cold and wailed, "No! Scared--scared----"
"You have to go, Tip," he said, gently disengaging his wrist. "And Sigyn will hide near to you and watch over you." He spoke to Sigyn. "When the horn calls you run back with him."
Again she made the sound signifying understanding and he touched them both in what he hoped would not be the last farewell.
"All right, Sigyn--go now."
She vanished into the gloom of coming night, Tip hanging tightly to her. Fenrir stood with the fur lifted on his shoulders and a half snarl on his face as he watched her go and watched the place where the not-men would appear.
"Where's Freckles?" he asked Jimmy.
"Here," someone said, and came forward with Tip's mate.
He set Freckles on his shoulder and the first searchlight came on, shining down from high up on the cruiser. It lighted up the area around them in harsh white brilliance, its reflection revealing the black shadow that was Sigyn just vanishing behind the ship.
Two more searchlights came on, to illuminate the town. Then the Gerns came.
They poured out through the airlock and down the ramp, there to form in columns that marched forward as still more Gerns hurried down the ramp behind them. The searchlights gleamed on their battle helmets and on the blades of the bayonets affixed to their rifle-like long range blasters. Hand blasters and grenades hung from their belts, together with stubby flame guns.
They were a solid mass reaching halfway to the stockade before the last of them, the commanding officers, appeared. One of them stopped at the foot of the ramp to watch the advance of the punitive force and give the frightened but faithful Tip the first words to transmit to Freckles:
"The full force is on its way, Commander."
A reply came, in Freckles' simulation of the metallic tones of a communicator:
"The key numbers of the confiscated blasters have been checked and the disturbance rays of the master integrator set. You'll probably have few natives left alive to take as prisoners after those thirteen charges explode but continue with a mopping up job that the survivors will never forget."
So the Gerns could, by remote control, set the total charges of stolen blasters to explode upon touching the firing stud? It was something new since the days of the Old Ones....
He called Chiara and the other groups, quickly, to tell them what he had learned. "We'll get more blasters--ones they can't know the numbers of--when we attack," he finished.
He took the blaster from his belt and laid it on the ground. The front ranks of the Gerns were almost to the wall by then, a column wider than the gap that had been blasted through it, coming with silent purposefulness.
Two blaster beams lanced down from the turrets, to smash at the wall. Dust billowed and thunder rumbled as they swept along. A full three hundred feet of the wall had been destroyed when they stopped and the dust hid the ship and made dim glows of the searchlights.
It had no doubt been intended to impress them with the might of the Gerns but in doing so it hid the Ragnarok forces from the advancing Gerns for a few seconds.
"Jim--black out their lights before the dust clears," he called. "Joe--the horn! We attack now!"
The first longbow arrow struck a searchlight and its glow grew dimmer as the arrow's burden--a thin tube of thick lance tree ink--splattered against it. Another followed----
Then the horn rang out, harsh and commanding, and in the distance a unicorn screamed in answer. The savage cry of a prowler came, like a sound to match, and the attack was on.
He ran with Fenrir beside him and to his left and right ran the others with their prowlers. The lead groups converged as they went through the wide gap in the wall. They ran on, into the dust cloud, and the shadowy forms of the Gerns were suddenly before them.
A blaster beam cut into them and a Gern shouted, "The natives!" Other beams sprang into life, winking like pale blue eyes through the dust and killing all they touched. The beams dropped as the first volley of arrows tore through the massed front ranks, to be replaced by others.
They charged on, into the blue winking of the blasters and the red lances of the flame guns with the crossbows rattling and strumming in answer. The prowlers lunged and fought beside them and ahead of them; black hell-creatures that struck the Gerns too swiftly for blasters to find before throats were torn out; the sound of battle turned into a confusion of raging snarls, frantic shouts and dying screams.
A prowler shot past him to join Fenrir--Sigyn--and he felt Tip dart up to his shoulder. She made a sound of greeting in passing, a sound that was gone as her jaws closed on a Gern.
The dust cloud cleared a little and the searchlights looked down on the scene; no longer brilliantly white but shining through the red-black lance tree ink as a blood red glow. A searchlight turret slid shut and opened a moment later, the light wiped clean. The longbows immediately transformed it into a red glow.
The beam of one of the turret blasters stabbed down, to blaze a trail of death through the battle. It ceased as its own light revealed to the Gern commander that the Ragnarok forces were so intermixed with the Gern forces that he was killing more Gerns than Ragnarok men.
By then the fighting was so hand to hand that knives were better than crossbows. The Gerns fell like harvested corn; too slow and awkward to use their bayonets against the faster Ragnarok men and killing as many of one another as men when they tried to use their blasters and flame guns. From the rear there came the command of a Gern officer, shouted high and thin above the sound of battle:
"Back to the ship--leave the natives for the ship's blasters to kill!"
The unicorns arrived then, to cut off their retreat.
They came twenty from the east and twenty from the west in a thunder of hooves, squealing and screaming in their blood lust, with prowlers a black wave going before them. They struck the Gerns; the prowlers slashing lanes through them while the unicorns charged behind, trampling them, ripping into them with their horns and smashing them down with their hooves as they vented the pent up rage of their years of confinement. On the back of each was a rider whose long spear flicked and stabbed into the throats and bellies of Gerns.
The retreat was halted and transformed into milling confusion. He led his own groups in the final charge, the prearranged wedge attack, and they split the Gern force in two.
The ship was suddenly just beyond them.
He gave the last command to Lake and Craig: "Now--into the ship!"
He scooped up a blaster from beside a fallen Gern and ran toward it. A Gern officer was already in the airlock, his face pale and strained as he looked back and his hand on the closing switch. He shot him and ran up the ramp as the officer's body rolled down it.
Unicorn hooves pounded behind him and twenty of them swept past, their riders leaping from their backs to the ramp. Twenty men and fifteen prowlers charged up the ramp as a warning siren shrieked somewhere inside the ship. At the same time the airlocks, operated from the control room, began to slide swiftly shut.
He was through first, with Fenrir and Sigyn. Lake and Craig, together with six men and four prowlers, squeezed through barely in time. Then the airlocks were closed and they were sealed in the ship.
Alarm bells added their sound to the shrieking of the siren and from the multiple-compartments shafts came the whir of elevators dropping with Gern forces to kill the humans trapped inside the ship.
They ran past the elevator shafts without pausing, light and swift in the artificial gravity that was only two-thirds that of Ragnarok. They split forces as long ago planned; three men and four prowlers going with Charley Craig in the attempt to take the drive room, Lake and the other three men going with him in the attempt to take the control room.
They found the manway ladder and began to climb, Fenrir and Sigyn impatiently crowding their heels.
There was nothing on the control room level and they ran down the short corridor that their maps had showed. They turned left, into the corridor that had the control room at its end, and into the concentrated fire of nine waiting Gerns.
Fenrir and Sigyn went into the Gerns, under their fire before they could drop the muzzles of their blasters, with an attack so vicious and unexpected that what would have been a certain and lethal trap for the humans was suddenly a fighting chance.
The corridor became an inferno of blaster beams that cracked and hissed as they met and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft tappings. It was over within seconds, the last Gern down and one man still standing beside him, the blond and nerveless Lake.
Thomsen and Barber were dead and Billy West was bracing himself against the wall with a blaster hole through his stomach, trying to say something and sliding to the floor before it was ever spoken.
And Sigyn was down, blood welling and bubbling from a wound in her chest, while Fenrir stood over her with his snarling a raging scream as he swung his head in search of a still-living Gern.
Humbolt and Lake ran on, Fenrir raging beside them, and into the control room.
Six officers, one wearing the uniform of a commander, were gaping in astonishment and bringing up their blasters in the way that seemed so curiously slow to Humbolt. Fenrir, in his fury, killed two of them as Lake's blaster and his own killed three more.
The commander was suddenly alone, his blaster half lifted. Fenrir leaped at his throat and Humbolt shouted the quick command: "Disarm!"
It was something the prowlers had been taught in their training and Fenrir's teeth clicked short of the commander's throat while his paw sent the blaster spinning across the room.
The commander stared at them with his swarthy face a dark gray and his mouth still gaping.
"How--how did you do it?" he asked in heavily accented Terran. "Only two of you----"
"Don't talk until you're asked a question," Lake said.
"Only two of you...." The thought seemed to restore his courage, as sight of the ship had restored Narth's that night, and his tone became threatening. "There are only two of you and more guards will be here to kill you within a minute. Surrender to me and I'll let you go free----"
Lake slapped him across the mouth with a backhanded blow that snapped his head back on his shoulders and split his lip.
"Don't talk," he ordered again. "And never lie to us."
The commander spit out a tooth and held his hand to his bleeding mouth. He did not speak again.
Tip and Freckles were holding tightly to his shoulder and each other, the racing of their hearts like a vibration, and he touched them reassuringly.
"All right now--all safe now," he said.
He called Charley Craig. "Charley--did you make it?"
"We made it to the drive room--two of us and one prowler," Charley answered. "What about you?"
"Norman and I have the control room. Cut their drives, to play safe. I'll let you know as soon as the entire ship is ours."
He went to the viewscreen and saw that the battle was over. Chiara was letting the searchlight burn again and prowlers were being used to drive back the unicorns from the surrendering Gerns.
"I guess we won," he said to Lake.
But there was no feeling of victory, none of the elation he had thought he would have. Sigyn was dying alone in the alien corridor outside. Sigyn, who had nursed beside him and fought beside him and laid down her life for him....
"I want to look at her," he said to Lake.
Fenrir went with him. She was still alive, waiting for them to come back to her. She lifted her head and touched his hand with her tongue as he examined the wound.
It was not fatal--it need not be fatal. He worked swiftly, gently, to stop the bleeding that had been draining her life away. She would have to lie quietly for weeks but she would recover.
When he was done he pressed her head back to the floor and said, "Lie still, Sigyn girl, until we can come to move you. Wait for us and Fenrir will stay here with you."
She obeyed and he left them, the feeling of victory and elation coming to him in full then.
Lake looked at him questioningly as he entered the control room and he said, "She'll live."
He turned to the Gern commander. "First, I want to know how the war is going?"
"I----" The commander looked uncertainly at Lake.
"Just tell the truth," Lake said. "Whether you think we'll like it or not."
"We have all the planets but Earth, itself," the commander said. "We'll have it, soon."
"And the Terrans on Athena?"
"They're still--working for us there."
"Now," he said, "you will order every Gern in this ship to go to his sleeping quarters. They will leave their weapons in the corridors outside and they will not resist the men who will come to take charge of the ship."
The commander made an effort toward defiance:
"And if I refuse?"
Lake answered, smiling at him with the smile of his that was no more than a quick showing of teeth and with the savage eagerness in his eyes.
"If you refuse I'll start with your fingers and break every bone to your shoulders. If that isn't enough I'll start with your toes and go to your hips. And then I'll break your back."
The commander hesitated, sweat filming his face as he looked at them. Then he reached out to switch on the all-stations communicator and say into it:
"Attention, all personnel: You will return to your quarters at once, leaving your weapons in the corridors. You are ordered to make no resistance when the natives come...."
There was a silence when he had finished and Humbolt and Lake looked at each other, bearded and clad in animal skins but standing at last in the control room of a ship that was theirs: in a ship that could take them to Athena, to Earth, to the ends of the galaxy.
The commander watched them, on his face the blankness of unwillingness to believe.
"The airlocks--" he said. "We didn't close them in time. We never thought you would dare try to take the ship--not savages in animal skins."
"I know," Humbolt answered. "We were counting on you to think that way."
"No one expected any of you to survive here." The commander wiped at his swollen lips, wincing, and an almost child-like petulance came into his tone. "You weren't supposed to survive."
"I know," he said again. "We've made it a point to remember that."
"The gravity, the heat and cold and fever, the animals--why didn't they kill you?"
"They tried," he said. "But we fought back. And we had a goal--to meet you Gerns again. You left us on a world that had no resources. Only enemies who would kill us--the gravity, the prowlers, the unicorns. So we made them our resources. We adapted to the gravity that was supposed to kill us and became stronger and quicker than Gerns. We made allies of the prowlers and unicorns who were supposed to be our executioners and used them tonight to help us kill Gerns. So now we have your ship."
"Yes ... you have our ship." Through the unwillingness to believe on the commander's face and the petulance there came the triumph of vindictive anticipation. "The savages of Ragnarok have a Gern cruiser--but what can they do with it?"
"What can we do with it?" he asked, almost kindly. "We've planned for two hundred years what we can do with it. We have the cruiser and sixty days from now we'll have Athena. That will be only the beginning and you Gerns are going to help us do it."
* * * * *
For six days the ship was a scene of ceaseless activity. Men crowded it, asking questions of the Gern officers and crew and calmly breaking the bones of those who refused to answer or who gave answers that were not true. Prowlers stalked the corridors, their cold yellow eyes watching every move the Gerns made. The little mockers began roaming the ship at will, unable any longer to restrain their curiosity and confident that the men and prowlers would not let the Gerns harm them.
One mocker was killed then; the speckle-faced mocker that could repeat messages verbatim. It wandered into a storage cubicle where a Gern was working alone and gave him the opportunity to safely vent his hatred of everything associated with the men of Ragnarok. He broke its back with a steel bar and threw it, screaming, into the disposal chute that led to the matter converter. A prowler heard the scream and an instant later the Gern screamed; a sound that died in its making as the prowler tore his throat out. No more mockers were harmed.
One Ragnarok boy was killed. Three fanatical Gern officers stole knives from the galley and held the boy as hostage for their freedom. When their demands were refused they cut his heart out. Lake cornered them a few minutes later and, without touching his blaster, disemboweled them with their own knives. He smiled down upon them as they writhed and moaned on the floor and their moans were heard for a long time by the other Gerns in the ship before they died. No more humans were harmed.
They discovered that operation of the cruiser was relatively simple, basically similar to the operation of Terran ships as described in the text book the original Lake had written. Most of the operations were performed by robot mechanisms and the manual operations, geared to the slower reflexes of the Gerns, were easily mastered.
They could spend the forty-day voyage to Athena in further learning and practice so on the sixth day they prepared to depart. The unicorns had been given the freedom they had fought so well for and reconnaissance vehicles were loaned from the cruiser to take their place. Later there would be machinery and supplies of all kinds brought in by freighter ships from Athena.
Time was precious and there was a long, long job ahead of them. They blasted up from Ragnarok on the morning of the seventh day and went into the black sea of hyperspace.
By then the Gern commander was no longer of any value to them. His unwillingness to believe that savages had wrested his ship from him had increased until his compartment became his control room to him and he spent the hours laughing and giggling before an imaginary viewscreen whereon the cruiser's blasters were destroying, over and over, the Ragnarok town and all the humans in it.
But Narth, who had wanted to have them tortured to death for daring to resist capture, became very cooperative. In the control room his cooperation was especially eager. On the twentieth day of the voyage they let him have what he had been trying to gain by subterfuge: access to the transmitter when no men were within hearing distance.
After that his manner abruptly changed. Each day his hatred for them and his secret anticipation became more evident.
The thirty-fifth day came, with Athena five days ahead of them--the day of the execution they had let him arrange for them.
* * * * *
Stars filled the transdimensional viewscreen, the sun of Athena in the center. Humbolt watched the space to the lower left and the flicker came again; a tiny red dot that was gone again within a microsecond, so quickly that Narth in the seat beside him did not see it.
It was the quick peek of another ship; a ship that was running invisible with its detector screens up but which had had to drop them for an instant to look out at the cruiser. Not even the Gerns had ever been able to devise a polarized detector screen.
He changed the course and speed of the cruiser, creating an increase in gravity which seemed very slight to him but which caused Narth to slew heavily in his seat. Narth straightened and he said to him:
"Within a few minutes we'll engage the ship you sent for."
Narth's jaw dropped, then came back up. "So you spied on me?"
"One of our Ragnarok allies did--the little animal that was sitting near the transmitter. They're our means of communication. We learned that you had arranged for a ship, en route to Athena, to intercept us and capture us."
"So you know?" Narth asked. He smiled, an unpleasant twisting of his mouth. "Do you think that knowing will help you any?"
"We expect it to," he answered.
"It's a battleship," Narth said. "It's three times the size of this cruiser, the newest and most powerful battleship in the Gern fleet. How does that sound to you?"
"It sounds good," he said. "We'll make it our flagship."
"Your flagship--your 'flagship'!" The last trace of pretense left Narth and he let his full and rankling hatred come through. "You got this cruiser by trickery and learned how to operate it after a fashion because of an animal-like reflex abnormality. For forty-two days you accidental mutants have given orders to your superiors and thought you were our equals. Now, your fool's paradise is going to end."
The red dot came again, closer, and he once more altered the ship's course. He had turned on the course analyzer and it clicked as the battleship's position was correlated with that of its previous appearance. A short yellow line appeared on the screen to forecast its course for the immediate future.
"And then?" he asked curiously, turning back to Narth.
"And then we'll take all of you left alive back to your village. The scenes of what we do to you and your village will be televised to all Gern-held worlds. It will be a valuable reminder for any who have forgotten the penalty for resisting Gerns."
The red dot came again. He punched the BATTLE STATIONS button and the board responded with a row of READY lights.
"All the other Gerns are by now in their acceleration couches," he said. "Strap yourself in for high acceleration maneuvers--we'll make contact with the battleship within two minutes."
Narth did so, taking his time as though it was something of little importance. "There will be no maneuvers. They'll blast the stern and destroy your drive immediately upon attack."
He fastened the last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on Athena, hasn't it?"
"Not exactly," Humbolt replied. "Our plans are a little broader in scope than that. There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the shops ten days from now. We'll turn control of Athena over to the humans there, of course, then we'll take the three cruisers and the battleship back by way of Ragnarok. There we'll pick up all the Ragnarok men who are neither too old nor too young and go on to Earth. They will be given training en route in the handling of ships. We expect to find no difficulty in breaking through the Gern lines around Earth and then, with the addition of the Earth ships, we can easily capture all the Gern ships in the solar system."
"'Easily'!" Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. "Were you actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal Gern officers who have made a career of space warfare?"
"We'll far exceed them," he said. "A space battle is one of trying to keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to break through its blaster shields at that point. And at the same time try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty gravities or more but the acceleration limitator is the safeguard that prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew.
"We from Ragnarok are accustomed to a one point five gravity and can withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other race from a one gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser disconnected."
"Disconnected?" Narth's contemptuous regard vanished in frantic consternation. "You fool--you don't know what that means--you'll move the acceleration lever too far and kill us all!"
The red dot flicked on the viewscreen, trembled, and was suddenly a gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control and Narth's next words were cut off as his diaphragm sagged. He swung the cruiser in a curve and Narth was slammed sideways, the straps cutting into him and the flesh of his face pulled lopsided by the gravity. His eyes, bulging, went blank with unconsciousness.
The powerful blasters of the battleship blossomed like a row of pale blue flowers, concentrating on the stern of the cruiser. A warning siren screeched as they started breaking through the cruiser's shields. He dropped the detector screen that would shield the cruiser from sight, but not from the blaster beams, and tightened the curve until the gravity dragged heavily at his own body.
The warning siren stopped as the blaster beams of the battleship went harmlessly into space, continuing to follow the probability course plotted from the cruiser's last visible position and course by the battleship's robot target tracers.
He lifted the detector screen, to find the battleship almost exactly where the cruiser's course analyzers had predicted it would be. The blasters of the battleship were blazing their full concentration of firepower into an area behind and to one side of the cruiser.
They blinked out at sight of the cruiser in its new position and blazed again a moment later, boring into the stern. He dropped the detector screen and swung the cruiser in another curve, spiraling in the opposite direction. As before, the screech of the alarm siren died as the battleship's blasters followed the course given them by course analyzers and target tracers that were built to presume that all enemy ships were acceleration-limitator equipped.
The cruiser could have destroyed the battleship at any time--but they wanted to capture their flagship unharmed. The maneuvering continued, the cruiser drawing closer to the battleship. The battleship, in desperation, began using the same hide-and-jump tactics the cruiser used but it was of little avail--the battleship moved at known acceleration limits and the cruiser's course analyzers predicted each new position with sufficient accuracy.
The cruiser made its final dash in a tightening spiral, its detector screen flickering on and off. It struck the battleship at a matched speed, with a thump and ringing of metal as the magnetic grapples fastened the cruiser like a leech to the battleship's side.
In that position neither the forward nor stern blasters of the battleship could touch it. There remained only to convince the commander of the battleship that further resistance was futile.
This he did with a simple ultimatum to the commander:
"This cruiser is firmly attached to your ship, its acceleration limitator disconnected. Its drives are of sufficient power to thrust both ships forward at a much higher degree of acceleration than persons from one-gravity worlds can endure. You will surrender at once or we shall be forced to put these two ships into a curve of such short radius and at an acceleration so great that all of you will be killed."
Then he added, "If you surrender we'll do somewhat better by you than you did with the humans two hundred years ago--we'll take all of you on to Athena."
The commander, already sick from an acceleration that would have been negligible to Ragnarok men, had no choice.
His reply came, choked with acceleration sickness and the greater sickness of defeat:
"We will surrender."
* * * * *
Narth regained consciousness. He saw Humbolt sitting beside him as before, with no Gern rescuers crowding into the control room with shouted commands and drawn blasters.
"Where are they?" he asked. "Where is the battleship?"
"We captured it," he said.
"You captured--a Gern battleship?"
"It wasn't hard," he said. "It would have been easier if only Ragnarok men had been on the cruiser. We didn't want to accelerate to any higher gravities than absolutely necessary because of the Gerns on it."
"You did it--you captured the battleship," Narth said, his tone like one dazed.
He wet his lips, staring, as he contemplated the unpleasant implications of it.
"You're freak mutants who can capture a battleship. Maybe you will take Athena and Earth from us. But"--the animation of hatred returned to his face--"What good will it do you? Did you ever think about that?"
"Yes," he said. "We've thought about it."
"Have you?" Narth leaned forward, his face shining with the malice of his gloating. "You can never escape the consequences of what you have done. The Gern Empire has the resources of dozens of worlds. The Empire will build a fleet of special ships, a force against which your own will be nothing, and send them to Earth and Athena and Ragnarok. The Empire will smash you for what you have done and if there are any survivors of your race left they will cringe before Gerns for a hundred generations to come.
"Remember that while you're posturing in your little hour of glory on Athena and Earth."
"You insist in thinking we'll do as Gerns would do," he said. "We won't delay to do any posturing. We'll have a large fleet when we leave Earth and we'll go at once to engage the Gern home fleet. I thought you knew we were going to do that. We're going to cripple and capture your fleet and then we're going to destroy your empire."
"Destroy the Empire--now?" Narth stared again, all the gloating gone as he saw, at last, the quick and inexorable end. "Now--before we can stop you--before we can have a chance?"
"When a race has been condemned to die by another race and it fights and struggles and manages somehow to survive, it learns a lesson. It learns it must never again let the other race be in position to destroy it. So this is the harvest you reap from the seeds you sowed on Ragnarok two hundred years ago.
"You understand, don't you?" he asked, almost gently. "For two hundred years the Gern Empire has been a menace to our survival as a race. Now, the time has come when we shall remove it."
* * * * *
He stood in the control room of the battleship and watched Athena's sun in the viewscreen, blazing like a white flame. Sigyn, fully recovered, was stretched out on the floor near him; twitching and snarling a little in her sleep as she fought again the battle with the Gerns. Fenrir was pacing the floor, swinging his black, massive head restlessly, while Tip and Freckles were examining with fascinated curiosity the collection of bright medals that had been cleaned out of the Gern commander's desk.
Lake and Craig left their stations, as impatient as Fenrir, and came over to watch the viewscreen with him.
"One day more," Craig said. "We're two hundred years late but we're coming in to the world that was to have been our home."
"It can never be, now," he said. "Have any of us ever thought of that--that we're different to humans and there's no human world we could ever call home?"
"I've thought of it," Lake said. "Ragnarok made us different physically and different in the way we think. We could live on human worlds--but we would always be a race apart and never really belong there."
"I suppose we've all thought about it," Craig said. "And wondered what we'll do when we're finished with the Gerns. Not settle down on Athena or Earth, in a little cottage with a fenced-in lawn where it would be adventure to watch the Three-D shows after each day at some safe, routine job."
"Not back to Ragnarok," Lake said. "With metals and supplies from other worlds they'll be able to do a lot there but the battle is already won. There will be left only the peaceful development--building a town at the equator for Big Winter, leveling land, planting crops. We could never be satisfied with that kind of a life."
"No," he said, and felt his own restlessness stir in protest at the thought of settling down in some safe and secure environment. "Not Athena or Earth or Ragnarok--not any world we know."
"How long until we're finished with the Gerns?" Lake asked. "Ten years? We'll still be young then. Where will we go--all of us who fought the Gerns and all of the ones in the future who won't want to live out their lives on Ragnarok? Where is there a place for us--a world of our own?"
"Where do we find a world of our own?" he asked, and watched the star clouds creep toward them in the viewscreen; tumbled and blazing and immense beyond conception.
"There's a galaxy for us to explore," he said. "There are millions of suns and thousands of worlds waiting for us. Maybe there are races out there like the Gerns--and maybe there are races such as we were a hundred years ago who need our help. And maybe there are worlds out there with things on them such as no man ever imagined.
"We'll go, to see what's there. Our women will go with us and there will be some worlds on which some of us will want to stay. And, always, there will be more restless ones coming from Ragnarok. Out there are the worlds and the homes for all of us."
"Of course," Lake said. "Beyond the space frontier ... where else would we ever belong?"
It was all settled, then, and there was a silence as the battleship plunged through hyperspace, the cruiser running beside her and their drives moaning and thundering as had the drives of the Constellation two hundred years before.
A voyage had been interrupted then, and a new race had been born. Now they were going on again, to Athena, to Earth, to the farthest reaches of the Gern Empire. And on, to the wild, unknown regions of space beyond.
There awaited their worlds and there awaited their destiny; to be a race scattered across a hundred thousand light-years of suns, to be an empire such as the galaxy had never known.
They, the restless ones, the unwanted and forgotten, the survivors.
THE END
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
By Arthur G. Hill
They came down to Mars ahead of the rest because Larkin had bought an unfair advantage—a copy of the Primary Report. There were seven of them, all varying in appearance, but with one thing in common; in the eyes of each glowed the greed for Empire. They came down in a flash of orange tail-fire and they looked first at the Martians.
"Green," marveled Evans. "What a queer shade of green!"
"Not important," Cleve, the psychologist, replied. "Merely a matter of pigmentation. White, yellow, black, green. It proves only that God loves variety."
"And lord how they grin!"
Cleve peered learnedly. "Doesn't indicate a thing. They were born with those grins. They'll die with them."
Of the seven strong men, Larkin exuded the most power. Thus, his role of leader was a natural one. No man would ever stand in front of Larkin. He said, "To hell with color or the shape of their mouths. What we're after lies inside. Come on. Let's set up a camp."
"For the time being," Cleve cautioned, "we must ignore them. Later—we know what to do. I'll give the nod."
They brought what they needed out of the ship. They brought the plastic tents, broke the small, attached cylinders, and watched the tents bulge up into living quarters. They set up the vapor condenser and it began filling the water tank from the air about them. They plugged a line into the ship and attached it to the tent-line. Immediately the gasses in the plastic tents began to glow and give off both light and heat.
They did many things while the Martians stood silently by with their arms hanging, their splay-feet flat on the ground, their slash-mouths grinning.
The seven sat down to their first meal under the Martian stars and while they ate the rich, delicate foods, they listened to the words of Larkin. "A new empire waiting to be built. A whole planet—virgin—new."
"Not new," Dane, the archeologist, said. "It's older than Earth. It's been worked before."
Larkin waved an impatient hand. "But hardly scratched. It can have risen and fallen a thousand times for all we care. The important thing is the vital ingredient of empire. Is it here? Can it be harnessed? Are we or are we not, on the threshold of wealth, splendor, and progress so great as to take away the breath?"
And as Larkin spoke, all seven men looked at the Martians; looked covertly while appearing to study the rolling plain and the purple ridges far away; the texture of the soil; the color of the sky; the food on their plates; the steaming fragrance of their coffee. They looked at all these things but they studied the Martians.
"Stupid-looking animals," Evans muttered. "Odd though. So like us—yet so different."
At first there had been only a handful of Martians to grin at the landing of the ship. Now they numbered over a hundred, their ranks augmented by stragglers who came to stare with their fellows in happy silence.
"The prospects are excellent," Cleve said. Then he jerked his attention back to Larkin from whom it had momentarily wandered. When Larkin spoke, one listened.
Larkin had been directing his words toward a young man named Smith. Smith had inherited a great deal of money which was fine. But Larkin wasn't too sure of his qualifications otherwise. "—the pyramids," Larkin was saying. "Would they have ever been built if the men up above—the men with vision—had had to worry about a payroll?"
Smith regarded the Martians with not quite the impersonal stare of the other six Earthlings. Once or twice he grinned back at them. "I'll grant the truth of what you say," he told Larkin, "but what good were the pyramids? They're something I could never figure."
Smith had a sardonic twist of mouth that annoyed Larkin. "Let's not quibble, man. I merely used the pyramids as an example. Call them Empire; call them any Empire on Earth from the beginning of known history and let's face facts."
"Facts?" Smith asked. He had been looking at a six-foot-six Martian, thinking what a magnificent specimen he was. If only they'd wipe off those silly grins.
"Yes, facts. The building must be done. It is a law of nature. Man must progress or not. And what empire can arise without free labor? Can we develop this planet at union scale? Impossible! Yet it's crying to be developed."
Cleve knocked the ashes off his cigar and frowned. Being a man of direct action, he inquired. "Do you want your money back, Smith?"
The latter shook his head. "Oh no! Don't get me wrong, gentlemen. I'm for empire first, last and always. And if we can lay the foundations of one on the backs of these stupid creatures, I'm for it."
"I still don't like your—"
"My outspoken manner? Don't give it a thought, old man. I just don't want to be all cloyed up with platitudes. If we're going to chain the children of Israel into the house of bondage, let's get on with it."
"I don't like your attitude," Larkin said stubbornly. "In the long run, it will benefit these people."
"Let's say, rather, that it may benefit their children. I doubt if these jokers will be around very long after we start cracking the whip."
Dane was stirred. "The whip," he murmured. "Symbol of empire." But nobody heard him. They were too busy listening to Larkin and Smith—and watching the Martians.
The Martians stood around grinning, waiting patiently for something to happen. Larkin's attitude toward them had changed again. First there had been curiosity. Then a narrow-eyed calculation; now he regarded them with contempt. The careful, studied checks and tests would be made of course. But Larkin, a man of sure instincts, had already made up his mind.
He stretched luxuriously. "Let's call it a day and turn in. Tomorrow we'll go about the business at hand with clearer heads."
"A good idea," Cleve said, "but first, one little gesture. I think it would be judicious." He eyed the Martians, settling finally upon one—a male—standing close and somewhat apart from the rest. Cleve scowled. Standing erect, he called, "Hey—you!" He interpreted the words with a beckoning gesture of his arm. "Come here! Here, boy! Over here!"
The Martian reacted with a typically Earthian gesture. He pointed to his own chest with one green finger, while a questioning expression reflected through the eternal grin.
"Yes, you! On the double."
The Martian came forward. There was in his manner a slight hesitation, and Smith expected to see his hind quarters wriggle like that of a dog—uncertain, but eager to please.
Cleve pointed with a martinet gesture toward the smoked-out cigar butt he'd thrown to the ground. "Pick it up!"
The Martian stood motionless.
"Pick—it—up, you stupid lout!"
Larkin—now beyond sanity—was gibbering in the grave.
The Martian understood. With a glad little whimper, he bent over and took the cigar butt in his hand.
"There," Cleve said. "Garbage can! Get it? Garbage can. Place for trash—for cigar butts. Put it in there."
Smith wasn't sure whether the grin deepened or not. He thought it did, as the Martian laid the cigar butt carefully into the trash can.
"Okay, you fella," Cleve barked, still scowling. "Back and away now. Stay out there! Get it? Only come when you're called."
It took a few eloquent gestures, including the pantomime of swinging a whip, before the Martian understood and complied. After he backed into the circle of his fellows, Cleve dropped the cruel overseer manner and turned with satisfaction to Larkin. "I think there will be no trouble at all," he said. "Tomorrow we'll really get down to cases. I predict smooth sailing."
They said goodnight to each other and went about the business of preparing for slumber. As he raised the glowing flap of his tent, Larkin saw Smith lounging in a chair before the electric heat unit. "Aren't you going to get some sleep?"
"In a little while. I'm going to wait around until those two famous moons come. Want to see them first hand."
"A waste of time," Larkin said. "Better keep your mind on more important things."
"Goodnight," Smith said. Larkin did not reply, and Smith turned his head to look at the Martians. He wondered where they had come from. They probably had a village somewhere over the rise. He regarded them without fear or apprehension of what might occur during the sleeping hours. He had read the Primary Report, brought back by the pioneer expedition. These people were entirely harmless. Also they were possessed of remarkable stamina. They had stood for days, watching the first expedition, grinning at it, without nourishment of any kind.
Maybe they live off the atmosphere, Smith told himself dreamily. At any rate, they were ideal specimens to use as the foundation stones of an empire. He lay back, thinking of Larkin; he did not like Larkin personally, but he had to admire the steel in the man; the unswerving determination that had made him what he was.
His mind drifted back to the things of beauty around him. The far purple ridges had changed now, as a light bloomed behind them to gleam like azure through old crystal. Then the two moons shot over the horizon; huge silver bullets riding the thin atmosphere.
The oldest planet. Had it ever been great? Were the bones of any dead civilizations mouldering beneath this strange yellow soil? Smith closed his eyes while the cool Martian breezes soothed his face. Greatness. What was greatness after all? Merely a matter of viewpoint perhaps.
Smith got up and moved slowly toward his tent. Out in the shadows he could feel the grins of the Martians. "Goodnight," he called.
But there was no answer.
"I put them out there," Cleve said. "It seemed as good a place as any."
"Fine," Larkin rumbled. He wore boots and britches and a big, wide-brimmed hat. He had on soft leather gloves. He looked like an empire builder.
The Martians were standing around grinning at the pile of shovels lying in the fuzz-bush. The Martians seemed interested and appeared to communicate with one another in some imperceptible manner.
Larkin shoved through the circle of green men, pushing rudely. He stopped, picked up one of the shovels; thrust it toward a Martian. The Martian took it in his hands.
"It's very important that you tell them—that you don't show them," Cleve said. "You must not do any of the work yourself."
"I'll handle it," Larkin snapped. "Now, you—all of you! Grab a shovel. Pick 'em up, see? Pick 'em up! We've got work to do. A ditch to dig."
Larkin's pantomime was a universal language. "We start the ditch here. Right here—you fella! Get digging! And put your back into that shovel. Hit hard or maybe it gives the whip—understand?" Larkin made a threatening motion toward the lash coiled at his belt.
Smith, already on the scene, turned as Evans and Dane arrived carrying undefined plastic. They snapped the cylinders and chairs appeared; chairs—and a table upon which Carter and Lewis, bringing up the rear, placed a pitcher of beer, glasses and a box of cigars.
Cleve, the psychologist, looked with satisfaction upon the string of Martians manipulating the shovels. "All right," he said. "Let's sit down. Pour the beer, one of you."
"Allow me," Smith said. He fought to straighten the smile bending his lips. He picked up the pitcher and poured beer into the glasses. It all seemed so absurd; these grim-faced men acting out an asinine tableau.
Cleve caught the smile. "I wish you'd take this seriously," he said. "It's a mighty touchy and important business."
"Sorry," Smith said, raising his glass. "Here's to empire."
Larkin was striding up and down the line of straining Martians. The scowl had become a part of him.
It's getting him, Smith marveled. Act or no act, he likes it. Experiment or not, he's in his element.
The six men sat drinking their beer and watching Larkin. But only Cleve was aware of the skill with which the man worked. The gradual application of pressure; the careful moving forward from bog to bog with the path of retreat always open. From sharpness to brusqueness. From the brusque to the harsh. From the harsh to the brutal.
"Will you tell me," Smith asked, "why we have to sit here drinking like a pack of fools? I don't like beer."
"I'm not enjoying it, either," Cleve said. "But you can certainly understand that the roles must be set right from the beginning. They must understand we are their masters, so we must conduct ourselves in that manner. Never any sign that could be interpreted as compromise."
Larkin, satisfied with the progress of the entirely useless ditch, came to the table and raised a glass of beer. He wiped the foam from his mustache and asked, "What do you think?" directing the question toward Cleve.
The latter regarded the sweating Martians with calculating eyes. "It's going entirely as I predicted. The next step is in order, I believe."
"You think it's safe?"
"I'm certain of it."
Smith, studying Larkin, saw the latter smile, and was again struck by its quality.
Whatever the test, Larkin's for it, even above the call of scientific experimentation.
Larkin was uncoiling the whip from his belt. He strode toward the fast-deepening ditch. He selected a subject. "You—fella. You're lazy, huh? You like to gold-brick it? Then see how you like this!" He laid the whip across the green shoulders of the Martian.
The Martian winced. He raised an arm to shield off the whip. Again it curled against his flesh. He whimpered. His grin was stark, inquiring.
"Hit that shovel, you green bastard!" Larkin roared.
The Martian understood. So did the other Martians. Their muscles quivered as they drove into their work.
Larkin came back, smiling—almost dreamily, Smith thought. Cleve said, "Excellent. I'd hardly hoped for such conformity. Hardly expected it."
"You mean," Smith asked, "that this little scene can be projected from a dozen to a hundred? From a hundred to a thousand—?"
"From this little plot to the whole, surface of the planet," Cleve said. "The mass is nothing more than a collection of individuals. Control the individual and you've got the mob. That is if you follow through with the original method. Set the hard pattern."
"Then we're in—is that it? They've passed every test with flying colors."
"I'm sure they will," Cleve said, frowning. "But we must be thorough."
"There's still another test?"
"Yes. The test of final and complete subservience. It must be proven beyond all doubt that they know their masters."
"You don't think they're aware yet that we are their masters?"
"I'm sure they know. It only remains to be proven." Cleve glanced up at Larkin. "Maybe this is as far as we should go today. We've made marvelous progress."
That characteristic wave of Larkin's hand; the gesture of the empire builder brushing away mountains. "Why wait? I want to get this thing over with. You said yourself they're under our thumb."
Cleve pondered, staring at the Martians. "Very well. There's really no reason to wait."
Larkin smiled and turned toward the diggers, only half visible now from the depths of the ditch. He walked forward, appearing to exercise more care, this time, in the selection of his subject. Finally, he pointed at one of the Martians. "You—fella! Come here!"
Several of them looked at one another a trifle confused. "You—damn it! What are you waiting for?"
One of them climbed slowly from the trench. While he was engaged in so doing, Smith noticed two things. He saw the look of rage, simulated or otherwise, that came into Larkin's face. And he saw Cleve's fingers tighten on the edge of the table.
Larkin had a gun in his fist; a roar in his voice. "When I talk—you jump! Get that? All of you!"
He fired three bullets into the Martian's brain. The latter slumped grinning to the ground. Larkin, his breath coming jerkily, stood poised on the balls of his feet. The men at the table sat frozen—waiting. Around them—on the plain—some two hundred Martians stood motionless.
The final test, Smith thought. To prove they're cattle.
A full minute passed after the echo of the gun faded out. Silence.
And nothing.
The Earthmen picked up their breathing where they'd dropped it. Larkin's breath exploded in savage voice—triumphant voice. The Martians were his.
"Come on, some of you! Dig a hole and bury that carrion! And if anybody still wonders who's boss around here—let him step forward!"
"They took it!" Cleve whispered. "Glory be—they took it!"
Four Martians climbed grinning from the trench. They faced Larkin and stood as though awaiting instructions.
"Dig there," Larkin said.
They went stolidly to work and Larkin pocketed his gun, making the pocketing a gesture of contempt.
"You see," Cleve said, with the tone of one explaining an abstract problem, "we were at somewhat of a disadvantage because they are incapable of indicating emotion by facial expression. Thus the last test was necessary. If we could have judged the degree of fear previously instilled, that last might not have been necessary."
"Just as well to have a double check nonetheless," Dane said. "Look at them! You'd think nothing out of the ordinary had happened."
Larkin strode back to the table. "Glad we got it over with," he said. "Now we know. Cleve can head back for Earth tomorrow. Initial supplies will come to about twenty million, I estimate. The rest of us can stay here and really drive these beggars. Get the foundations dug; get the rock down from the hills."
"A planet in glorious resurrection," said Dane, the poet of the group.
"They've got the grave dug," Cleve observed. "They're waiting for orders."
"Such cattle," Evans muttered.
Larkin strode back to the grave. He pointed. "Him—body into the grave. Snap into it. We've got work to do."
The Martians put the body into the grave.
Then a tall, green man appeared behind Larkin. He put his arms around Larkin's body. Another Martian took the gun from Larkin's pocket.
And they pushed the screaming Earthman down into the grave.
Smith sprang to his feet. "For God's sake!"
"Sit down, you fool!" Cleve hissed. "Do you want to die? We've miscalculated. Something's wrong."
The big Martian was standing on Larkin. The others threw in the soil. Larkin, now beyond sanity, was gibbering like an animal.
Smith sat down. The Earthman presented a frozen tableau. Soon the gibbering could no longer be heard and the big Martian stepped out of the grave.
"Leave everything," Cleve whispered. "Get up very casually and walk back to the ship. Get inside it."
"May God help us," Dane quavered.
"Shut up! Act natural."
They went back and got into the ship while the Martians stood patiently about waiting for something to happen. Their patience was rewarded when the ship arose on a great flaming tail from the surface of the planet.
It was a sight worth waiting for.
THE END
THE WOMAN-STEALERS OF THRAYX
By Fox B. Holden
"And that is why you will take us to Earth, Lieutenant," barked the Ihelian warrior. "We do not want your arms or your men. What we must ask for is--ten thousand women."
Mason was nervous. It was the nervousness of cold apprehension, not simply that which had become indigenous to his high-strung make-up. He was, in his way, afraid; afraid that he'd again come up with a wrong answer.
He'd brought the tiny Scout too close to the Rim. Facing the facts squarely, he knew, even as he fingered the stud that would wrench them out of their R-curve, that he'd not just come too close. He'd overshot entirely. Pardonable, perhaps, from the view-point of the corps of scientists safely ensconced in their ponderous Mark VII Explorer some fifteen light-days behind. But not according to the g-n manual. According to it, he'd placed the Scout and her small crew in a "situation of avoidable risk," and it would make a doubtful record look that much worse.
The next time he'd out-argue Cain with his rank if he had to. Cain was big enough to grab things with his brawny fists and twist them into whatever shape he wanted when the things were tangible, solid, resisting. But R-Space was something else again. Nobody knew what it did beyond the Rim.
He materialized the Scout into E-Space, listened for trouble from her computers, but they chuckled softly on, keeping track of where they were, where they'd been, and how they'd get home.
It was as though nothing had happened. But Lieutenant Lansing Mason was still nervous, his slender fingers steady enough, but as cold as the alien dark outside the ship they controlled.
"You look a little shot again, skipper!" Cain said, grinning like a Martian desert cat. "What's the matter, Space goblins got you again?"
A retort started at Mason's taut lips, but his third officer was already speaking.
"Here's a dope sheet from the comps, if anybody's interested in knowing just where outside the Rim we are," she said. "I make it just a shade inside the outermost fringes of the Large Magellanic Cloud." Sergeant Judith Kent's voice had its almost habitually preoccupied tone, as though the words she said were hardly more than incidental to a host of more important thoughts running swiftly behind her wide-set, deep gray eyes. They were serious eyes, and in their way matched the solemn set of her small features and the crisp, military cut of her black hair and severe uniform.
"Our little boss-man knows where we are, all right!" Cain said.
Mason gave Cain's six-feet-two a quick glance, wondering as he always wondered why the big redhead's shoulders always seemed too broad for the Warrant Officer's stripes on them. "Sergeant Kent's right," he said. "Here's her comp-sheet. You can look for yourself. Fringe, Magellanic. And look at that while you can--" he jabbed a forefinger at the main scanner, its screen studded with unfamiliarly close constellations--"because we're on our way back. Set up a return on the comps, will you, Sergeant?" For all his tenseness his voice was low, and the words it formed were even and swift.
"Hell, Lance, this is the sort of stuff the brain trust pays us bonuses for."
"Not out here they don't. R-drive when you're ready, Sergeant!"
Cain turned from the deep control bank and gave his full attention to the scanner as the slender, efficient girl started feeding a tape of reversal co-ordinates into the computers.
Mason waited the few necessary seconds, pushed disarranged dark hair out of his eyes and felt the clammy dampness on his forehead, and wished silently to himself that opportunists like Cain were kept where they belonged--on the Slam-Bang Run out of Callisto. That's where the money was. That's where a Warrant like Cain ought to be.
"Ready, sir," he heard Judith saying quietly.
"Hey, skipper!" There was a sudden urgency in Cain's voice, and the equally sudden racket of an MPD alarm going off. Cain was gesturing at the scanner, stubby finger tracing a slewing pip of light. The alarm stopped, and Judith's cool voice was relaying information. "About a thousand miles," she was saying, "mass, approximately three hundred tons. Speed--"
* * * * *
But Mason wasn't listening. He was watching the pip of light as Cain got the scanner's directional going, tracked it. Suddenly there were others coming as though to meet it, and it swerved violently, obviously in flight. And now there were more yet, this time from the starboard quadrant of the screen.
"Radiation reading, Sergeant!" Mason clipped out.
While the two men watched, Judith read back the cryptic information interpolated by the ship's mass-proximity detector.
"That's not all engine junk!" Cain exclaimed as she finished.
"We don't know what drive they've got," Mason answered. "Could be anything--"
"Nuts! You wouldn't get that much from an old-fashioned ion-blast, skipper! That's a shooting war, that's what it is!" There was a glitter in Cain's narrowed brown eyes; a new edge on his heavy voice. "Which side do we take, boss-man?"
"No side at all," Mason said, hardly moving his lips. "We're getting the hell out of here."
"Look, Lance. We've got a crew of ten--we've got a couple of m-guns aboard because we're a Scout. No telling how one of those outfits may show their gratitude if we pitch in, help their side out. That's what we're out here for, isn't it? Dig up new stuff for the double-domes to sink their slide-rules into? Think of the bonus, skipper! Hell, this is made to order--"
Mason turned a quick glance to the girl, but her face told him nothing. It never did when things like this came up between himself and Cain. And it was something he knew he had no right to expect. But he was tired ... too damn much Space, and there was nothing else he knew how to do.
But this time Cain had a point. Aliens--extra-galactic, even if almost neighbors--and his help one way or the other could mean an engraved invitation, a key to the city.
He turned back to the screen, watched as the careening pips massed, mixed, whirled in an insensate jumble. He didn't want any more mistakes. They'd ground him for good, tell him he'd had his limit of Space, and park him on one of the rest-planets with a pension for the rest of his life.
No, he had to think, and quickly.
Earth had only too recently gotten an entire history of wars out of her system. Perhaps for good, this time. And that was it; that was his answer. Better keep his nose clean--
"For God's sake, skipper," Cain snapped. "Come out of it! This is a natural, we'll clean up!"
"Sergeant Kent! R-drive!"
There was a moment's sensation of nothingness as the Scout made the Euclidean-Riemannian Transition; the scanner paled and the segment of the universe it framed twisted, changed.
Cain didn't say anything. He glowered, and Mason could feel the big man's contempt. But he didn't have time for it.
This time there wouldn't be any error. This time he'd be a step ahead of the situation and stay there. "Scratch those reversal co-ordinates, Sergeant! Set up to diverge thirty degrees!"
Cain's sarcasm was little disguised. "Mind if I ask a question?"
"Just stay at ease, Mister Cain, until we're out of this!"
Mason watched the scanner's distorted image as the Scout hurtled through a curved pencil of four-point Space; she didn't have a fraction of a powerful Explorer's speed, and her small powerframe physically limited her to that of light. Yet it could be fast enough, for the aliens might know nothing of Transition technique, or could be as wary as Earthmen of the Rim. His precautions could be needless. But he had seen them and they were war-like, and he had no intention of being followed, either back to the Explorer, or ultimately to Earth itself. He'd have to maintain the diverged course until he was certain.
There was a black pip on the fog-colored scanner. Judith saw it even as he did. There was a fleeting look of fright on her intent young face that she hadn't been able to mask.
Cain saw it too.
"You got a tail, skipper!" he said, and the grin was back on his big freckled face.
Cain was right. The alien was capable of Transition. And he obviously had little fear of the Rim. His ship grew larger in the scanner.
Mason felt his fingers grow cold again.
* * * * *
Lance told the girl to eject the tape of co-ordinates from the nav-computers, and he took over manually, hoping the comps would keep up. It would be up to him where they went, and up to the comps to keep track of the Scout's position relative to both the Solar System and the Explorer.
His fingers played across the control-banks as though they were the keyboards of a great organ, and he felt his insides writhe as he slipped the hurtling ship back into E-Space, then back to R-level again. He played the tiny craft between levels as though it were a stone skipping across water, and altered course with each Transition with no attempt at plan or pattern. Rivulets of ice water trickled down across his ribs, and the flesh of his thin face was stiff.
"Wrong again," he heard Cain saying. "At least we can tell the brain trust that their precious R-factor is constant beyond the Rim ... maybe that'll be worth a buck or two. At least those kids back there are playing around in this galaxy like it was their own front yard. Go on, skipper, take a look yourself!"
Mason didn't have to look. He knew that he hadn't lost the alien; had known somehow that he wouldn't be able to. Too apparently, their own galaxy, near as it was to the Milky Way, was of the same Space, its continuum forged in the same curvature matrices.
"Shall I order our m-guns placed, sir?" It was Judith, and he knew she had grasped the implications of the situation as quickly as she always did. Sometimes he wondered if she were a computer herself, clad in the graceful body of a young woman rather than in a shell of permasteel. And other times....
He didn't even think about his answer. The "No" was automatic.
"I'll give the order, then, myself!" Cain said flatly.
"As you were, Mister Cain!"
"So it's rank, now, is it?" And he was grinning that damn grin again.
"Take it any way you want. If you think three meson cannon will stop a ship that's obviously built for battle, you're hardly thinking well enough for the responsibilities of your post."
"Well listen to who's sounding off! So we're just going to let 'em overhaul us; just let 'em blast us out of Space, or come tramping aboard if they want to!"
Mason didn't reply. He looked at the scanner, and now the alien craft was no longer a dot, but taking definite shape. It would be a couple of hours, yet, perhaps. And then it would have to be the way Cain had said.
The alien overhauled them hardly a billion miles inside the Rim, and Mason offered no resistance when he felt their magnetics touch the Scout and draw it gently to the flank of their great ship. It was necessary to scale down the scanner's field to see the huge shape in its entirety. Beside it, the Scout was like a sparrow's egg.
He punched the stud that would swing in the outer lock as the two craft touched with but the slightest jar.
Cain's ham-like fists were knotted at his sides, and Judith stood quietly, as though waiting for nothing more than the presence of an inspecting officer. But her delicate face was white, and Mason wondered if the brain under that crisp, dark hair was still functioning as a well disciplined piece of machinery, or if it felt the same fear that was in his own. He knew what was in Cain's thoughts. But at least when he'd told their small crew the score, they had accepted his decision--and his order to keep the m-guns where they were. So maybe this time it was Cain who was wrong.
The three of them stood in the compact confines of the control bubble, silent, waiting.
And when the alien stepped through their inner airlock port and faced them, Mason knew he was not succeeding in keeping his surprise from his features.
The alien could have been human. Even clad in his Spacegear, he was little taller than Cain, and his hair and eyes could have been those of an Earthly Viking of another day. Humanoid, so far as physical appearances went But in thought--?
There was a smile on the Viking face as the alien removed the transparent globe of his helmet. He seemed to realize instinctively that Mason was the Scout's commander.
"I am Kriijorl," he said. "I extend the greetings of Ihelos." And he proffered his right hand, Earth fashion, toward Mason!
Lance grasped it as he tried to organize the sudden scramble of his thoughts. It was a strong hand. He could feel the sinews of it beneath its gauntlet; like Cain's, yet different, somehow. "You are peacefully received, and welcome," he said. But there was a hollow sound to his words that he had not been able to help.
The smile still played on the alien's sun-darkened face.
"Thank you. I hope that I use your language not too clumsily. Our teleprobes may leave something to be desired in the matter of semantics. You will, I hope, forgive us for taking the liberty of their use. But since you employed no protective screens, and because of the necessity of our meeting--"
Cain broke in without hesitation. "I don't know what you've been up to while you've been tagging us, mister, but I--"
"At ease, Mister Cain!" Mason snapped. "We must allow our guest to explain his action and his mission."
The alien nodded slightly, glanced at Judith.
* * * * *
"It was your woman officer aboard," he began. "When we became aware that you also represented a bi-sexual race, as do we, we realized at once that you afforded us an unexpected opportunity. Otherwise, we should have remained at our business and spared you this intrusion.
"We of Ihelos, as you doubtless have noted, are at war. It is perhaps not war as your culture understands it; it is perhaps more accurately described by your word 'feud,' I think, and it has continued between us and our only similar neighbor, the planet of Thrayx, for many thousands of your years.
"We have been quite self-sufficient cultures for all that time, and have taken great care that our conflict not infect any other area in either our galaxy or yours, for neither of us, by inherent nature, is war-like in the sense of aggressiveness. Our conflict is between us and us alone.
"However, we of Ihelos recently received a staggering setback from our traditional enemy due to a certain unexpected innovation in their battle techniques, and we realized that our cause could end only in eventual defeat. As it shall, unless your people will help us."
There was a moment of silence, and Mason found himself wondering how often this had happened in Earth's own bitter past. It was, wherever men lived, an old story.
"What," Cain was asking, "is in this for us?"
"Could you tell us," Judith said before the alien could answer Cain, "just why you chose us? Certainly, you must have noticed our techniques of warfare are quite inferior to your own. We have not employed them for more than two hundred years--"
"Nor," Mason finished for her, "do we intend to again. You must seek help elsewhere, sir."
"That, for us, would be quite impossible," the alien replied slowly. "The chances of finding other life forms like our own are billions to one, the immensity of both our galaxies notwithstanding. Had you not ventured within range of our screens we would in all probability never known you existed. And to organize a search...." and now the smile on his lips was almost a sad thing, "a search of two galaxies--it would take us aeons, even at a thousand times the speed of light, simply to cover the vast distances involved, to say nothing of finding a similar life and thought form. And we do not have aeons, Lieutenant. We have but two--three, at most--generations.
"There is too little time to search for allies. We have no other choice, as you can see, than to take what advantage we can of those upon whom we may chance."
"But as my sergeant has already pointed out," Mason said, "our arms would be worthless to you. And, more importantly, we wish no more part in warfare. I am afraid, in that respect, you must excuse us, sir.... It has been a pleasure to have you aboard."
And suddenly, the smile was gone from the alien's face.
"I must demand of you, then--force you, if necessary--to take us to your planet, Lieutenant. For you can quite obviously help us. It is not your arms we want."
"I fail to understand you sir." Mason felt the icy sweat start again, repressed a shiver as it trickled the length of his spare body.
"Our planet, as our enemy's, is encircled by a wide ring of floating cosmic debris," the alien said. "In both instances, the rings are remnants of what once may have been satellites. In the ring which encircles us, we have successfully secreted refrigerated, lead-sheathed stores of male sperm, quite impossible for our enemy to locate. That is a necessity, of course, for any race that is constantly at war and is obliged to take all possible safeguards to insure its continued existence. We assume that Thrayx has done the same.
"However, our cell stores are useless if they lack ova to fertilize. On their last attack, Thrayxite ships succeeded in penetrating our innermost planetary defenses, and heavily damaged a number of our cities. Many of our women and young were victims.
"We therefore evacuated our planet's entire female population to an uninhabited world far distant. It was a young world and covered with thick forests, much like the labor planetoid which circles Thrayx, and we believed our breeders would be quite sufficiently camouflaged."
"Breeders?" Cain broke in.
"Our philosophy concerning women is slightly different than your own," the alien said. And then he resumed, "But in our haste we underestimated our enemy's cleverness. Thrayxite scouts located the planet, destroyed it, our women, and our seeds.
"And that is why you will take us to Earth, Lieutenant. We do not want your arms or your men. What we must ask for is--ten thousand of your women!"
II
A Cepheid Variable winked tauntingly at the edge of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud strewn like diamonds in a vast cosmic spume behind it. It corruscated in glorious display as, far off, a great silvery ship of Space and a tiny jot of man-made metal resumed their headlong motion through the mighty legion of the stars.
And then for an instant, the Cepheid's bright wink was dulled; eclipsed. A tapering streamlined shape slipped silently across it, and then was gone in the blackness, and the white dwarf resumed its brilliant display.
But the commander of the Cepheid's interruptor had been giving little time to appreciation of the myriad beauties in the great darkness that had swallowed her ship. She had trebled her screens and had taxed her craft's colossal power installation to its limit, forcing it to absorb and reconvert every erg of radiant energy possible as it labored to maintain the awful output necessary to cling to the very edge of R-Space, barely clear of the E-continuum itself.
She might have been an Amazon of Earth save for the great intelligence behind the high plane of her forehead, yet she was not without beauty, nor were those of her ship's complement. On their close-fitting uniforms were emblazoned the Planet-and-Circle insignia of their homeland, for they were of the galactic hosts of Thrayx.
"They proceed toward a planet on the near side of this galaxy called Earth," the second officer said. "Their mission is to replenish their supply of breeders."
"You are certain of that?"
"I admit it is peculiar, for the breeders they seek are women of that planet."
"Women?"
"Yes. However, the Earthmens' minds indicated a strong tendency to refuse cooperation."
"I see. Do you think our probe was detected?"
"No. I withdrew it immediately when the Earthmen were taken aboard the Ihelian destroyer."
There was a long moment of silence. The commander's eyes stayed unwaveringly on the control sphere mounted in gimbals before her. They remained concentrated on it when she spoke again.
"Women, you say. Hardly conceivable, Daleb, unless--unless it was not simply a penal planetoid which we destroyed!"
"A startling thought, Lady!"
"Yes. And the Earthmen, you say, did not have cooperative thoughts?"
"That is correct. They are not taking the Ihelian craft to their planet of their own volition."
"That is difficult to understand, Daleb, for the Ihelians are like ourselves in at least one respect. They are not aggressors. And if they are refused their strange request, they will leave the planet Earth peacefully. But if they are not refused it, perhaps the Earthman's superiors will cooperate, Daleb! In which case--"
"Whatever their mission, it is our duty to prevent its success, Lady. But to do this without violating the Book, without infecting a foreign area of the galaxy with our conflict?"
"I think there is a way," the commander said. She twisted the sphere slightly, and again the two tiny pips it held were caught squarely at the intersection of the curving light traceries within it. "There is a way," she said. "Give me a complete description of the clothing these Earthmen wore, Daleb...."
A tapering, streamlined shape slid shadow-like across the face of an undulating globular cluster, and then was swallowed quickly in the strange gray void of hyper-space.
* * * * *
Mason and Judith waited outside the towering New United Nations building in Greater San Francisco, their chauffeured government helio parked on a sky-ramp adjacent to the three hundredth floor.
They waited for Kriijorl; they had been assigned, as Earthmen best acquainted with the alien, as his official hosts during his stay on their planet. Mason had protested, but Judith had kept the protests from reaching the wrong ears.
"You won't make any mistakes. You're home, now!" she had whispered. "After all, he's only human!"
It had been the first time Mason had heard a hint of levity in her voice, and he had liked it, and decided to take the assignment gracefully. And, the orders said, Sergeant Judith Kent went with the assignment. Without Cain!
He hardly felt nervous at all as they waited for the Ihelian to leave the General Council chamber.
"Wonder how he made out?" he said idly, offering the girl a self-lighting cigarette. "Been in there for hours...."
"We'll know soon enough," she said. "But I--I personally can't conceive of it, sir. Of course, the New-UN is very practiced in dealing with all kinds of cultures. Remember the time they had with those awful five-legged things from Canis Major? Wanted to trade all the tritium we'd need to blow up a planet just for trees; because they worshipped trees! Any and all kinds of trees...."
Mason smiled. He was good looking when he smiled and the Space-tension was gone from his slate colored eyes. "I remember. But it looks as though they're going to have the toughest time with somebody just like us--two legs, two arms, oxygen-breathing.... Women, the man said. Just what the devil does he expect us to do? Draft 'em? Have an international lot drawing?"
* * * * *
She smoked quietly, and her gray eyes were thoughtful. "A matter of view-point, sir," she said finally. "As it always is. To them, females are for breeding only, to keep their war machine well stocked. From what Kriijorl said, they do not understand love as we do. There's simply one purpose...."
"Well, that's why I think the whole thing is--well, as you say, inconceivable from our point of view. Our culture, our women just aren't conditioned for such an existence."
"Think back two centuries, sir."
"You don't have to keep calling me 'sir' like that!" Mason said, feeling a sudden warmth at the back of his neck as he said it. And then, "Two centuries back. Yes. After every war, Earth's birth rate would go crazy. Mother Nature ruled the roost in those days, didn't she? Supply and demand, cause and effect. It's a wonder Man ever got anywhere."
"More wonder some men do--"
Mason looked up. But Judith's face was, as usual, quite calm and detached. "You say something?"
"I said I'd like to have you get Kriijorl to demonstrate that teleprobe thing of his for us, if you can, s---- Lance. How did he say it worked?"
"I still don't get it completely. A peculiar mixture of radio and the electroencephalograph, I think. He said it replaced radio on Ihelos and Thrayx centuries ago. You can communicate to a group or an individual with it in language, or in basic thought pictures. That's what they use it mostly for, of course, and as such, it's termed a mentacom. But he told me that it can also be used as it was on us as a teleprobe when the subject isn't screened. They use a specially tuned carrier wave of some sort, he said, that impinges on a thought wave pattern, but instead of registering the pattern's electronic impulse equivalents as does the electroencephalograph, it 'reflects' them. Like a basic radar system. And the receiver, it's a tiny thing, breaks the reflected pattern down into values equivalent to those in which the 'listener' thinks; amplifies, and that's it! Mind reading made easy, I guess."
Judith squirmed a little uneasily. "I'm glad they're not natural telepaths, anyway," she answered. "And even with a gimmick like that--"
And then the conversation was lost as Kriijorl, flanked by two New-UN guides, strode from the building. The stiff breeze at three hundred stories of what had once been called Nob Hill flicked his scarlet short-cape behind him and rippled the broad front of his black and silver tunic.
He climbed into the helio with a smiled greeting, seated himself to Judith's right as he knew Earth custom demanded, and the craft was lifting slowly over the central area of the ancient city before Mason spoke.
"Well, how did they treat you in there, sir?"
"Not as well as I had hoped," Kriijorl answered. "Your President-General spoke with me privately after the World Delegates Council met to question me, and he held out extremely little hope. However, the issue is to be debated. I think perhaps more out of diplomatic courtesy than actual consideration. I am to be informed of the official decision tomorrow...."
"There were scientists present, of course?"
"Yes; you have brilliant men on Earth, Lieutenant. They are good thinkers. I am certain they were interested in me for more than the sole fact that I am an alien of a race so precisely a replica of your own. But it is again the old factor, cultural difference. Your entire world simply regards women differently than we. I imagine my request, to persons less learned than those with whom I spoke, would be quite shocking anywhere on the planet."
"Perhaps," Judith murmured. "Yet somehow I wonder. Somehow I wonder how much two hundred years has really changed us. Our history in such things is not pleasant, Kriijorl. Many of our women once gave their bodies for money. Shock us? I'm not sure you really could. For your breeders simply give their bodies to produce the flesh for war. And there was a time when we did that, too."
There was silence between them for a while, and then Lance began directing the Ihelian's attention to points of interest as the air phase of the diplomatic tour got under way.
The blue-green beauty of the Pacific stretched lazily below them from the colorful California shore line to the west. Surrounding air traffic was light, and the tour proceeded smoothly eastward; over the Great Divide, and then swung north. Kriijorl seemed impressed and grateful for the momentary respite.
* * * * *
It was near the end of the tour's air phase that Mason remembered Judith's request, and Kriijorl obliged with an amused smile, producing a personal mentacom for Judith to examine.
"And the receiver simply fits about the head like earphones?"
"Like this," Kriijorl said. They were nearing Denver, and air traffic at their level had picked up, and the helio was proceeding more slowly so that Kriijorl's demonstration caused him to miss little of the tour.
He fitted the compact headpiece to his ears and flicked a small switch. It was suddenly bathed in a warm orange glow. "This way, the device functions as a limited range mentacom," he began. And then he flicked the switch again. "And now, as a teleprobe, you see, I could tell you, Lady Judith, just what--"
She flushed furiously, but Kriijorl had suddenly stopped speaking. His face had blanched, and a look of bewildered fury was suddenly in his eyes.
"Lieutenant! That air bus! There!" He pointed to a thick egg shaped vehicle speeding to the north. "Tell your chauffeur to pursue it at once! It carries a full passenger-load of Earthwomen!"
For a moment Mason thought the Ihelian was attempting some strange joke. But a look at the man's face told him that here was no joke; that here was something he was failing to understand.
"Earthwomen? Sure--"
"Plus two other beings, Lieutenant. Two others using Thrayxite probe screens!"
On Mason's order the government chauffeur swiftly heeled the helio about. "Those buses can make nearly a full Mach when they're wide open like that one," he told Kriijorl. "We can't overtake them, but maybe we can keep up. I'll have the chauffeur try for radio contact--"
"No, no! They'll be alert for any signs of awareness of their presence! Wait--" The Ihelian made a third adjustment on the mentacom, and it emitted a slight humming sound, and the orange glow vanished. "This will screen us for a short period, at least," he said. "And if we've not been already detected, perhaps we'll be able to follow. If you'll continue to help me, Lieutenant--"
"Looks as though they've got some of ours, doesn't it?" Mason said evenly. There was a strange heat in his veins now, and with the Ihelian, his nervousness was somehow evaporated. "But how the devil--"
"They are clever, Lieutenant. We were somehow followed here even as we at first followed you in your Scout ship. We may have been probed before you were taken aboard our screened destroyer."
"But you said nothing about destroying their breeders," Judith said above the throbbing roar of the helio's fast accelerating jets. "Why would they want--" and she let the sentence die as comprehension snapped in her gray eyes. Her dark, slender eyebrows arched nearly together as she pushed the thought further.
The borderlands of Canada sped beneath them, and then there was pine forest, but the helio kept the fleeing bus in sight even as the shadows of a dying day crept inexorably from the east to engulf them. And then, abruptly, the bus had started down.
"They're hanging a neat frame on you, sir," Mason said. "Making certain you don't get the women you ask. By kidnaping some, they plan sure as hell to make it look as though Ihelian desperation is responsible. And bingo, your side's in the dog house in nothing flat. No deal!"
"They're damnably cunning," Kriijorl said. "It will not be the first time they have come near making utter fools of us. I can't understand that."
"But how would they have gotten those women?" Judith asked. The helio was slanting downward, and was now less than five miles distant from the fast vanishing bus. It began to skim the tree tops of a great tract of spruce, its chauffeur awaiting Mason's signal to drop quickly out of their quarry's line of sight.
"Video ads, of course," Mason answered quickly, straining his tensed eyes to estimate distance in the fast gathering darkness. "Some big deal. Spaceliner hostess at twice the going rate of payment. Anything like that...."
The bus finally vanished less than a half-mile ahead of Mason's helio, and there was a dark vertical shadow jutting just above the tree tops. He knew it was one of their shuttle boats, and from its apparent size would easily hold all the bus would be able to carry--perhaps a full three hundred. He gave orders quickly to the chauffeur, and then the helio was hovering inches above the tree tops, and he tossed a plastiweave ladder over the side.
"Don't use the radio," he snapped to Judith. "Just get back to New-UN headquarters. Inform them any way possible of what's going on, and then flash the air patrol and tell 'em to come gunning!"
He didn't give her a chance to argue. He simply swung over the helio's side, Kriijorl after him, and within moments they were on the ground, and running with what silence they could through the darkness toward the towering Thrayxite ship a quarter-mile distant.
"Their action is incomprehensible to me," the Ihelian grunted between gulps of air. "It violates the most basic tenets of the ancient Book of the Saints, sacred to us both--"
"Better save your breath for running," Mason told him, and they sprinted across the soft pine needle forest floor, shielding their eyes from treacherous, low hanging boughs, dodging the trees themselves as best they could in the moonlit darkness.
And they burst upon the clearing in which the Thrayxite ship had landed almost before realizing it.
Mason caught a glimpse of Earthwomen, being led as though drugged into the yawning flank of the silent vessel.
There was a sudden movement in the darkness to his left, and he heard the start of an outcry on the Ihelian's lips. But it was all he heard or saw. There was a quick knifing pain in his skull, and he crumpled to the ground.
III
"You may wait in here, sergeant," the New-UN orderly said. She was ushered into a small, comfortably appointed chamber adjoining the main conference hall, and the perfectly controlled coolness of her bearing was at its peak. To the casual glance of the orderly, perhaps, it flawlessly masked the vital convictions which had long seethed within her and made her the little known woman she was. The studied mask itself had made her the efficient Space officer she was. And at the moment she was glad for it, because it also concealed the anxious uncertainty that twisted coldly inside her.
She was to wait, the Council had informed her. Wait, while the information she had given them was analyzed, digested. As though, perhaps, what she had said was part of some insidious plot; as though it were too fantastic to be the truth.
They had not even immediately authorized the dispatch of a patrol cruiser to the spot where she'd left Lance and Kriijorl over two hours ago, and by now--?
She tried not to think or what the Earthman and the Ihelian might be facing, alone and in the darkness. Nor of the conclusions to which the Council, called into emergency session by the President General himself when her information had been rapidly relayed through the correct channels to him, might arrive.
She could only wait.
And her waiting was terminated with an abrupt suddenness that made the twisting cold thing inside her a churning confusion. It had been only minutes, hardly minutes.
Only one of them came into the small room where she sat. She rose quickly to attention. It was an aide to the President General himself; a brevet-Colonel wearing the uniform of the World Police.
"Sergeant Kent," he said, "it is the Council's decision that you be placed under temporary arrest. Your case will be heard at the next sitting of the martial court to which your unit is assigned. If you will accompany me, please...."
"May I ask, sir, what the charge against me is?" Her voice was steady by cultivated habit.
"You are to be held on suspicion of acting as accessory before and after the fact of conspiring to assist an alien power in the achievement of its objective within the governmental jurisdiction of Earth without official permission of the New United Nations."
"But the Ihelians have not done that, sir!" she protested. "It is a plot of their enemy, as I explained to the Council--"
"You will be given full benefit of due legal process, sergeant," the officer said. "You will come with me, please."
The Women's Detainment Barrack was not unpleasant, yet, Judith thought, it may as well have been a medieval dungeon. But her own problem, she knew, was nothing beside the cunning success of the Thrayxites.
The call-buzzer at the side of her bunk interrupted her thoughts; it meant she was wanted in the main guard room. She straightened her uniform quickly, and within moments presented herself before the barrack warden.
Roger Cain stood beside the warden's desk. There was something white in his hand, and she knew what it was.
"You're at liberty, Sergeant Kent," the beefy-faced warden informed her in a tone as casual as though she'd asked her for a cigarette. "Warrant Officer Cain has posted a release voucher; you're ordered into his custody until your trial. That's all. You may go."
She left the barrack with Cain, wordlessly. None of it made sense. Unless--
"Well, don't I even get a thank you?" the red-haired giant asked.
"Yes, Mister Cain, sorry. But I don't understand--"
"Why I did it?" He chuckled, and she didn't like the sound of it. "I'm only too glad to have you in my custody, young woman! And, you know, you're not supposed to be out of my sight any--that is, any of the time!"
She felt her face redden, and spun about to face him. There was sudden anger at her lips and her coolness had evaporated.
"You contempti--"
"Easy there, sergeant! Always knew there was a little more to you than that ice cube exterior of yours! But tell me--d'you want to sit back there in that dump, or shall we stick our noses into the lovely mixup your precious Lieutenant Mason has set off?"
She stared up at him wordlessly, the blood hot in her cheeks. And she tried to think. This was Cain as she knew he was. This was Roger Cain, angling for a deal.
"I'm in your custody," she bit out. "I must stay within your sight. That is your responsibility."
He laughed at her, then gripped her elbow.
"Come on," he said. "I've got a R-IX waiting at the field. I think we should go on a little trip, sergeant. There are people I want to see!"
They were streaming for open Space within less than thirty minutes from the time Cain had freed her. She didn't ask him how he'd gotten permission for the fleet R-IX's use, or how he'd obtained her voucher, nor did she ask him how he had learned of what had happened to Lance and Kriijorl, yet she knew that somehow he was aware of the Thrayxites and their plot. Cain had ways of learning the things he wanted to learn, getting the things he wanted to get.
"Keep an eye on the scanner for me, will you, beautiful?"
"Yes sir."
"And forget that sir stuff! Look, Judy--"
"For what do you want me to watch, sir?"
Cain grunted, gave a shrug of his powerful shoulders and turned his attention back to the pursuit's compact control console.
"Two blips, honey. Tearing hell-for-leather out of old Sol's little family. One'll be chasing the other, if my guess is any good. We want the front one."
"But--but that would be the--"
"The Thrayxite crowd. Right?"
For a moment she was silent. She knew he could not mean to attack; not with a tiny pursuit, swift as it was.
"Mister Cain, I can only guess at what you intend doing. But it will be my privilege in court to testify concerning your conduct of custodianship--"
"You must be working on the assumption that we're going back there, sweetheart!"
"You--"
"A deal is where you find it! Watch for that front blip, sergeant. With what we know of Kriijorl and his crowd, this oughta be a natural!"
* * * * *
The cubicle in which he awoke was softly lit, and the painful throb Mason knew should be splitting his head apart was strangely absent. Kriijorl was bending over him, loosening the tightness of the military collar at his throat.
"They certainly were taking no chances with you," he said. His long Viking's hair was matted with blood just above the temple, yet he seemed to be suffering little pain, himself. "How do you feel?"
"O.K. I guess. Don't feel anything, really...." Kriijorl unbuckled the wide straps that held him solidly in an acceleration-hammock, and he sat up. The steel-walled room rocked for a moment, then steadied.
"The Thrayxites are not vicious, any more than we. If they do not kill outright, they apparently take medical precaution to see that their victims suffer as little pain as possible. We're captives, however, together with your Earthwomen. We've been in flight for about an hour; putting us well out of your system, if we're hyperdriving--moving in what you term R-Space."
"Then--"
"Apparently no help of any kind arrived in time, Lieutenant."
Mason remembered, then. Judith.... Somehow she hadn't made it. Or hadn't made them believe her. This trip, he was strictly on his own. Not just a space weary Scout Lieutenant any more.
"What'll they do with us?"
"Pump us for information, probably. Kill me afterward. You should be safe enough in that respect. You're an alien, not a part of our conflict. Their labor planetoid for you, I would imagine. It is a jungle covered sphere at the edge of their planetary ring; our scouts have sighted it on numerous occasions. A handful of men in each of its camps, mining, probably, for the ore used in Thrayxite engines. But it will be better than death."
"What are our chances, Kriijorl?" Mason felt the familiar nervousness returning to his wiry body, yet this time it was in some way different. Not the kind that ate your insides out from too much Space, for too long.
"Of escape, you mean?" Mason nodded. "There is no reason for you to risk--"
"Sure as hell is, friend. First because I believe you're my friend. Second, there were a couple of things you said awhile back that got me thinking. And third, I got myself shanghaied, and I don't think I'll like where I'm going!" Cain, Mason thought to himself, wasn't the only guy in the universe with a muscle!
The Ihelian grinned. "We'll watch for a chance of some kind, then. But I will not let you risk your life. We of Ihelos obey the Book, even if our enemy sees fit occasionally to violate the spirit in which it was conceived."
"Tell me something," Mason said. "This feud of yours. What's it all about? You mentioned that Book business once before, and it seems a people with your apparent piety and maturity and general advancement would certainly find a way to arbitrate such a dispute. What are you fighting about?"
Kriijorl's answering smile was thin, and there was a puzzled look in his craggy features.
"We fight because the Book of the Saints says we must!" he answered at length. "And further than that--"
"Yes?"
"Further than that, I'm afraid we do not know!"
Mason felt his features twisting into an incredulous expression despite his efforts to realize and appreciate the wide gap of cultural differences between them.
"Don't know! But you can't fight a war without knowing why! You--"
"It is in the Book of the Saints," the Ihelian said, "and, therefore, it is our command. And--" he looked into the Earthman's face with the slightest hint of a smile, "from what I've learned of Earth's history from your own lips, Lieutenant, what of your own past wars? Who among your own soldiery has really known why he fought?"
"Well, but--" And then Mason returned the smile. "No, it isn't so different, is it? But tell me more about this Book. Is it based on law, religion, ethics?"
And this time there was no smile on the Ihelian's broad face.
"Legend says all three," he replied.
"Legend? And yet you blindly obey--"
"We always have. Its writings, such as we understand them to be, have governed us for millenia, Lieutenant. The Book is our way, our life. We are told we could not be a civilization without it."
Mason was silent for a long moment. He did not want to question too deeply the beliefs sacred to another, yet it was so damnably peculiar. They fought bitterly, and they did not know why.
"Could you--would you let me see a copy of this Book, Kriijorl?"
"If I could I'd be glad to, Lieutenant. For I have often wished I could see the words it contains myself."
"You've never read it?"
"Never. Nor has any Ihelian or Thrayxite for thousands of years. There is, you must understand, only one Book of the Saints."
"Just one copy?"
"Yes. It has long been deemed sacrilege for mortal eyes to view the ancient writings. The single copy is kept in a great vault, built of indestructible metals, and protectively sheathed to last for all Time. The spot above its burial place is marked by a tall spire of stone. It is jealously protected."
"You said that its commands commit you and Thrayx to eternal battle. But if you could only read it, you might learn the basic cause of your conflict--and, knowing, certainly--"
"The thought has often occurred to me. But, there is even more prohibiting such an impossible undertaking than the powerful bondage of tradition and belief alone, Lieutenant. And that is the Book's very location."
"And that--?"
"The subterranean vault in which it rests is guarded in the Forest of Saarl. And the Forest of Saarl, my friend, is on Thrayx."
IV
"It is something completely beyond my understanding," the Ihelian was saying. The two men stood, each flanked by two guards, at the threshold of a great ramp which led from the main air lock of the Thrayxite ship to the reddish surface of the spaceport upon which it had landed but minutes before. Mason felt a chill of awed amazement, not because of the unexpected beauty of the verdant hills that rolled in a delicate blend of kaleidoscopic pastels on every side of the 'port and as far as the eye could see, nor was it even from the sight of the exquisite towers that rose as though from the heart of some fabled fairyland scant miles to the south.
"They're all--all women!" Mason breathed. "Not a single man!" And he looked quickly to Kriijorl. "You mean you did not know this?"
"Know? By the teeth of Jhavuul, we never so much as suspected, Lieutenant! We have not looked upon a Thrayxite face for five thousand years."
The guards spoke to them tersely in the common tongue of Ihelos and Thrayx, although peculiarly accented to Ihelian ears, and Kriijorl gestured with a slight movement of his head to Mason. At a quick pace they started down the ramp.
"We're sunk, kid," Mason said. And he saw the heaviness in the great Viking's face. "We'll never make it out of here in a million years. Even if we made a break for it; even if we had our hands free, where could we hide? Couldn't make a move. Two men among an entire female populace--"
He let the sentence trail off as he realized that Kriijorl wasn't hearing him. And as their brief view of Thrayx was terminated by their entrance into a smaller shuttle-ship, he saw the hint of a smile flicker at the corners of the Ihelian's lips.
Their captors strapped them into hammocks, and when they had gone to assist others in herding a portion of the Earthwomen aboard the same craft, Kriijorl finally spoke.
"I think for the moment their probes may be off us," he said quickly. "I was relieved of my own during my unconsciousness, so we're no longer screened. And the fact that we speak in your tongue does us little good. But hear me. If we are being taken where I hope we are, then they are playing into our hands almost as well as we could have asked. There will be a limited freedom there, and a chance, if we are clever enough, to get to a mentacom installation. A planetary unit of unlimited range."
"But among women?" Mason asked, and his throat was dry.
"That is the point," Kriijorl replied tersely. "We shall be among males almost exclusively, save for the Earthwomen and those Thrayxites who periodically will be sent to breed."
"You mean the planetoid that you talked of before...? But I--"
"Think a moment! Thrayxite is a matriarchy, something we of Ihelos never suspected. And therefore we erred further--what we believed to be a labor planetoid is not, of course!"
"Breeders!"
"Exactly. And if we can make it to one of their mentacoms, perhaps our problem will be solved. Except that--" His voice hesitated, and Mason saw doubt in the sudden frown. "I--I have no right to sacrifice your life nor those of your women. If we were to get to a mentacom it would be to contact my people, to inform them of the planetoid's true nature, so that we may even the score for what was done to our own breeders, and perhaps even form a plan to take prisoners to replace them. But such a message would be intercepted, of course."
"Hell, we could dodge 'em long enough--"
"Perhaps we could, Lieutenant. But the ships I summon will be fighting their way through a trebled Thrayxite guard--and once within range of our enemy's breeder satellite, they will have little time to seek us out and effect our rescue. Destruction will have to be immediate. Now do you understand?"
Mason wet his lips. He understood. Death for the breeders. For the Earthwomen. And for themselves.
"Nuts!" he clipped out. "That means that as far as you're going to be concerned, I'm just another Ihelian private first class for awhile, not a space-neurotic Earthman! And our girls ... well, I think--I think they'd prefer anything to the living death in store for them--the rotting away of their lives in some infested alien jungle. Anyway, somebody's got to be judge. So let's get this damned thing doped out!"
The Ihelian began a reply, but the words were stopped in his throat by the sudden pressure of acceleration as powerful engines fumbled suddenly to throbbing life and lifted the Thrayxite craft quickly toward the eye of a great white sun.
* * * * *
For the second time in her life, Judith Kent watched the warp configurations of the Large Magellanic Cloud from the far side of the Rim; somehow it frightened her, as though some awful deadliness must lie within it.
Helplessly, she carried out Cain's orders, and as hopelessly, wondered of the fate of Lance and Kriijorl. Captives, with the Earthwomen, in the Thrayxite ship with which Cain was so rapidly closing? Or lying dead somewhere, as she more than half believed, in the chill wilds of northern Canada? The odds had been so great. She knew that to hope without reason was folly, and yet not to hope was no longer to care.
She twisted away quickly from Cain's muscular arm.
"What's eating you, duchess? Your conscience giving you trouble, or are you just plain scared?" When she didn't reply, he laughed shortly, and gestured toward the scanner. In it, the slender Thrayxite craft was growing steadily larger as Cain's swift pursuit gradually folded the gap of curved Space between them. "In a couple of minutes, we'll be ready to talk turkey, sweetheart. They ought to be aware of us right this minute. I think they'll listen to what we have to offer."
"To what you have to offer!"
He laughed again. "It's more than Mason ever had! You know, sometimes I think you were torching for that space-happy has-been!"
She felt the burn of rising color in her cheeks and turned quickly away from him.
"You don't get it yet, do you duchess?" his heavy voice was saying behind her. "It's never occurred to you that there are other places to be beside with your own flock; that there are other men among whom to seek your fortune if the ones you were born among didn't offer the opportunities you expected. What are we among the stars at all for if it's not to find our destinies anywhere we think they might lie? What's this Big Freedom for, if not to use to some kind of advantage? And me, I'm sick of being a Warrant under worn out space-neurotics like Mason! And I don't want to end up being one, either!"
Judith held her lips tight against the thing that surged hotly inside her. There would have to be a way to stop this man. And if there weren't--How the pampered friends whom she'd left so proudly to choose this calling would laugh at her, would say "that was what the hot-headed little rebel deserved ... she had it coming if she couldn't act like a lady." And they were wrong!
But this man was hideously twisting all the things she had thought were good and right, worth hoping and striving for. All the priceless things that had stood for more than the soft, idle and pointlessly shallow existence to which she'd been born.
"But I guess you wouldn't get it," Cain was saying. "Born with a silver shovel in your mouth, you don't have to worry about sweating out your pile! Quit any time and there it all is after your little adventure, still waiting for you to come home to! Maybe they'll even want you to write a book! But me--my father wasn't a lucky g-prospector."
A proximity alarm clanged, and Cain quickly turned his attention to the control banks. He jacked out the auto control and took over manually. And within seconds the pursuit was hovering over the great whale-like back of the Thrayxite craft, and then was drawn slowly to it as its powerful magnetics reached out, ensnared it. Then Cain cut the pursuit's drive, and they both waited.
The airlock opened, and the two women stepped through. There were weapons in their hands.
"I want to see your commander," Cain barked.
"I am the commander of this complement," the taller of the two said in an almost unaccented English. "You will consider yourselves my captives. Daleb...."
"What? Not all women." There was a curious look on Cain's face; thoughts were racing behind the thin blades of his eyes.
"You are prisoners of the matriarchy of Thrayx," the officer called Daleb said. "If you do not resist, you shall be unharmed."
"All right, come off that alien-meets-alien stuff," Cain said as though the two briefly-uniformed women before him held toys rather than weapons in their hands. "I didn't just tag after you at a billion times the speed of light to get thrown into one of your dungeons! I've got some information I think you can use. And--" and the curious look was again on his face, "--there are some--shall we say--services, I think I can profitably perform for you."
"Profitably, Earthman? Profitable to whom?"
"To both of us. To me--that's why I'm here--and to you."
Judith's face was white. Perhaps this was some clever trick of Cain's. She could have been wrong.
"Tell me this information you have, Earthman."
"Let's dicker about price, first, Goldylocks!" He stood there, confident, defiant, great muscles bunched beneath the fabric of his tunic.
"You, Earthman, are hardly in bargaining position!" Only the woman's mouth moved; her eyes bored straight into Cain's like fine diamond drills.
"Chuck me," Cain said with a grin, "and you chuck the best chance you've ever had to take your Ihelian friends to the cleaners. What information I have concerning Ihelian plans is one thing." Judith caught her breath. She knew Cain was lying now. Even Lance had learned little of the Ihelian strategy, above Kriijorl's attempt to enlist Earthwomen for Ihelian breeding colonies. It was all, she realized suddenly, a colossal bluff, from which Cain planned to play his cards as he went along! And now he had found a wedge of some sort, some new bargaining point. There was still that curious look on his face, that careless grin at his lips. "But what service I can render you," he was continuing, "is quite another! Ladies, how good are your teleprobe gadgets against an Ihelian screen? A big blank, aren't they? But I still think you'd give those cute shirts of yours to find out what's going on inside the thick skulls of our Ihelian friends."
A puzzled look flickered across the Thrayxite commander's face, yet she remained immobile, and her weapon held steady.
"First of all, bright eyes," Cain said swiftly, "may you be the first to know that they're all men! All men, get it?" There was a soft gasp from Daleb, and the commander's eyes flickered, widened almost imperceptibly. "And better yet, I'm a pal of Kriijorl, their commander who picked us up just inside the Rim that time you followed us into Earth. So think it over. It ought to be worth a fancy little pile to you, ladies, since women agents would be kind of conspicuous in an all-male civilization!"
"You expect us to believe this fantasy? Do you expect us to accept your proposal on the basis of nothing more than words? And the technique you describe. It has never been used, never even considered as a legitimate method of battle!"
Cain laughed easily. "Then maybe you better consider it if you want to come out on top! And as to the rest of it, if I was part of some counter-plot against you do you think I'd've gone to the trouble of bringing along some security?" And Judith felt something freeze inside her as he threw a careless glance in her direction. "There she is--Sergeant Judith Kent. Your hostage for this little operation! If I misbehave, she should make a pretty good bargaining point with Ihelos. From all I gather, they've got Earth sore enough at them as it is!"
There was an instant's silence, and then the commander said, "You have not proven your statement that our enemy is a male enemy."
"What do you think they wanted women for on Earth after you blasted that planetoid of theirs? A quilting party or something? Add it up."
The quiet in the small control bubble was electric. Judith watched the Thrayxites' faces as they weighed the incredible thing that Cain had said.
"I haven't got all eternity!" Cain snapped. "You think you can afford not to believe me?"
"Very well. Our Book has never mentioned this technique of spying, and therefore there can be no rule against it. As for the rest--that could be immaterial. You could be of value to us. Outline your plan."
"That's better, girls. Only take it just a little slower. We both know what we are, but let's haggle for awhile about the price, shall we?"
V
Judith shivered, partly from an uncontrollable terror and partly from the pre-dawn dampness creeping from the thick jungle surrounding the small clearing which held one of the breeder planetoid's many secluded colonies. The camp and the tangled growth which bounded it was her prison; a place in which there was freedom, yet where none were free. To walk or to run or to hide--but where? And so it was with the rest--the hard-muscled, obviously drug-clouded males who had never known any other world than this; who never questioned from whence came the periodic groups of Thrayxite women for them to fertilize; who only glared dully at her, dimly understanding that she was to be, although captive here, left to herself and unmolested. Yet despite her status as hostage and Earthwoman, she was afraid.
The brute of a camp leader, Bruhlla.... Not drugged like the rest. There was more to his sidelong glances than curiosity and vague resentment. Too often, she could sense his eyes upon her. And she wondered at the increasing frequency of his visits to the camp's well guarded mentacom installation.
She had lost count of night and days under the white sun of Thrayx and its ringed host. There had been two, perhaps, or three. Three days in which Roger Cain had been doing what? Was he with Kriijorl and Lance posing as their friend, their fellow captive, listening to their plans against their Thrayxite captors ... remembering? Or would they be freed, if indeed they still lived, in order that Cain could, with them, learn even more of Ihelian stratagems on a far greater scale?
And the Earth girls--she had heard the cries of some, the desperate curses of others.
Bruhlla, entitled to use of the mentacom for daily contact reports with Thrayx as he was, was the only other alien being on the planetoid who could converse with her. He had lost little time in probing her to learn her tongue. And he had already hinted at the fate of the women from her planet. In other camps on the planetoid, held in small isolated groups, unmolested, Bruhlla had said. But prisoners, as was she.
Somehow, the Ihelians would have to know.
For there was no Earth to which to turn now.
The shiver again shook her slender body, and her tattered uniform did little to shield her from the damp cold.
"Still one apart from the rest of us, are you?" The growl of Bruhlla's voice behind her startled her, and she turned quickly to face the loose grimace of derision on his thick lips.
"I am to be left to myself," she said with what assurance she could muster. "That is your order."
"I know my order, little one! No need to tell Bruhlla his orders! But perhaps you will grow colder; perhaps you will grow hungry."
"You couldn't--"
"I have no order about feeding you, little one!"
Somehow she found the strength to voice her defiance. For she could still think. And thought, Lance had once told her, was the ultimate strength....
"You lie! There was such an order! But if you wish to bring the wrath of your masters down upon your ugly head." She watched his unkempt face, fanned the sudden puzzlement she saw growing in his red, sadistic eyes. If his intelligence were blurred enough by the self-made drug of his lust. "I myself heard such an order; and if you can prove me mistaken you may do with me what you will!" God, would he stop to realize that she understood not a word of the Thrayxite tongue?
"Quickly proven, my little one! Quickly enough proven! And then if what you say is untrue...." He left the sentence mercifully unfinished, and turned toward the sturdily-built cubicle that housed the colony's mentacom.
"Wait! I'll only believe your proof if I can hear it for myself!"
"Come along then and you shall hear it!" The thick lips slackened into a lascivious grin that sickened her, but she hastened to follow him. And he did not see her as she scooped the jagged stone from the ground, thrust it into a tattered tool-pocket of her uniform.
Past the quiescent, sweat reeking bodies of the bull-muscled guards, into the dimly lit chamber beyond, Bruhlla half walking, half shambling before her.
She watched him as he switched the device into life; waited until its dull orange glow assured that it was ready for use. So much like the communications room of an ordinary ship of Earth, she thought. So like the familiar things of her life, yet so alien.
He had barely slipped the mentacom's headpiece on his skull and adjusted a simply calibrated control dial when she struck him at the base of his thick neck with the stone, all the force of her supple young body behind it.
Blood spurted as its ragged edges tore through flesh, bone and nerves, and slowly, Bruhlla crumpled from the rude chair that held his dying bulk.
Thought images as well as words, Kriijorl had explained during their flight so long ago in the helio. Language would be no barrier. Over the head, like this ... and this switch--
She twirled the large dial from its setting, watched a slender thread of light within a transparent sphere above it fluctuate in breadth as the dial twisted. And when it was at its widest, she gambled that it indicated the broadest transmitting beam of which the mentacom was capable.
And then she marshalled her thoughts, carefully chose the simplest words.
Warning, Ihelos! There is an Earthman among you at work as a spy for Thrayx! I am a captive.
Over and over, the same words, the same thought images which they formed; of Cain, of this hell-planetoid itself.
The orange glow pulsated as though itself alive with the desperation of her signal. And she heard the guard barely in time.
A howl of rage bellowed from him as she turned, twisted frantically just outside his grasp, darted headlong through the door.
And she was quicker than those outside; she was beyond them, running, the breath sobbing in her throat.
Away from the blood-soaked thing she'd left crumpled in death behind her, and toward the jungle's edge. Toward some new horror, perhaps, and toward a freedom that would be short-lived at best. For she had killed Bruhlla, and she knew they would not stop now until she had been run to earth.
* * * * *
The three men watched as the six ships landed in the jungle clearing; emptied of the selected Thrayxite women who would in little more than a day's time re-enter them, the breeders' seed within their bodies, for the journey back to the mother planet.
It had been the same the day before, and the day before that, and in the distance, they had watched similar craft descend toward other of the many colonies with which the lush planetoid was dotted.
"Nuts!" Cain said. He turned to Mason. "What the hell else is there to do? Sit here and rot? They won't kill us. They'll just let Nature take its course--"
"There's more to be done than simply make a run for it to one of their ships," Mason snapped. "The mentacoms on them, Kriijorl's said a dozen times, haven't the necessary range."
"So what's your plan? Or don't I get to hear any of the details?"
Mason studied the big man's face. Captured in his attempt to rescue the Earthwomen, he had said. His explanation had been that simple. New-UN hadn't believed Judith, but she had convinced him, and so he'd tried on his own responsibility, and simply hadn't made it. And then they'd brought him here, scarcely hours after Mason and Kriijorl had themselves been delivered to the teeming colony.
Logical enough, yes. Cain was the kind who would try such a crazy stunt, alone, with such supreme overconfidence in his own muscle power. Yet--
"We must not be impatient," Kriijorl interrupted his thought. He stood up, his blond head nearly touching the top of the plastifabric tent. "We must be certain and wait for the best time, Mister Cain. For if we fail in our first attempt, there will not be a second. And it has only been three days. As yet, we have been left quite to ourselves; even my life has not been threatened."
Mason noticed the puzzled frown that was across the Ihelian's forehead. "Do you think--"
"I cannot even guess the reason for that," Kriijorl murmured, as though more to himself than in answer to Mason's question. "By all the rules of our conflict, I should be stretched naked for the jungle beasts by now."
"Forget it!" Cain broke in quickly. "You're alive now, and if we can have a little action around here maybe you'll stay that way. We've watched long enough. They don't guard those ships at all. These breeders they keep drugged to the eyes, so why should they? I say we just grab one and blast off! Unless somebody's got a better plan, and I still haven't heard one--"
"Awfully anxious, aren't you, Mister Cain?" Mason asked.
"I'm not afraid of 'em if that's what you mean!"
Lance turned to Kriijorl. "Maybe he's right. We've watched for three days. What do you think?"
The Ihelian looked out across the colony of low, square-shaped enclosures and to its far side where the twisted jungle began; to the spot where the mentacom was housed in a squat, guarded dome of crudely-shaped steel. Then he turned back to the Earthman, and Mason saw the uncertainty in his eyes.
"We have gained far less than I had hoped by watching," he said slowly. "We have learned the number of their guards, and the period of their change, but perhaps that is all we shall learn. If you think that as soon as there is darkness--"
"About time!" Cain said sourly. "And it'll be straight for the--"
"To the mentacom first," Mason said quietly. "And after that, to the ships if we can, Mister Cain." He felt strangely calm as his eyes met Cain's squarely. Somewhere within him, there was something changing. "Take it from an ex-has-been, big man! That's how it's going to be!"
* * * * *
The camp was dark and silent as the three men left the tent. They walked as if from boredom, changing direction often as though at random; yet they moved with a deceiving swiftness, and each step brought them closer to the crude dome. The sound of their movements was as a whisper that lost itself with the quiet murmur of the night wind through the web of the jungle, and when they were close enough, they halted, to wait; to watch.
There was the soft clink of metal on metal and the mutter of dead-toned voices as the guard changed. Four hulking shapes walked at last in a tired shamble from the structure housing the mentacom. Four others prepared to take their posts.
And there was little to disturb the silence after that.
A muffled grunt, a choked off curse lost in a brief rustle of undergrowth as though a sudden breeze had momentarily ruffled its languid calm. And that was all.
Four breeders lay dead outside the dome.
Mason felt the warm stickiness of blood on his face, and the sting of a deep cut somewhere upon it. He saw that Cain was straightening over a mangled form; that Kriijorl had overcome odds of two to one. The breeder at his own feet had died swiftly of a deftly broken neck, a reddened dirk still clutched in his stiffening fingers.
Then they were inside the dome, and Kriijorl was placing the head-unit of the mentacom over his matted yellow hair.
Mason watched in the half-light of the pulsing orange glow, listened to the heaviness of Cain's breathing.
And he saw Kriijorl's face stiffen suddenly. With a swift movement the Ihelian had handed him the head-unit, and with slippery fingers he fumbled the device into place over his own head.
Before he could think he had given Cain all the warning that he had needed.
"My God, it's Judith! Somehow she's--"
Kriijorl lunged too late. The man whom Judith's mentacom message had branded as a spy was already through the dome's door, running.
Mason moved more quickly than the Ihelian then. Ahead in the jungle there was a crashing sound, and Mason tripped suddenly himself as he ran, fell. Kriijorl leapt past him in the darkness, as though he could somehow see through it, and then Mason had regained his feet and was following blindly.
And suddenly he thought of the empty ships behind them, and Cain's abrupt uselessness to his Thrayxite employers. Then--
But the gamble was too great. Cain might not double back, but instead plunge headlong further and further into the concealing morass before him. No, Cain would not double back. Not now. For in Kriijorl he had met an even match, and now he was afraid!
Fully an hour had passed when, his tunic torn and the exposed flesh bleeding, Mason caught up with Kriijorl.
"He was nearly within my hands for a moment--" the giant whispered hoarsely. He breathed with difficulty, and there were long slashes gleaming redly in the darkness across his great muscles.
Mason stood silently for moments, toying with a thought that nagged insistently at the edge of his brain. He knew Cain. He knew the man.
Then suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by the muffled sound of a rocket blast, and within moments there was a vertical trail of fire above them as a Thrayxite ship hurtled skyward.
"By Jhavuul--"
"No!" Mason exclaimed. "The blast was from in front of us, he didn't double back! Must be another colony near our own, and he stumbled out of this overgrown mess and right into it. There was simply an empty ship--"
"Then the traitor has won!" Kriijorl's face was tilted upward, and in the faint glow of the planetesimal belt that girdled Thrayx, it seemed more than ever that of an heroic Viking king of ages gone.
"There's a chance he hasn't!" Mason breathed. He had the thought now, pinned down, clear in his head. "If there has been no alarm back at our own camp we may still have the mentacom to ourselves. We'll signal Ihelos as you planned and then--then there is something else you will say. Something else that I think will, as the saying goes on Earth, kill two birds with a single blast."
Mason had lost track of time; perhaps it was as many as two hours before they had fought their way through the clutching undergrowth back to the mentacom at the fringe of their own camp. Several times they had had to stop, for there had been sounds in the jungle other than those they had made themselves. Animals, Kriijorl had said, who had got the scent of their blood. But the noises had not been fast and crashing--more those of stealth, as were those of their own steps. A single animal, perhaps, with the scent of their blood; or that of the breeder guard they had slain. And stalking.
The dome was still silent, and the stiff corpses outside it lay undisturbed in the thick undergrowth. In the clearing the six empty Thrayxite ships towered in the sleeping quiet, star-shine glinting faintly from their polished hulls.
Wordlessly, they entered the dome, and it was as they had left it.
Kriijorl again adjusted the headset, and the orange glow pulsed and waned as Mason watched.
And then at length, "If they are to know, they know now," Kriijorl said. "And the Thrayxite host as well. What was there you wished to add, Lieutenant?"
Mason spoke quickly. "Say that you have discovered that the priceless--and you must say priceless--Book of the Saints is in the Forest of Saarl on Thrayx. Say that we have discovered it to be less well protected than is generally believed. Then give the location of the subterranean vault as precisely as you can!"
"But my people are well aware--"
"I realize that, but our friend Cain doesn't!"
The Ihelian's face was still puzzled, but he projected the thought-message Mason had dictated.
And then in seconds the Ihelian had hastily but thoroughly wrecked the mentacom, and the two men left its silent dome for the empty ships that beckoned so tantalizingly a scant quarter-mile distant.
They had run perhaps a dozen steps when the undergrowth behind them ripped and tore, and Mason spun.
There was a muffled cry, and he had barely time to catch Judith's bleeding body as she fell in exhaustion into his arms.
VI
The muscles in his arms and legs trembled with fatigue as he lifted the semi-conscious girl up to Kriijorl, and then with what seemed an impossible effort, hauled himself through the deserted ship's stern airlock.
The Ihelian seemed to carry Judith as though she were a feather as he climbed the narrow ladder above Mason, infinitely upward, the Earthman thought ... an infinite distance to the ship's forehull, to its control banks.
There was only the sound of his own hoarse breathing in his ears as he climbed, rung after rung, and the hollow echo of Kriijorl's boots as they mounted resolutely above him.
Then they had made it, and were strapping Judith into a hammock, were taking their own shock-seats before the control-banks of the Thrayxite shuttle-craft.
The Ihelian did not hesitate. His fingers deliberated for only a moment above the firing studs in the blue-green glow of the banks, and then they flicked home, and engines muttered, roared into terrifying life.
Within moments, saying nothing, moving the swift, silent movements of desperation, they had freed themselves of the grasping snare of the jungle beneath them; were once more strong, liberated things in the vast freedom of Space.
"And now Ihelos!" Kriijorl cried as they broke swiftly from the ecliptic of the great spangled ring of Thrayx. "If we can but escape their fleet. Any moment they should be on the scanner, forming to meet the onslaught of Ihelian squadrons--"
"No!" Mason said, and his voice was like a solid thing clogging his throat. "No, not Ihelos--not yet!" His eyes burned, and the red welts that covered his body had begun to sting, to pain, and it was hard to think.
He saw the frown forming on Kriijorl's face.
"Thrayx, and the Forest of Saarl," he bit from between teeth clenched against the creeping agony in him. "The Book of the Saints, Kriijorl. It is the key, don't you see. Key to all this, your feud."
For an instant the Ihelian said nothing, but groped in hidden pockets of his battered space harness. His long fingers quickly produced a tablet, thrust it into Mason's hand. The Earthman swallowed it and almost at once energy coursed as though from some hidden well in his body through his flagging muscles and nerves.
Then Kriijorl spoke. "I do not understand, Lieutenant. I know only that it would be almost certain death. Intrusion near the vault would bring a flight of guard ships within minutes."
"I know that," Mason said. "But perhaps not down upon us! And we must have that Book. I've been thinking about it, comparing it with similar writings in Earth's own past. Such books are not new, such motives, such methods. Your Book is priceless in a way that even you don't know, Kriijorl. I'm certain of it. For it must contain the reason that you fight."
"And that reason?"
"A reason, if I'm right, that would end your feud once and for all. A nasty bit of logic which the people of Ihelos and Thrayx were quite deliberately kept from knowing from the beginning. I'd make book on it that at one time both planets were very hungry places--"
"But if you are wrong, Lieutenant?"
Mason fastened his gaze straight before him on the diamond-studded scanner, and saw that some of the smaller diamonds were moving in a tiny echelon.
"Then I guess we die young," he answered the Ihelian. "Want to try?"
The Ihelian's face loosened into a wry smile. "Sometimes you ask rather foolish questions, Lieutenant! I've been bred to such business, and not given my life so much thought before this! But--"
"Yes. Judith."
And then they heard a woman's voice speaking behind them. "Thrayxite acceleration hammocks could stand improvement," it said. "And when we leave the Forest of Saarl, I think I'll just lie on the deck instead."
* * * * *
Kriijorl's knowledge of the spot's location in the great forest was far more accurate than he had given Mason reason to hope. And with a deftness that matched that with which he had eluded the screens of the Thrayxite fleet hurtling to protect its breeder planetoid, he brought the ship to rest at Mason's direction, little more than a quarter-mile from where the Book of the Saints lay entombed.
It was marked by two spires. One was of hewn stone, as Kriijorl had said, immobile, with ancient symbols carven from its base to its pinnacle.
And the other was smooth, and of metal; its gaping airlock testimony to the haste with which it had been landed, unhidden by the natural camouflage of the soaring trees with which the grass-carpeted clearing was surrounded.
"Who--"
"Muscles," Mason answered her. The three were crouched at the clearing's edge, waiting. "Thought he'd made it some way. Must've ducked in before their fleet got into Space. Gambling that our signal that he picked up wouldn't bring out a special reception committee ready and waiting to meet him."
"But he has preceded us by many minutes," Kriijorl said. "I do not see--"
"Not so many. He was in flight two full hours before you mentacommed Ihelos. And if I know him, it was straight out of this galaxy at full blast! So he had to back-track all that time and distance. He had to risk a trap down here, as well as the Thrayxite fleet which he knew would be rushing to protect its breeders."
"You had counted on those factors, Lieutenant?"
"Two birds with one blast, like I told you before," Mason said. "Ask Judith, here. She'll tell you how well I know him." The girl was silent, but her eyes voiced her thoughts more eloquently than her tongue might have.
"Some will do anything to obtain the 'priceless'--" Kriijorl said softly.
"Cain, any time!"
"You have laid a clever trap, Lieutenant."
"If it springs, sure. But where are those guard ships you were so worried about? I was counting on them, too. They should be all over the place by now."
And he was interrupted by the high-pitched scream of the flat, finned shapes that hurtled suddenly over the tree tops, circled, slid quickly downward.
"FLAT!" Mason yelled. And as they stretched prone, they saw Cain running toward the ship from a great open shaft in the ground, a round, shiny thing beneath one arm.
A probing needle of white hot flame stabbed out from one of the descending ships, and there was a scream, and then Cain fell, a charred skeleton, to the ground. The shiny thing he had carried rolled lazily along the grass, teetered on edge, plopped silently over.
Mason was poised like a runner awaiting the starting gun. For a split second he hesitated as the guard ships touched down, their weapons momentarily screened by the lush foliage at the clearing's edge.
And then Mason was running, Judith and Kriijorl only steps behind him.
There were perhaps seconds before the armed women of the Thrayxite guard detail would break from the forest's edge.
He stumbled, fell, and his outstretched hands touched the round, shiny thing, and he could smell the reek of Cain's smouldering skeleton.
Kriijorl and Judith hesitated.
"Damn it, run!" and he felt his scream tear at his dry throat, and then clutched the metal disk to him and regained his feet in a single whip-like motion, and bolted after them toward the gaping air lock of the ship that Cain had never reached.
There was a hissing sound and a wave of heat crackled behind him, seared his flesh beneath his tattered tunic. And there was another, inches before him, scorching smoking scars in the soft green turf, and shouted orders filled the air scant yards behind him.
Then somehow he was at the air lock, and strong hands were pulling him over its edge, and it swung to, glowed red as a bolt of raw energy spent itself harmlessly against it.
"Now Ihelos!" Mason said as he fought for new breath.
* * * * *
It was white, all white around him.
He tried to sit up but there was the touch of gentle hands that stayed him, lowered him back upon the bed.
There were two of them--tall, like Vikings, and memory returned slowly. There was a smaller one, too, standing straight and erect beside him, like a proud queen from the pages of Earth's colorful history.
Judith. And Kriijorl. And another. And in his hands there was the silver disk. The can.
The can of records. The Book of the Saints.
He tried again to straighten, and then heard the voice of the one whom he did not know.
"I am Yhevvak, Grand Liege of Ihelos," the voice said. "And I hold in my hands, Earthman, the Book of the Saints. I have read it, and I have broadcast to all of Thrayx what I have read. A truce delegation has already departed from that planet to meet us here in Space."
"But--" the word stuck in his throat, and it was hard to think.
"Commander Kriijorl said that you suspected it was the key to our great trouble. You were right.
"For it tells of a conference among the leaders of our two worlds many millenia ago; a conference held in secret, because of the nature of its subject--the very people of our worlds themselves. Secret, because of the decision concerning them and their staggering number. Too staggering for either planet any longer to feed. And the record itself was then committed to this single microtape, and itself, kept in secrecy since the day it was recorded.
"At first shrouded in deliberate mysticism, it was at length remembered only as the Last Word of the Saints in the sudden wars which so quickly followed its creation, the true cause of which was skillfully falsified to the people of the time, and truly known only to those who made the microtape I hold here.
"They were our greatest leaders; in them was invested the responsibility for the welfare and livelihood of our two planets, both materially and spiritually.
"When they lived, those records say, travel in Space beyond the speed of light had not been accomplished; they believed such a feat an impossibility imposed by a condescending Nature that could be challenged too far. And they therefore knew no way of reaching beyond the planets of Ihelos and Thrayx for the food and resources that became so sorely depleted as both planets became, at length, stripped nearly bare as their populations swelled beyond saturation point.
"Medical science had permitted the old to grow older; granted the new-born an almost certain purchase on life once first breath had been drawn. Yet its greatest offering was rejected by the people; there were indignant cries at the merest suggestion that they intelligently regulate their number, so that their posterity might live in greater plenty than had they.
"There was but one solution for our desperate leaders. For although warfare had long since vanished from our civilization as it had matured, it took with it Nature's own unpleasant balance for her overgenerous fecundity.
"The new balance, then, had to be of Man's making. And so it was made.
"Our leaders, our Saints, as we have come through the years to know them, were of course adept masters at the many subtle arts of propaganda, and they used those arts to the very limits of their skill. They deliberately fomented, as their ancient record shows, the wars, small at first and then ever larger, between Ihelos and Thrayx.
"They could not have foreseen that one day there would be conflict for existence between the sexes; logically calculating intellect against intuitive, wily cunning in a battle to determine the most fit, who would then enjoy the right to survive.
"Nor could they have foreseen that one day, because of the very conflict they fomented, the science of controlled genetics would at last be recognized as a necessity of survival to both factions.
"Today we have our answer to the age old problem of keeping our consumption within the limits of our ability to produce for it; we have used it to survive. But to survive war, not peace.
"And that, as you apparently suspected, Earthman, is the key.
"We know now why we fought. And with the knowledge of the life forces with which we insured our continued existence during our years of battle, we may now become united worlds of peace again. For we shall use that knowledge to take more advisedly of Nature's fruits than we took before.
"Well done, Earthmen. And with our thanks, know that we shall be always in your debt."
Then Yhevvak bowed low, and left just the three of them together in the white hospital bay of his flagship.
Kriijorl was smiling, and there was a shininess in Judith's eyes.
Mason grinned. "I hope those Thrayxite babes get a wiggle on," he said. "Those Earth gals gotta get 'em home! Their mothers'll be frantic. Hey, girl, not in front of company!"
THE DAY OF THE DOG
By Andersen Horne
Carol stared glumly at the ship-to-shore transmitter. "I hate being out here in the middle of the Caribbean with no radio communication. Can't you fix it?"
"This is a year for sun spots, and transmission usually gets impossible around dusk," Bill explained. "It will be all right in the morning. If you want to listen to the radio, you can use the portable radio directional finder. That always works."
"I want to catch the 5 o'clock news and hear the latest on our satellite," Carol replied. She went to the RDF and switched it on to the standard broadcast channel. "Anyhow, I'd feel better if we could put out a signal. The way we're limping along with water in our gas is no fun. It will take us twenty hours to get back to Nassau the way we're losing RPM'S."
Bill Anderson looked at his young, pretty wife and smiled. "You're behaving like a tenderfoot. We've plenty of gas, a good boat and perfect weather. Tomorrow morning I'll clean out our carburetors and we'll pick up speed. Meantime, we're about to enter one of the prettiest harbors in the Bahamas, throw over anchor ..."
The RDF drowned him out.
"The world is anxiously awaiting return of the chamber from the world's first manned satellite launched by the United States ten days ago. The world also awaits the answers to two questions: Is there any chance that Robert Joy, the volunteer scientist who went up in the satellite, is still living? There seems to be little hope for his survival since radio communication from him stopped three days ago. Timing mechanism for the ejection of Joy are set for tonight. And that's the second question. Will the satellite, still in its orbit, eject the chamber containing Joy? Will it eject the chamber as scheduled, and will the chamber arrive back at earth at the designated place?
"There are many 'ifs' to this project which is shrouded in secrecy. The President himself has assured us of a free flow of news once the chamber has been recovered, and this station will be standing by to bring you a full report."
Carol switched the radio off. "Do you think he's alive?" She suppressed a shudder. "God! Think of a human being up there in that thing."
"Well, the dog lived for several days. It was just a question of getting it back, which the Russians couldn't do. I don't know about Joy. He sounded real cheerful and healthy until his broadcasts stopped." Bill peered into the fading twilight. "Come on now, let's put our minds to getting the hook over!"
They concentrated on the tricky entrance to the lee side of Little Harbor Cay. It meant finding and passing a treacherous coral head north of the adjoining Frozen Cay. Little Harbor Cay was midway in the chain of the Berry Islands which stretched to the north like beads in a necklace.
"There's the cove," called Carol. About a mile of coastline ahead was the small native settlement. Once the center of a thriving sponge industry, the island was now practically deserted. A handful of small cottages, a pile of conch shells on the beach and two fishing smacks gave evidence of a remaining, though sparse, population.
Dusk was rapidly approaching and Carol strained her eyes against the failing light. Bill heard her call his name and saw her pointing--not ahead to their anchorage, but amidships and toward the sky. He turned his eyes to where she was indicating and saw a dullish object in the sky, some thousand feet up. The object seemed to be falling leisurely towards earth.
"What in the world is that?" asked Bill. "It's not a bird, that's for sure."
The object seemed to be parachuting, not falling. The breezes were blowing it towards the island. Before they could study it further, it was lost in the lowering dusk and darkness of the shore line.
"Looks like a ball on a parachute," Bill finally said. However, the business at hand was to make secure the Seven Seas and together they spent the next quarter hour anchoring.
After "setting the hook" securely, Carol and Bill donned swim suits, dove overboard and swam lazily the 300 yards in to shore.
"Let's try to find that thing we saw. It shouldn't be too far from here," said Carol the moment they hit the beach.
They climbed inland on the rocky island. Little green lizards scooted underfoot and vines scratched at their ankles.
Bill was leading, when suddenly he called, "Carol, I see something up ahead! There's something lying on the ground!" He hurried toward what he had seen.
The dying sun reflected on a luminescent bolt of cloth, somewhat like a spun-aluminum fabric. Thin wire lines were entangling it, and about ten feet away lay three fragments of what appeared to have been a dull metal box.
Carol knelt at the closest piece, evidently a corner of the box. It was lined with wiring and tubes.
"It looks like electronic equipment," decided Carol, peering intently at the strange piece. Bill had approached the second and largest fragment.
He carefully turned it over. It was filled with black and yellow ... fur?
"Oh no!" he cried, knowing in a flash, yet denying it in his mind at the same time. Stunned, he stared at the perky ears, the dull staring and unseeing eyes, the leather thongs that held the head and body of a dog to the metal encasement. Carol saw it the next instant.
"It's some horrible joke!" she gasped. "It couldn't be the second Russian satellite, it couldn't be Muttnik! My God, no, it couldn't be!"
Bill kept staring, his thoughts racing. There were rumors of an ejection chamber for Muttnik. But they had been denied by the Russians. But suppose the Russians had planned an ejection chamber for the dog Laika when they launched the satellite and had only denied it after they thought it had failed?
But if it had worked, why had it taken so long to find its way to earth? The satellite itself was supposed to have disintegrated months ago.
"Damn," thought Bill. "I wish I were a scientist right now instead of a know-nothing artist!"
He touched the dog with his toe. It was perfectly preserved, as though it had died just a few hours before. It was rigid, but it had not started to decompose.
"Carol, are we crazy? Is this some dream, or do you believe we are looking at the ejection chamber of the Russian satellite?" he asked, doubting even what he was saying.
"I don't know." Carol was wide-eyed. "But what shall we do now? We'd better contact the authorities immediately!"
Bill tried to keep reason from overcoming his disbelief of their discovery.
"But how, Carol? Our radio transmitter isn't working. It won't till morning. And there's certainly no other way to communicate with anyone. We can't even take the boat anywhere with the speed we're making. We'll have to wait till morning."
"What shall we do with the dog?" asked Carol. "Do you think we ought to bury it?"
"Lord no, Carol. The body of the dog will be extremely valuable to science. We've got to get someone here as quickly as possible." Bill was trying to steady his nerves.
"Let's go back and try to raise someone on the radio. Let's try again, it may work," called Carol, running in the direction of the boat. Bill followed her. They stumbled on the craggy rocks and exposed sea grape roots, but together in the darkness they struck out for the boat.
Bill was first aboard and went directly to the ship-to-shore radio.
"Try the Nassau marine operator first," Carol panted as she clambered aboard. "He's a lot closer to us than Miami."
As the receiver warmed up, static filled the cabin. Bill depressed the transmitting button. "This is the Yacht Seven Seas calling the Nassau Marine operator," he called into the phone. Only static answered.
"Bill!" Carol said in sudden inspiration. "Give a May Day. Try every channel with a May Day. If anyone picks up a May Day call you'll get emergency action."
"May Day, May Day! This is the Yacht Seven Seas. Come in anyone!" Bill called urgently into the mouthpiece. He switched to the Coast Guard channel, then to the Miami Marine operators channel. Only static filled the cabin. No welcome voice acknowledged their distress call. Bill flipped the switch desperately to the two ship-to-ship channels. "May Day! Come in any boat!" Still static. Nothing but static.
* * * * *
It was night. A night without a moon. The island loomed dark against the black waters. The dark was relieved only by a small fire burning at the native settlement a half-mile down the coast, and the cabin lights of the Seven Seas.
"What will we do now?" Carol tried to sound unconcerned, but her voice sounded thin and wavering.
"I don't know what we can do, except wait until daybreak. I'm sure we can get a signal out then," Bill replied, calmly as he could. He hoped she couldn't hear the pounding of his heart.
"What about the dog?" she asked. "Will it be all right there? Should we bring it aboard?"
"We better leave everything untouched. Our best bet is to get some sleep and place our call as soon as day breaks."
Neither of them could eat much supper and after putting the dishes away, they made up their bunks and climbed in. After a very few minutes, Bill handed a lighted cigarette across the narrow chasm between the bunks.
"I can't sleep. My head is spinning. Do you really believe that's what we've found?" Carol's voice sounded small.
"Yes, I do. I believe we've found the Russian ejection unit, complete with the dog Laika and instrumentation."
They lay quietly, the glow of two cigarettes occasionally reflecting on the bulkhead. Bill finally arose.
"I can't think of another thing but what's sitting out there on Little Harbor Cay!" He walked up to the main cabin and switched on the RDF. For a few minutes there was music, and then:
"Flash! The United States Government has just officially released the news that at 10:09 p.m. Eastern Standard Time the U. S. Satellite ejection chamber was successfully returned to earth at the designated location. This was some six hours earlier than expected. The chamber, into which Robert Joy voluntarily had himself strapped, has landed at an undisclosed site and is being raced under heavy guard to the Walter Reed Hospital at Washington, D. C. There is no hope that Joy is still living. Word has just been released by Dr. James R. Killian that instruments measuring Joy's pulse rate indicated three days ago that all Joy's bodily processes ceased to function at that time. We repeat, all hope of the survival of Robert Joy is now abandoned as the result of scientific data just released by Dr. Killian.
"The satellite is being brought intact to Walter Reed Hospital and leading physiologists and scientists are racing to the scene to be on hand for the opening of the unit scheduled for 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. Further reports will be given as received. This station will remain on the air all night. Stay tuned for further developments. We repeat, the U. S. satellite's ejection chamber, containing the first human being ever to go into space, has been successfully returned to earth as predicted, though all hope has been abandoned for the survival of Robert Joy, the man in the moon. The chamber will be opened for scientific study tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for further news."
Bill tuned down the music that ensued and returned to his bunk. "You heard that, Carol?" He knew she wasn't asleep.
"Yes. And it makes this whole thing that we've found seem more plausible. I've been lying here trying to make myself believe it's some sort of dream, but it isn't. If we could only ..." Carol's voice faded softly into the night.
There was absolutely nothing they could do. Nothing but lie there and smoke and pretend to sleep. They didn't talk much, and keenly felt the terrible frustration of their enforced silence on the ship-to-shore. They heard several more news reports and several analyses of the news, but nothing new was added throughout the night. The radio only reiterated that the ejection unit had been recovered, that hope had faded for Joy's survival and that the chamber was to be opened in the morning as soon as scientists had convened in Washington.
* * * * *
Dawn, long in coming, broke about 4:30. With the lifting of the dark, the sun spots which interfered with radio reception miraculously lifted also. Bill and Carol sat next to the ship-to-shore and turned it on. This time they heard the reassuring hum of the transmitter, not drowned out by the awful static of the night before. Bill switched to the Coast Guard channel.
"May Day. May Day. This is the Seven Seas calling the United States Coast Guard. Come in please!"
And a voice, almost miraculously, answered, "This is the U. S. Coast Guard. Come in Seven Seas. What is your position? Come in Seven Seas."
"This is the yacht Seven Seas back to the Coast Guard. We are located at the Berry Islands at Little Harbor Cay. We want to report the discovery of what we believe to be the second Russian satellite."
"This is the Coast Guard to the Seven Seas. Do we read you correctly? Are you reporting discovery of the Russian satellite? Please clarify. Over." A stern voice crackled through the speaker.
"Last evening on entering the harbor here we saw an object fall to the ground. On inspection, it was a metal box which was broken apart on impact. In it are electronic equipment and the body of a small dog. Over." Bill tried to be calm and succinct.
"Coast Guard to Seven Seas. Is your boat in distress? Over."
"No, no! Did you read me about the Russian satellite?" asked Bill, impatience in his voice.
"Will you state your name and address. Will you state the master's full name, and the call letters and registration of your craft. Over," crackled the voice from the speaker.
"Oh my lord, we're not going to have red tape at a time like this, are we?" Carol asked exasperatedly.
"This is Bill Anderson of Ft. Lauderdale, owner and skipper. Our call letters are William George 3176, Coast Guard registration #235-46-5483. What are your instructions regarding dog satellite?"
"Please stand by."
Bill and Carol stared at each other while the voice on the radio was silent.
"This is the United States Coast Guard calling the yacht Seven Seas."
"Seven Seas standing by."
"We wish to remind you that it is illegal and punishable by fine and or imprisonment to issue false reports to the Coast Guard. We are investigating your report and wish you to stand by."
"Investigating our report?" Bill fairly shouted into the phone. "Good God, man! The thing to investigate is here, laying in three pieces on the middle of Little Harbor Cay. This is no joke." Despite the emotion in Bill's voice, the answer came back routine and cold, "Please stand by. We will call you. Do not, we repeat, do not make further contact anywhere. Please stand by. Coast Guard standing by with the Seven Seas."
"Seven Seas standing by," shouted Bill, almost apoplectic, his face reddening in anger.
"Now what? It looks like they're going to take their time in believing us. At least until they find out who we are and if we're really here," said Carol.
Bill paced the deck in frustration. Suddenly he decided, "Carol, you stick with the radio. I'm going ashore again and take another look at our Muttnik. It seems so incredible that I'm not even sure of what I saw last night. Once they believe us they'll want to know as much about it as we can tell them." Bill hurriedly put on his swim suit and heard Carol shout as he dove overboard, "Hurry back, Bill. I don't like you leaving me here alone!"
Bill swam with sure even strokes to the shore where they had gone last night. The water felt cool. It soothed his nerves which jangled in the excitement of the discovery and in the anger at the disbelieving authorities. He reached shallow water and waded towards shore.
Suddenly he stopped dead, his ankles in five inches of water. His eyes stared ahead in disbelief. His brain was numbed. Only his eyes were alive, staring, wide in horror. Finally his brain pieced together the image that his vision sent to it. Pieced it together but made no comprehension of it.
His brain told him that there was a blanket of fur laying unevenly twenty feet back from the shore line. A blanket of yellow and black fur ... covering the earth, covering mangrove roots, fitted neatly around the bent palm tree trunks, lying over the rocks that had cut his feet last night ... smothering, suffocating ... hugging the earth.
Bill shut his eyes, and still the vision kept shooting to his brain. All yellow and black and fuzzy, with trees or a tall mangrove bush or a sea grape vine sticking up here and there.
He opened his eyes and wanted to run, for the scene was still there. It hadn't disappeared as a nightmare disappears when you wake up. Thick yellow and black fur lay on the ground like dirty snow. Covering everything low, hugging the base of taller things.
"Run!" his mind told him. Yet he stood rooted to the spot, staring at the carpet of fur near him. It was only ten feet away. Ten feet? His every muscle jumped. The lock that had held his muscles and brain in a tight vice gave loose and a flood of realization hit him. "It's moving!" he realized in horror. "It's growing!"
* * * * *
As he watched, slowly, slowly, as the petals of a morning glory unfold before the eye, the yellow and black fur carpet stretched itself in ever-increasing perimeter.
He saw it approach a rock near the beach. The mind, when confronted with a huge shock, somehow concentrates itself on a small detail. Perhaps it tries to absorb itself in a small thing because the whole thing is too great to comprehend all at once. So with Bill's mind. He saw the yellow and black fur grow toward the rock. It seemed to ooze around it and then up and over the top of it. Bill saw, when it reached the top of the rock, that it dropped a spiny tendril to the ground. Like a root, the tendril buried itself into the earth below the jutting rock, and slowly the rock was covered with the flowing fur.
Bill's thoughts sped ahead of his reason. The dog. The dog ... growing like a plant. Its hide covering the ground, putting out roots, suffocating everything, smothering everything, growing, growing.
With almost superhuman effort, he turned his back on the awful sight and swam desperately out to the Seven Seas.
"Bill, what's happened?" cried Carol, when she saw his white and terrified face.
"Carol ... the dog ... it must have had some cosmic reaction to its cellular structure ... some cancerous reaction ... when the chamber broke open and the cells were exposed to our atmosphere again it started some action ... started to grow ... doesn't stop growing ... it's horrible ..." Bill's words were disjointed and hysterical.
Carol stared at him. "Bill, what are you saying?" Bill pointed mutely to the shore. Carol rushed to the cockpit. She stared at the island. She ran back to the cabin where Bill was sitting, holding his head in his hands. She grabbed the binoculars from the bookshelf and turned them to the island.
"Bill! It's ... oh no! The whole island looks as though it's covered with ... fur!" She screamed.
Bill grabbed the binoculars and ranged the island with them. A quarter of a mile down he could see small figures in the water, floundering around, climbing aboard the two fishing smacks. All around, the black and yellow mounds of fur carpeted the pretty green island with a soft rug of yellow and black.
"Get the Coast Guard, Carol!"
"They called back while you were gone. They're sending a plane over immediately."
"Call them, Carol!" Bill shouted at her. "Don't you realize what this could mean? Don't you realize that something, only God knows what, has happened to the cellular structure of this animal, has turned it into a voracious plant-like thing that seems to grow and grow once it hits our atmosphere? Don't you realize that today they're going to open that satellite, that other one, in Washington? Suppose this is what happens when living tissue is exposed to cosmic rays or whatever is up there. Don't you see what could happen?" Bill was hoarse from fright and shouting. "Smother everything, grow and grow and smother ..."
Carol was at the ship-to-shore. "What time is it, Carol?"
"I don't know. 5:30 I guess."
"They plan to open the ejection chamber at six. We've got to tell them what happened here before they open it! Hurry with the damned Coast Guard!"
"May Day! May Day! Coast Guard come in. This is the Seven Seas. Come in and hurry!"
"Coast Guard to the Seven Seas. Come in."
Bill grabbed the phone. "Listen carefully," he said in a quiet determined voice. "This is God's own truth. I repeat: This is God's own truth. The remains of the dog we discovered last night have started to grow. It is growing as we look at it. It has covered the entire island as far as we can see, with fur. Stinking yellow and black fur. We've got to get word to Washington before they open up the satellite. The same thing could happen there. Do you understand? I must get in touch with Washington. Immediately!"
There was no mistaking the urgency and near-panic in Bill's voice. The Coast Guard returned with "We understand you Seven Seas. We will clear a line directly to Dr. Killian in Washington. Stand by."
With his hand shaking, Bill turned on the standard broadcast band of the portable RDF. A voice cut in: "... latest reports from Walter Reed General Hospital where the first human-manned satellite ejection chamber has just been opened. All leading physiologists and physicists were assembled at the hospital by midnight last night and plans to open the ejection chamber at 6 a.m. this morning were moved up. The chamber was opened at 4 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today. Our first report confirmed that volunteer moon traveller, the man in the moon, Robert Joy, was no longer alive. Hope had been abandoned for him some 80 hours previous, when recording instruments on his body processes indicated no reactions. Of scientific curiosity is the fact that though dead for more than three days, his body is in a perfect state of preservation ...
"Flash! We interrupt this special newscast for a late bulletin: The body of Robert Joy has begun to shoot out unexplained appendages, like rapidly growing cancerous growths. His integument appears to be enlarging, growing away from his body ..."
"Hello Seven Seas," broke in the ship-to-shore. "We are still trying to locate Dr. Killian...."
END
ADVANCED CHEMISTRY
By Jack G. Huekels
Professor Carbonic was diligently at work in his spacious laboratory, analyzing, mixing and experimenting. He had been employed for more than fifteen years in the same pursuit of happiness, in the same house, same laboratory, and attended by the same servant woman, who in her long period of service had attained the plumpness and respectability of two hundred and ninety pounds.
"Mag Nesia," called the professor. The servant's name was Maggie Nesia--Professor Carbonic had contracted the title to save time, for in fifteen years he had not mounted the heights of greatness; he must work harder and faster as life is short, and eliminate such shameful waste of time as putting the "gie" on Maggie.
"Mag Nesia!" the professor repeated.
The old woman rolled slowly into the room.
"Get rid of these and bring the one the boy brought today."
He handed her a tray containing three dead rats, whose brains had been subjected to analysis.
"Yes, Marse," answered Mag Nesia in a tone like citrate.
The professor busied himself with a new preparation of zinc oxide and copper sulphate and sal ammoniac, his latest concoction, which was about to be used and, like its predecessors, to be abandoned.
Mag Nesia appeared bringing another rat, dead. The professor made no experiments on live animals. He had hired a boy in the neighborhood to bring him fresh dead rats at twenty-five cents per head.
Taking the tray he prepared a hypodermic filled with the new preparation. Carefully he made an incision above the right eye of the carcass through the bone. He lifted the hypodermic, half hopelessly, half expectantly. The old woman watched him, as she had done many times before, with always the same pitiful expression. Pitiful, either for the man himself or for the dead rat. Mag Nesia seldom expressed her views.
Inserting the hypodermic needle and injecting the contents of the syringe, Professor Carbonic stepped back.
Prof. Carbonic Makes a Great Discovery
"Great Saints!" His voice could have been heard a mile. Slowly the rat's tail began to point skyward; and as slowly Mag Nesia began to turn white. Professor Carbonic stood as paralyzed. The rat trembled and moved his feet. The man of sixty years made one jump with the alacrity of a boy of sixteen, he grabbed the enlivened animal, and held it high above his head as he jumped about the room.
Spying the servant, who until now had seemed unable to move, he threw both arms around her, bringing the rat close to her face. Around the laboratory they danced to the tune of the woman's shrieks. The professor held on, and the woman yelled. Up and down spasmodically on the laboratory floor came the two hundred and ninety pounds with the professor thrown in.
Bottles tumbled from the shelves. Furniture was upset. Precious liquids flowed unrestrained and unnoticed. Finally the professor dropped with exhaustion and the rat and Mag Nesia made a dash for freedom.
Early in the morning pedestrians on Arlington Avenue were attracted by a sign in brilliant letters.
Professor Carbonic early in the morning betook himself to the nearest hardware store and purchased the tools necessary for his new profession. He was an M.D. and his recently acquired knowledge put him in a position to startle the world. Having procured what he needed he returned home.
* * * * *
Things were developing fast. Mag Nesia met him at the door and told him that Sally Soda, who was known to the neighborhood as Sal or Sal Soda generally, had fallen down two flights of stairs, and to use her own words was "Putty bad." Sal Soda's mother, in sending for a doctor, had read the elaborate sign of the new enemy of death, and begged that he come to see Sal as soon as he returned.
Bidding Mag Nesia to accompany him, he went to the laboratory and secured his precious preparation. Professor Carbonic and the unwilling Mag Nesia started out to put new life into a little Sal Soda who lived in the same block.
Reaching the house they met the family physician then attendant on little Sal. Doctor X. Ray had also read the sign of the professor and his greeting was very chilly.
"How is the child?" asked the professor.
"Fatally hurt and can live but an hour." Then he added, "I have done all that can be done."
"All that you can do," corrected the professor.
With a withering glance, Doctor X. Ray left the room and the house. His reputation was such as to admit of no intrusion.
* * * * *
"I am sorry she is not dead, it would be easier to work, and also a more reasonable charge." Giving Mag Nesia his instruments he administered a local anesthetic; this done he selected a brace and bit that he had procured that morning. With these instruments he bored a small hole into the child's head. Inserting his hypodermic needle, he injected the immortal fluid, then cutting the end off a dowel, which he had also procured that morning, he hammered it into the hole until it wedged itself tight.
Professor Carbonic seated himself comfortably and awaited the action of his injection, while the plump Mag Nesia paced or rather waddled the floor with a bag of carpenter's tools under her arm.
The fluid worked. The child came to and sat up. Sal Soda had regained her pep.
"It will be one dollar and twenty-five cents, Mrs. Soda," apologized the professor. "I have to make that charge as it is so inconvenient to work on them when they are still alive."
Having collected his fee, the professor and Mag Nesia departed, amid the ever rising blessings of the Soda family.
* * * * *
At 3:30 P.M. Mag Nesia sought her employer, who was asleep in the sitting room.
"Marse Paul, a gentleman to see you."
The professor awoke and had her send the man in.
The man entered hurriedly, hat in hand. "Are you Professor Carbonic?"
"I am, what can I do for you?"
"Can you----?" the man hesitated. "My friend has just been killed in an accident. You couldn't----" he hesitated again.
"I know that it is unbelievable," answered the professor. "But I can."
* * * * *
Professor Carbonic for some years had suffered from the effects of a weak heart. His fears on this score had recently been entirely relieved. He now had the prescription--Death no more! The startling discovery, and the happenings of the last twenty-four hours had begun to take effect on him, and he did not wish to make another call until he was feeling better.
"I'll go," said the professor after a period of musing. "My discoveries are for the benefit of the human race, I must not consider myself."
He satisfied himself that he had all his tools. He had just sufficient of the preparation for one injection; this, he thought, would be enough; however, he placed in his case, two vials of different solutions, which were the basis of his discovery. These fluids had but to be mixed, and after the chemical reaction had taken place the preparation was ready for use.
He searched the house for Mag Nesia, but the old servant had made it certain that she did not intend to act as nurse to dead men on their journey back to life. Reluctantly he decided to go without her.
"How is it possible!" exclaimed the stranger, as they climbed into the waiting machine.
"I have worked for fifteen years before I found the solution," answered the professor slowly.
"I cannot understand on what you could have based a theory for experimenting on something that has been universally accepted as impossible of solution."
"With electricity, all is possible; as I have proved." Seeing the skeptical look his companion assumed, he continued, "Electricity is the basis of every motive power we have; it is the base of every formation that we know." The professor was warming to the subject.
"Go on," said the stranger, "I am extremely interested."
"Every sort of heat that is known, whether dormant or active, is only one arm of the gigantic force electricity. The most of our knowledge of electricity has been gained through its offspring, magnetism. A body entirely devoid of electricity, is a body dead. Magnetism is apparent in many things including the human race, and its presence in many people is prominent."
"But how did this lead to your experiments?"
"If magnetism or motive force, is the offspring of electricity, the human body must, and does contain electricity. That we use more electricity than the human body will induce is a fact; it is apparent therefore that a certain amount of electricity must be generated within the human body, and without aid of any outside forces. Science has known for years that the body's power is brought into action through the brain. The brain is our generator. The little cells and the fluid that separate them, have the same action as the liquid of a wet battery; like a wet battery this fluid wears out and we must replace the fluid or the sal ammoniac or we lose the use of the battery or body. I have discovered what fluid to use that will produce the electricity in the brain cells which the human body is unable to induce."
"We are here," said the stranger as he brought the car to a stop at the curb.
"You are still a skeptic," noting the voice of the man. "But you shall see shortly."
The man led him into the house and introduced him to Mrs. Murray Attic, who conducted him to the room where the deceased Murray Attic was laid.
Without a word the professor began his preparations. He was ill, and would have preferred to have been at rest in his own comfortable house. He would do the work quickly and get away.
* * * * *
Selecting a gimlet, he bored a hole through the skull of the dead man; inserting his hypodermic he injected all the fluid he had mixed. He had not calculated on the size of the gimlet and the dowels he carried would not fit the hole. As a last resource he drove in his lead pencil, broke it off close, and carefully cut the splinters smooth with the head.
"It will be seventy-five cents, madam," said the professor as he finished the work.
* * * * *
Mrs. Murray Attic paid the money unconsciously; she did not know whether he was embalming her husband or just trying the keenness of his new tools. The death had been too much for her.
The minutes passed and still the dead man showed no signs of reviving. Professor Carbonic paced the floor in an agitated manner. He began to be doubtful of his ability to bring the man back. Worried, he continued his tramp up and down the room. His heart was affecting him. He was tempted to return the seventy-five cents to the prostrate wife when--THE DEAD MAN MOVED!
The professor clasped his hands to his throat, and with his head thrown back dropped to the floor. A fatal attack of the heart.
He became conscious quickly. "The bottles there," he whispered. "Mix--, make injection." He became unconscious again.
The stranger found the gimlet and bored a hole in the professor's head, hastily seizing one of the vials, he poured the contents into the deeply made hole. He then realized that there was another bottle.
"Mix them!" shrieked the almost hysterical woman.
It was too late, the one vial was empty, and the professor's body lay lifeless.
In mental agony the stranger grasped the second vial and emptied its contents also into the professor's head, and stopped the hole with the cork.
Miraculously Professor Carbonic opened his eyes, and rose to his feet. His eyes were like balls of fire; his lips moved inaudibly, and as they moved little blue sparks were seen to pass from one to another. His hair stood out from his head. The chemical reaction was going on in the professor's brain, with a dose powerful enough to restore ten men. He tottered slightly.
Murray Attic, now thoroughly alive, sat up straight in bed. He grasped the brass bed post with one hand and stretched out the other to aid the staggering man.
He caught his hand; both bodies stiffened; a slight crackling sound was audible; a blue flash shot from where Attic's had made contact with the bed post; then a dull thud as both bodies struck the floor. Both men were electrocuted, and the formula is still a secret.
THE END
FIELD TRIP
By Gene Hunter
Kial was disgusted with the slow, cumbersome train. He disliked using this uncomfortable means of travel, but since he wanted to learn more about these strange creatures who were his ancestors, he had decided to try to become used to their ways.
He was lonely in this strange, backward age and when he unexpectedly saw another being like himself in the same coach, he hastened to make his presence known. He introduced himself and asked politely:
"When are you from?"
"8000," the other replied. "Name's Broyk, from VII Galaxy."
"I'm from out XIX way myself," Kial said. "Just a country boy. But 8000--that's only a period ahead of my own time. Maybe you could tell me ..."
"Ah, ah!" the other admonished. "Remember the First Law of Thek!"
"Oh, Center," Kial grumbled. "I know: 'One may not divulge any scientific, technical or social information to anyone from his own past whom he may meet at an equidistant point in a Thek-travel.' I forgot."
"Bad," Broyk said. Then he added, almost jokingly: "You wouldn't want to be marooned in this dismal era, would you?"
Kial shuddered. "Of course not. But the Laws seem so ridiculous."
"Not a bit," Broyk said, warming up to the subject. "It's very simple, really. Same principle that doesn't allow anyone to Thek-travel into the future.
"Look. I'm from 8000. Say that I went into 12,000, where I memorized as much information as I could on some subject such as medicine. So I return to 8000, retaining all such knowledge in my mind that's been learned in four periods. Therefore, I'd have knowledge that wasn't dreamed of in my own time, but was discovered sometime during the next four periods. But then it couldn't be discovered, because I'd brought it back to 8000 and--well, I'm no Logician, but you see my point."
"Oh, it's reasonable, I suppose," Kial admitted. "I realize the Laws are really for our own good. By the way--I'm here on a field trip to gather material for my thesis on Advanced Therapeutical Psychology and its development since the Twentieth Century. What phase of this era are you here to study?"
"I--I'm afraid I couldn't tell you that," Broyk said. "It's of rather a secret nature and ..."
"You mean we might violate a Law and be stuck here for good--is that it?"
"Yes--in a way."
Frightened, Kial let the matter drop. His gaze wandered through the coach, examining the other passengers with interest. As time-travelers from a different space-time plane from their 20th Century ancestors, he and Broyk were naturally invisible to their fellow travelers.
Two pompous old gentlemen were lighting cigars and Kial was about to remark on the habit of smoking when he noticed an even more remarkable phenomenon. A few seats ahead of them sat a good-looking young couple, oblivious to others about them.
"Look!" Kial cried excitedly. "Lovers! Honeymooners! I've read about such things! Isn't it disgusting?"
"Oh, I don't know," Broyk said, a little wistfully. "I sometimes think it was a mistake for Center to do away with sex. It must have been interesting."
"Atavist!" Kial snapped in horror.
Had his people's emotional make-up provided for blushing, Kial would undoubtedly have turned beet-red. Broyk's words had caused him acute embarrassment.
* * * * *
As he sat reflecting upon his strange companion, he suddenly began to feel a sensation he had often heard about but never before had experienced. Terror and dismay filled him as he sought to throw off the probing finger that was penetrating his mind.
He looked at Broyk. There was the faintest notion of a smile on the other's face as he said: "Yes, Kial--I am a Telepath."
Kial's mind reeled. He felt himself on the brink of some gigantic abyss and then, as suddenly as it had come, the searching sensation faded away.
"Since you are unable to enter my mind," Broyk said calmly, "it's only fair that I tell you about myself. You were right--I'm an atavist. Even in period 8000, such things can happen. Always such creatures are destroyed after their first psychotests, but my case was different. The Controller who bred me was only a dabbler in such things. I was a failure, but he took a fancy to me. I was allowed to mature secretly--few people knew of my existence. When I reached my majority my presence became dangerous and I was sent back into time to try and find the proper place for myself. And I think I've found it--here!"
Kial was a very amazed young man. "But such a barbarous age," he complained. "Sex and atom bombs and everything ..."
"Remember," Broyk smiled, "these people are the forebears of the geniuses who created Center and the Galactic Empire. They'll survive, despite their barbarism. The existence of Center is proof."
"It's rather horrible to contemplate," Kial said thoughtfully, calmer now, "and yet, this might really be a great age. In a way I almost envy you."
"Of course you do," Broyk said. "You have certain tendencies--they bother you, although you manage to hide them well. I discovered them when I took the liberty of telepathing you. Artificial Genetics isn't perfect, even in our time--perhaps because we originally sprang from man. Perhaps we'll never be quite perfect, because of that, even after thousands of periods of breeding."
Kial took another look at the loving young couple. "It--it might be fun, after all."
Broyk laughed. "You needn't envy me at all, you know."
Kial frowned.
"I'm telling you about myself," Broyk went on, "I have also told you of a specific condition existing a period ahead of your own time. Remember the First Law?"
"Center!"
"We're marooned in the Twentieth Century. You have to accept it."
"But what will we do?" Kial's mind was reeling again.
"Since we've already broken the First Law," Broyk said, "we may just as well break the Second: 'No Thek-traveler may enter the body of a native of a foreign space-time ...'"
* * * * *
The young lovers kissed again and this time there seemed to be an added zest, even to their passionate embrace.
THE END
THE SHINING COW
By Alex James
Robbie whined and acted like his eyes were burning, as if he'd gotten dust or something even stranger into them....
Zack Stewart stared sleepily into the bottom of his cracked coffee cup as his wife began to gather the breakfast dishes.
Mrs. Stewart was a huge, methodical woman, seasoned to the drudgery of a farm wife. Quite methodically she'd arise every morning at 4:00 A.M. with her husband and each would do their respective chores until long after the sun had set on their forty-acre farm.
"You've jest got to find Junius today, Zack," Mrs. Stewart spoke worriedly, "Lord only knows her condition, not being milked since yesterday morning."
"Yeah, I know, Ma," Zack said wearily as he rose from the table, "I'll search for her again in the north woods, but if she ain't there this time, I give up."
A dog suddenly howled outside. There was a brief instant when neither moved, then Zack suddenly exclaimed, "It's Robbie!" and dashed outside.
In the light from the open doorway Zack saw the dog creeping along on his haunches, howling and whining, and scratching frantically at his tear-streaming eyes.
"Skunk finally got ya, eh boy?" Zack spoke sympathetically as the dog, fawning, came closer.
"Stay away, Robbie, stay away now!" he ordered the dog. Robbie whined and scratched again, furiously. Zack sniffed cautiously, expecting any moment the pungent smell of skunk fluid to hit his nostrils. He sensed nothing but the clean, fresh smell of the morning air, so he leaned closer. Within a foot of Robbie, he sniffed again. Nothing. He realized it wasn't a skunk that caused Robbie's eyes to burn. He knelt down and took the dog's head tenderly in his rough, calloused hands and examined his eyes. They were bloodshot and watery. He took some water from the well and dashed it into the dog's eyes as Robbie struggled.
"Hold still, boy, I'm trying to help ya," Zack soothed. He took out a blue work bandanna and wiped tenderly around Robbie's eyes.
"What did it, boy? How did it happen?" Zack asked. Robbie merely whined.
"What's wrong with him?" Mrs. Stewart, broom in hand, asked from the doorway.
"Don't rightly know," Zack patted the dog, "acts like he got something in his eyes."
"Skunk?"
"Naw," Zack shook his head. "He don't smell. Something else."
"Cat?"
"No scratches, either. He acts like they're burnin' him, like he got dust or somethin' in 'em."
"Well, take him out to the barn and you better get after Junius."
"Yeah, Ma. Come on, Robbie." He led Robbie to the barn and made him lie on a bed of hay in one of the stalls then returned to the kitchen for his lantern. He put on his thick denim jacket and work cap and turned to his wife.
"If she ain't in the woods, I'll come back and git the truck and drive over to the Leemers and see if he seen her."
He left the kitchen and shone the lantern around in the farmyard to get his bearings, then headed for the north end of his farm. He could see the faint glimmer of dawn in the east, more pronounced in the northeast, and even more so due north. He rubbed his eyes. A much brighter glow outlined the treetops in the north woods, that made the dawn on the eastern horizon look like a dirty gray streak. His first thought was of fire, but there was no smoke, no flame.
Zack walked dazedly toward the woods, his eyes glued to the light above the trees. Soon he was in the woods, and he could see the brightness extended down through the trees from the sky, on the other side of the woods. He approached cautiously as the light grew brighter, and came to the clearing where it was most intense. A thick bush obstructed his view, and Zack moved it aside then uttered a hoarse gasp, as he clutched at his eyes.
For a moment he felt he was dreaming. He squinted between the slits of his fingers. The glow was still piercing, but he could see the brightly lit Junius, radiating blue-white light, nibbling at the sparse grass in the clearing. Zack stood transfixed, his eyes widening behind his fingers. He felt the tears and the burning sensation, and squinted tightly, turning his head from the unbelievable scene.
* * * * *
Zack didn't remember his return to the farmhouse, or incoherently trying to explain to his wife the scene he had witnessed. A stiff jolt of elderberry wine drove off the jitters and reasoning returned. His wife sat patiently, eyeing him oddly, as Zack muttered over and over again, "It's unbelievable! It's unbelievable!"
Mrs. Stewart rose. "I'm going out and see fer myself. And, Zack, if yer lying to me--"
Zack jumped from the chair, barring her way.
"Believe me, maw, it's true. Don't go out there. It might be too much fer ya."
"It's the craziest thing I ever heard," Mrs. Stewart scoffed. "A cow that shines like the sun!"
"Look, maw, will ya jest come with me as fer as the pasture, you can see the glow from there, and mebbe that might convince ya."
"Yes, yes, I will." Mrs. Stewart jerked off her apron. "I declare, Zack, I think these chores are getting the best of ya."
They walked to the pasture, their eyes on the treetops of the north woods. A faint glow began to appear.
"See! See!" Zack pointed, laughing crazily.
"Let's get closer, looks like a fire," Mrs. Stewart said.
"Ain't no fire." Zack's tone was angry. "It's Junius and she's all lit up like a Christmas tree."
"Zack, now you stop that kinda crazy talk. There's a reason behind everything, and I'm sure there's one fer this."
"There is a reason, maw. Junius. She's got the whole clearing lit up like the noonday sun. Lord only knows how she got that way, but she's shining out there like a great big light bulb, only brighter."
Mrs. Stewart quickened her pace towards the clearing.
"I'm going to see fer myself," she said determinedly, "and put an end to this foolish nonsense."
"Alright, maw," Zack spoke resignedly, "if yer mind's set. But I'm warning ya, ya better squint yer eyes tight. She's too bright to look at. Poor Robbie must have got too good a look at her."
Mrs. Stewart approached the clearing ahead of her husband, and moved the same bush aside that had obstructed her husband's view. Her gaze caught the brightly radiating figure of Junius, and Mrs. Stewart screamed, clasping her face with her hands. Zack had his head turned, but he groped for his wife, grasped her arm and led her from the clearing.
"It's too crazy to believe, Zack," she whispered in awe; "What are we going to do? What has happened to poor Junius?"
"I don't know what happened to her," Zack answered, "but I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm going to call the University and git them scientist fellas down here."
"You suppose they can git close enough to milk the poor thing?" Mrs. Stewart clasped her hands in frustration. "She's probably in misery."
Zack shook his head. "Ain't no tellin' what they're liable to do after they seen her. Most likely they'll want to ship her to the University to examine her and see how she got that way."
"Why don't we call the Vet'nar'n?" Mrs. Stewart asked. "It might be some kind of new disease."
"It ain't no disease, maw. It's something nobody in the whole world ever seen or heard of before. I jest hope I can convince them University fellas to come down here."
"Don't you think you better tie Junius so she won't stray?"
"Better wait and see what them scientists say. Besides, if she strays, all we gotta do is follow the light!"
* * * * *
Zack did the most important chores and at eight A.M. on the dot he called the State University.
The operator at the switchboard answered sleepily.
"Good morning, State University."
"Mornin', ma'am. I'd like to talk to one of them scientist fellas."
"To whom in particular did you wish to speak?"
"Any of 'em that ain't busy. I got somethin' important to tell 'em."
"If I knew what it was about," the operator was becoming irritated, "I'd connect you with the right party."
Zack hesitated, reluctant to give his startling news to a mere operator. Instead, he hedged. "Well, who would have charge of things that light up?"
"Oh, you want the electrical engineering lab. Just a moment, sir."
There was a series of clicks and buzzes in the earpiece then Zack heard a man's deep voice.
"Hello."
"Hello," Zack replied, "this the electrical engineering lab?"
"Yessir, that's right."
"Well, my name is Zack Stewart and I own a forty-acre farm on the Canal Road just outside of Smithville."
"I'm Professor Donnell, can I help you?"
"Yeah," Zack took a deep breath then began, "my cow Junius was missing since yesterday morning and this morning when I went out to search for her again, I found her."
"Mr. Stewart," Professor Donnell's voice was impatient, "I'm a very busy man with a heavy class schedule. Why in the world would I care if you found your cow or not?"
"You'd care if you knew how I found her."
"Alright, Mr. Stewart, how did you find your cow, with some new kind of radar?"
"Nossir, I found her by following the bright light in the north wood and when I got there, there was Junius lit up like a neon sign."
"Mr. Stewart, are you drunk?"
"I knew you wouldn't believe me. All I can say is, come see for--"
Zack heard a sudden click then an immediate buzzing. Professor Donnell had hung up.
* * * * *
He had no sooner replaced the phone when there was a pounding on the door. He opened it and saw six state troopers and four important-looking gentlemen in civilian dress. A trooper who looked as though he might be in charge, spoke to Zack.
"Sir, we don't want you or your wife to get panicky, but we have reason to believe that something strange is going on in your woods. These men are from the atomic research laboratory at the University and they are convinced that a flying saucer has landed out there."
"It ain't no flying saucer," Zack spoke wearily.
"It isn't?" one of the gentlemen asked, disappointed, "then what is it?"
"It's Junius, my cow."
"Your--WHAT?" the state trooper exclaimed incredulously. "Are you nuts?"
Angrily, Zack jerked his thumb in the direction of the north woods.
"Jest go out there and see fer yourself and then tell me I'm nuts."
They hurriedly left the house, looking back skeptically at Zack.
Zack and his wife stood in the doorway, watching them until they were out of sight in the woods.
"You watch 'em come busting back here in a minute, maw."
In a few moments they saw the men scrambling out of the woods, rushing madly for the house, holding their eyes.
"Now I don't have to convince anybody," Zack smirked.
By the time they reached the porch, they were all talking excitedly and rubbing their eyes. The state trooper in charge pulled Zack aside.
"Mister," he asked ominously, "what the hell happened to that cow?"
"I don't know," Zack spoke with sarcasm, "jest the way I found her."
The important-looking civilian bustled past the patrolman and confronted Zack.
"I'd like to use your phone," his hands moved nervously, "where is it?"
Zack showed him and the man rushed to it and hastily dialed a number.
"This is Professor Jonathon Sims, Nuclear Physicist at State University. Put me through immediately to the Governor. It's very important."
There was a slight pause as Sims drummed impatiently on the phone.
"Hello! Hello, Governor? Professor Sims. I'd like a contingent of National Guardsmen around the farm of Zack Stewart on the old Canal Road. A most astounding thing has happened out here. For the welfare of the Public, I urgently request this farm be placed under tight security check at once and the Federal Government notified immediately."
"Hey now, wait a minute, Mister--" Zack protested.
Sims motioned him into silence, his ear glued to the phone.
"Sir," he hesitated, glancing at the group sideways, "you won't believe this until you see it. But we have positive proof a saucer has landed here. Mr. Stewart's cow is radiating intense blue and white light, the kind that has been associated with the glow of flying saucers."
Sims paused, listening to the Governor. Zack saw him fidget and stick a forefinger in his collar.
"Honestly, Sir! I am not drunk! The cow is radiating light."
"See?" Zack grinned at him. "Now ya know how I felt."
Sims ignored him, concentrating on the phone.
"Yessir, there is a state trooper here." He turned to the one in charge. "He wants to speak to you." The trooper took the receiver.
"Hello, Governor. Sgt. Les Johnson of the Highway Patrol." Pause. "That's right, sir. There's a number of people here who can swear to it. Yessir." This time the trooper fidgeted. "I seen it too. Blue-white light, yessir. Nossir, we are not having a drinking party. The light was reported by the pilot of the Continental Airways early this morning and we investigated. Yessir." He held the receiver towards Sims. "He wants to talk to you again."
The Governor was finally convinced something indeed strange was happening at the Stewart place, but being a solid citizen and faithful servant of the people who elected him, he couldn't believe the fantastic story the professor and the trooper told him. He decided to see for himself and rang for his chauffeur after his telephone conversation with Professor Sims.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Stewart turned to Sims.
"Will you please tell us if Junius can be milked?"
"I really don't know yet, Mrs. Stewart. I'll have to investigate the area for harmful radio-activity first, then I'll have to check the cow, herself. Pardon me." He turned to the phone again.
Trying to keep his voice and emotion under control, Professor Sims called his laboratory at the University and ordered among other technical equipment, a Geiger counter, a gamma-ray detector, a portable lead shield, body and temperature thermometers, a portable X-ray machine, and a dozen pairs of smoked glasses.
The equipment arrived within the hour, and Professor Sims distributed it among his assistants with his instructions. It was understood that he alone would approach Junius, wearing his smoked glasses and carrying the protective lead shield, to make the initial test. If his tests proved that Junius could be safely approached, he would go back for the others.
"You look like one of them flying saucer fellas, yerself," Zack laughed, seeing Professor Sims donned in the lead shield and the dark glasses.
Sims waved at the crowd in the farmyard and walked awkwardly toward the glow in the north wood, less pronounced now in the daylight. They watched until his retreating figure disappeared into the woods, and they were still watching the spot for what seemed a long time afterward. One of the assistants fidgeted and looked at his watch.
"He's been in there twenty minutes. Wonder what he's doing?"
"I hope he's milking her," Mrs. Stewart said hopefully.
Zack chuckled as a thought struck him.
"What's so funny, Zack?" his wife asked.
"Junius," Zack's chuckle bubbled into laughter, "will be the first cow to give radiated milk."
* * * * *
Finally, after another fifteen minutes, they saw Professor Sims emerge from the woods. As he came across the pasture they could see that his smoked glasses were propped above his eyebrows and he was concentrating on a small notebook in his hand, shaking his head from time to time.
When he finally joined the waiting group, he was flooded with questions.
He gestured them into silence.
"Please, I cannot answer any questions as yet until I have consulted with my assistants. Sgt. Johnson, will you please have your men guard the clearing while we hold a conference?"
"Is it safe to get that close to her?" the trooper asked, unbelieving.
"I can assure you that it is. There is just a negligible amount of radio-activity present, and no more ultra-violet rays then there are in an average sun lamp. But you must wear your glasses." Turning to his aides he said, "Come gentlemen," and they followed him into the farmhouse.
"Can she be milked?" Mrs. Stewart wailed after them.
"What a gadawful situation," Zack muttered, grabbing a pitchfork and heading for the barn.
The scientists seated themselves around the big dining-room table and faced Professor Sims.
"Gentlemen, it's the most amazing thing that ever happened. That cow is glowing out there like a miniature atomic pile, and under the circumstances as we know them, should be deader than a door nail, but there she stands, shining like the morning sun, chewing her cud and just mooing away as if nothing happened."
"What is your theory, Professor?" one of the assistants asked.
"I have one, but it's utterly fantastic," Sims answered.
"So is that cow out there. Let's hear it!"
"Do you remember how much more frequent saucer sightings were reported in this area alone?" Sims asked. All the assistants nodded their heads.
"Well," Sims went on, "I am of the opinion that a saucer actually landed out there and they came across the cow by accident. They either shot her with some sort of radium ray gun, or some luminous substance unknown to us."
"Why didn't Junius die?" one of the assistants asked.
Sims shook his head. "They wished to examine her. You see, gentlemen, whatever it was, it served a threefold purpose. It made her luminous, immobile and--" Sims placed both hands on the table and leaned forward for emphasis, "transparent."
There was a gasp and exclamations.
"Transparent? How?--"
"I was within a foot of the cow, felt her hide, and through the glasses I could see the skeletal frame, the chest cavity, the heart beating within, the entire intestinal tract, much, much more clearly than could be seen by the best X-ray."
As if on command, the assistants all rose simultaneously.
"Sit down, gentlemen, the cow isn't going anywhere. We shall have to face this situation with sound scientific reasoning. There will be a closed van here soon to pick up Junius and haul her to the laboratory where we can examine her more thoroughly. Now my belief is that the saucer took off in haste, such great haste that they forgot to extinguish poor Junius. I believe they will be back looking for her, therefore we shall have to return her tonight and conceal ourselves around the area and watch."
"Splendid idea, Professor Sims!" one of the assistants exclaimed.
Yelling voices in the farmyard caught their attention. They saw Sgt. Johnson through the dining-room window, coming across the yard, yelling and pointing to the sky. Sims rushed from the house, met Johnson, grasped him by the shoulders, shaking him.
"What happened, man, what happened?" Sims asked.
"Black light, black light!" Johnson shouted, pointing skyward. Sims looked up. Nothing but the serene blue of the summer sky and an occasional bird caught his eye.
Sims shook him again, more roughly.
"Speak, man, what happened?"
"Black light flashed down on the cow! Blackest light you ever saw!"
The group gathered around him in the yard, trying to make sense out of what he said. So engrossed were they with his babblings, that none but Mrs. Stewart was aware of the fact that Junius had entered the farmyard and was eyeing them curiously.
"Junius!" she exclaimed.
"Moooo!"
The crowd looked up to see the ordinary, unlit Junius standing calmly by the gate.
"Hurry and get the milk pail, Zack, Junius is all right now!" Mrs. Stewart yelled happily to her husband, as Professor Sims and his assistants led the hysterical trooper into the house.
High over the horizon, a faint, silvery disc was disappearing at fantastic speed into outer space.
ROUGH TRANSLATION
By Jean M. Janis
Don't be ashamed if you can't blikkel any more. It's because you couldn't help framishing.
"Shurgub," said the tape recorder. "Just like I told you before, Dr. Blair, it's krandoor, so don't expect to vrillipax, because they just won't stand for any. They'd sooner framish."
"Framish?" Jonathan heard his own voice played back by the recorder, tinny and slightly nasal. "What is that, Mr. Easton?"
"You know. Like when you guttip. Carooms get awfully bevvergrit. Why, I saw one actually--"
"Let's go back a little, shall we?" Jonathan suggested. "What does shurgub mean?"
There was a pause while the machine hummed and the recorder tape whirred. Jonathan remembered the look on Easton's face when he had asked him that. Easton had pulled away slightly, mouth open, eyes hurt.
"Why--why, I told you!" he had shouted. "Weeks ago! What's the matter? Don't you blikkel English?"
Jonathan Blair reached out and snapped the switch on the machine. Putting his head in his hands, he stared down at the top of his desk.
You learned Navajo in six months, he reminded himself fiercely.
You are a highly skilled linguist. What's the matter? Don't you blikkel English?
* * * * *
He groaned and started searching through his briefcase for the reports from Psych. Easton must be insane. He must! Ramirez says it's no language. Stoughton says it's no language. And I, Jonathan thought savagely, say it's no language.
But--
Margery tiptoed into the study with a tray.
"But Psych," he continued aloud to her, "Psych says it must be a language because, they say, Easton is not insane!"
"Oh, dear," sighed Margery, blinking her pale blue eyes. "That again?" She set his coffee on the desk in front of him. "Poor Jonathan. Why doesn't the Institute give up?"
"Because they can't." He reached for the cup and sat glaring at the steaming coffee.
"Well," said his wife, settling into the leather chair beside him, "I certainly would. My goodness, it's been over a month now since he came back, and you haven't learned a thing from him!"
"Oh, we've learned some. And this morning, for the first time, Easton himself began to seem puzzled by a few of the things he was saying. He's beginning to use terms we can understand. He's coming around. And if I could only find some clue--some sort of--"
Margery snorted. "It's just plain foolish! I knew the Institute was asking for trouble when they sent the Rhinestead off. How do they know Easton ever got to Mars, anyway? Maybe he did away with those other men, cruised around, and then came back to Earth with this made-up story just so he could seem to be a hero and--"
"That's nonsense!"
"Why?" she demanded stubbornly. "Why is it?"
"Because the Rhinestead was tracked, for one thing, on both flights, to and from Mars. Moonbase has an indisputable record of it. And besides, the instruments on the ship itself show--" He found the report he had been searching for. "Oh, never mind."
"All right," she said defiantly. "Maybe he did get to Mars. Maybe he did away with the crew after he got there. He knew the ship was built so that one man could handle it in an emergency. Maybe he--"
"Look," said Jonathan patiently. "He didn't do anything of the sort. Easton has been checked so thoroughly that it's impossible to assume anything except, (a) he is sane, (b) he reached Mars and made contact with the Martians, (c) this linguistic barrier is a result of that contact."
* * * * *
Margery shook her head, sucking in her breath. "When I think of all those fine young men," she murmured. "Heaven only knows what happened to them!"
"You," Jonathan accused, "have been reading that columnist--what's-his-name? The one that's been writing such claptrap ever since Easton brought the Rhinestead back alone."
"Cuddlehorn," said his wife. "Roger Cuddlehorn, and it's not claptrap."
"The other members of the crew are all alive, all--"
"I suppose Easton told you that?" she interrupted.
"Yes, he did."
"Using double-talk, of course," said his wife triumphantly. At the look on Jonathan's face, she stood up in guilty haste. "All right, I'll go!" She blew him a kiss from the door. "Richie and I are having lunch at one. Okay? Or would you rather have a tray in here?"
"Tray," he said, turning back to his desk and his coffee. "No, on second thought, call me when lunch is ready. I'll need a break."
He was barely conscious of the closing of the door as Margery left the room. Naturally he didn't take her remarks seriously, but--
He opened the folder of pictures and studied them again, along with the interpretations by Psych, Stoughton, Ramirez and himself.
Easton had drawn the little stick figures on the first day of his return. The interpretations all checked--and they had been done independently, too. There it is, thought Jonathan. Easton lands the Rhinestead. He and the others meet the Martians. They are impressed by the Martians. The others stay on Mars. Easton returns to Earth, bearing a message.
Question: What is the message?
Teeth set, Jonathan put away the pictures and went back to the tape on the recorder. "Yes," said his own voice, in answer to Easton's outburst. "I do--er--blikkel English. But tell me, Mr. Easton, do you understand me?"
"Under-stand?" The man seemed to have difficulty forming the word. "You mean--" Pause. "Dr. Blair, I murv you. Is that it?"
"Murv," repeated Jonathan. "All right, you murv me. Do you murv this? I do not always murv what you say."
A laugh. "Of course not. How could you?" Suppressed groan. "Carooms," Easton had murmured, almost inaudibly. "Just when I almost murv, the kwakut goes freeble."
Jonathan flipped the switch on the machine. "Murv" he wrote on his pad of paper. He added "Blikkel," "Carooms" and "Freeble." He stared at the list. He should understand, he thought. At times it seemed as if he did and then, in the next instant, he was lost again, and Easton was angry, and they had to start all over again.
* * * * *
Sighing, he took out more papers, notes from previous sessions, both with himself and with other linguists. The difficulty of reaching Easton was unlike anything he had ever before tackled. The six months of Navajo had been rough going, but he had done it, and done it well enough to earn the praise of Old Comas, his informant. Surely, he thought, after mastering a language like that, one in which the student must not only learn to imitate difficult sounds, but also learn a whole new pattern of thought--
Pattern of thought. Jonathan sat very still, as though movement would send the fleeting clue back into the corner from which his mind had glimpsed it.
A whole new frame of reference. Suppose, he toyed with the thought, suppose the Martian language, whatever it was, was structured along the lines of Navajo, involving clearly defined categories which did not exist in English.
"Murv," he said aloud. "I murv a lesson, but I blikkel a language."
Eagerly, Jonathan reached again for the switch. Categories clearly defined, yes! But the categories of the Martian language were not those of the concrete or the particular, like the Navajo. They were of the abstract. Where one word "understand" would do in English, the Martian used two--
Good Lord, he realized, they might use hundreds! They might--
Jonathan turned on the machine, sat back and made notes, letting the recorder run uninterrupted. He made his notes, this time, on the feelings he received from the words Easton used. When the first tape was done, he put on the second.
Margery tapped at the door just as the third tape was ending. "In a minute," he called, scribbling furiously. He turned off the machine, put out his cigarette and went to lunch, feeling better than he had in weeks.
Richie was at the kitchen sink, washing his hands.
"And next time," Margery was saying, "you wash up before you sit down."
Richie blinked and watched Jonathan seat himself. "Daddy didn't wash his hands," he said.
Margery fixed the six-year-old with a stern eye. "Richard, don't be rude."
"Well, he didn't." Richie sat down and reached for his glass of milk.
"Daddy probably washed before he came in," said Margery. She took the cover off a tureen, ladled soup into bowls and passed sandwiches, pretending not to see the ink-stained hand Jonathan was hiding in his lap.
Jonathan, elated by the promise of success, ate three or four sandwiches, had two bowls of soup and finally sat back while Margery went to get coffee.
Richie slid part way off his chair, remembered, and slid back on again. "Kin I go?" he asked.
"Please may I be excused," corrected his father.
* * * * *
Richie repeated, received a nod and ran out of the dinette and through the kitchen, grabbing a handful of cookies on the way. The screen door banged behind him as he raced into the backyard.
"Richie!" Margery started after him, eyes ablaze. Then she stopped and came back to the table with the coffee. "That boy! How long does it take before they get to be civilized?" Jonathan laughed. "Oh, sure," she went on, sitting down opposite him. "It's funny to you. But if you were here all day long--" She stirred sugar into her cup. "We should have sent him to camp, even if it would have wrecked the budget!"
"Oh? Is it that bad?"
Margery shuddered. "Sometimes he's a perfect angel, and then--It's unbelievable, the things that child can think of! Sometimes I'm convinced children are another species altogether! Why, only this morning--"
"Well," Jonathan broke in, "next summer he goes to camp." He stood up and stretched.
Margery said wistfully, "I suppose you want to get back to work."
"Ummmm." Jonathan leaned over and kissed her briefly. "I've got a new line of attack," he said, picking up his coffee. He patted his wife's shoulder. "If things work out well, we might get away on that vacation sooner than we thought."
"Really?" she asked, brightening.
"Really." He left the table and went back to his den.
Putting the next tape on the machine, he settled down to his job. Time passed and finally there were no more tapes to listen to.
He stacked his notes and began making lists, checking through the sheets of paper for repetitions of words Easton had used, listing the various connotations which had occurred to Jonathan while he had listened to the tapes.
As he worked, he was struck by the similarity of the words he was recording to the occasional bits of double-talk he had heard used by comedians in theaters and on the air, and he allowed his mind to wander a bit, exploring the possibilities.
Was Martian actually such a close relative to English? Or had the Martians learned English from Easton, and had Easton then formed a sort of pidgin-English-Martian of his own?
Jonathan found it difficult to believe in the coincidence of the two languages being alike, unless--
He laughed. Unless, of course, Earthmen were descended from Martians, or vice versa. Oh, well, not my problem, he thought jauntily.
* * * * *
He stared at the list before him and then he started to swear, softly at first, then louder. But no matter how loudly he swore, the list remained undeniably and obstinately the same:
Freeble--Displeasure (Tape 3)
Freeble--Elation (Tape 4)
Freeble--Grief (Tape 5)
"How," he asked the empty room, "can a word mean grief and elation at the same time?"
Jonathan sat for a few moments in silence, thinking back to the start of the sessions with Easton. Ramirez and Stoughton had both agreed with him that Easton's speech was phonemically identical to English. Jonathan's trained ear remembered the pronunciation of "Freeble" in the three different connotations and he forced himself to admit it was the same on all three tapes in question.
Stuck again, he thought gloomily.
Good-by, vacation!
He lit a cigarette and stared at the ceiling. It was like saying the word "die" meant something happy and something sad at one and the same, like saying--
Jonathan pursed his lips. Yes, it could be. If someone were in terrible pain, death, while a thing of sorrow, could also mean release from suffering and so become a thing of joy. Or it could mean sorrow to one person and relief to another. In that case, what he was dealing with here was not only--
The crash of the ball, as it sailed through the window behind his desk, lifted Jonathan right from his chair. Furious, his elusive clue shattered as surely as the pane of glass, he strode to the window.
"Richie!"
His son, almost hidden behind the lilac bush, did not answer.
"I see you!" Jonathan bellowed. "Come here!"
The bush stirred slightly and Richie peeped through the leaves. "Did you call me, Daddy?" he asked politely.
Jonathan clamped his lips shut and pointed to the den. Richie tried a smile as he sidled around the bush, around his father, and into the house.
"My," he marveled, looking at the broken glass on the floor inside. "My goodness!" He sat down in the leather chair to which Jonathan motioned.
"Richie," said his father, when he could trust his voice again, "how did it happen?"
His son's thin legs, brown and wiry, stuck out straight from the depths of the chair. There was a long scratch on one calf and numerous black-and-blue spots around both knees.
"I dunno," said Richie. He blinked his eyes, deeper blue than Margery's, and reached up one hand to push away the mass of blond hair tumbling over his forehead. He was obviously trying hard to pretend he wasn't in the room at all.
* * * * *
Jonathan said, "Now, son, that is not a good answer. What were you doing when the ball went through the window?"
"Watching," said Richie truthfully.
"How did it go through the window?"
"Real fast."
Jonathan found his teeth were clamped. No wonder he couldn't decode Easton's speech--he couldn't even talk with his own son!
"I mean," he explained, his patience wavering, "you threw the ball so that it broke the window, didn't you?"
"I didn't mean it to," said Richie.
"All right. That's what I wanted to know." He started on a lecture about respect for other people's property, while Richie sat and looked blankly respectful. "And so," he heard himself conclude, "I hope we'll be more careful in the future."
"Yes," said Richie.
A vague memory came to Jonathan and he sat and studied his son, remembering him when he was younger and first starting to talk. He recalled the time Richie, age three, had come bustling up to him. "Vransh!" the child had pleaded, tugging at his father's hand. Jonathan had gone outside with him to see a baby bird which had fallen from its nest. "Vransh!" Richie had crowed, exhibiting his find. "Vransh!"
"Do I get my spanking now?" asked Richie from the chair. His eyes were wide and watchful.
Jonathan tore his mind from still another recollection: the old joke about the man and woman who adopted a day-old French infant and then studied French so they would be able to understand their child when he began to talk. Maybe, thought Jonathan, it's no joke. Maybe there is a language--
"Spanking?" he repeated absentmindedly. He took a fresh pencil and pad of paper. "How would you like to help with something, Richie?"
The blue eyes watched carefully. "Before you spank me or after?"
"No spanking." Jonathan glanced at the Easton notes, vaguely aware that Richie had suddenly relaxed. "What I'm going to do," he went on, "is say some words. It'll be a kind of game. I'll say a word and then you say a word. You say the first word you think after you hear my word. Okay?" He cleared his throat. "Okay! The first word is--house."
"My house."
"Bird," said Jonathan.
"Uh--tree." Richie scratched his nose and stifled a yawn.
* * * * *
Disappointed, Jonathan reminded himself that Richie at six could not be expected to remember something he had said when he was three. "Dog."
"Biffy." Richie sat up straight. "Daddy, did you know Biffy had puppies? Steve's mother showed me. Biffy had four puppies, Daddy. Four!"
Jonathan nodded. He supposed Richie's next statement would be an appeal to go next door and negotiate for one of the pups, and he hurried on with, "Carooms."
"Friends," said Richie, eyes still shining. "Daddy, do you suppose we could have a pup--" He broke off at the look on Jonathan's face. "Huh?"
"Friends," repeated Jonathan, writing the word slowly and unsteadily. "Uh--vacation."
"Beach," said Richie cautiously, still looking scared.
Jonathan went on with more familiar terms and Richie slowly relaxed again in the big chair. From somewhere in the back of his mind, Jonathan heard Margery say, "Sometimes I think they're a different species altogether." He kept his voice low and casual, uncertain of what he was thinking, but aware of the fact that Richie was hiding something. The little mantel clock ticked drowsily, and Richie began to look sleepy and bored as they went through things like "car" and "school" and "book." Then--
"Friend," said Jonathan.
"Allavarg," yawned Richie. "No!" He snapped to, alert and wary. "I mean Steve."
His father looked up sharply. "What's that?"
"What?" asked Richie.
"Richie," said Jonathan, "what's a Caroom?"
The boy shrugged and muttered, "I dunno."
"Oh, yes, you do!" Jonathan lit a cigarette. "What's an Allavarg?" He watched the boy bite his lips and stare out the window. "He's a friend, isn't he?" coaxed Jonathan. "Your friend? Does he play with you?"
The blond head nodded slowly and uncertainly.
"Where does he live?" persisted Jonathan. "Does he come over here and play in your yard? Does he, Richie?"
The boy stared at his father, worried and unhappy. "Sometimes," he whispered. "Sometimes he does, if I call him."
"How do you call him?" asked Jonathan. He was beginning to feel foolish.
"Why," said Richie, "I just say 'Here, Allavarg!' and he comes, if he's not too busy."
"What keeps him busy?" Such nonsense! Allavarg was undoubtedly an imaginary playmate. This whole hunch of his was utter nonsense. He should be at work on Easton instead of--
"The nursery keeps him busy," said Richie. "Real busy."
* * * * *
Jonathan frowned. Did Richie mean the greenhouse down the road? Was there a Mr. Allavarg who worked there? "Whose nursery?"
"Ours." Richie wrinkled his face thoughtfully. "I think I better go outside and play."
"Our nursery?" Jonathan stared at his son. "Where is it?"
"I think I better go play," said Richie more firmly, sliding off the chair.
"Richard! Where is the nursery?"
The full lower lip began to tremble. "I can't tell you!" Richie wailed. "I promised!"
Jonathan slammed his fist on the desk. "Answer me!" He knew he shouldn't speak this way to Richie; he knew he was frightening the boy. But the ideas racing through his mind drove him to find out what this was all about. It might be nothing, but it also might be--"Answer me, Richard!"
The child stifled a sob. "Here," he said weakly.
"Here? Where?"
"In my house," said Richie. "And Steve's house and Billy's and all over." He rubbed his eyes, leaving a grimy smear.
"All right," soothed Jonathan. "It's all right now, son. Daddy didn't mean to scare you. Daddy has to learn these things, that's all. Just like learning in school."
The boy shook his head resentfully. "You know," he accused. "You just forgot."
"What did I forget, Richie?"
"You forgot all about Allavarg. He told me! It was a different Allavarg when you were little, but it was almost the same. You used to play with your Allavarg when you were little like me!"
Jonathan took a deep breath. "Where did Allavarg come from, Richie?"
But Richie shook his head stubbornly, lips pressed tight. "I promised!"
"Richie, a promise like that isn't a good one," pleaded Jonathan. "Allavarg wouldn't want you to disobey your father and mother, would he?"
The child sat and stared at him.
This was a very disturbing thought and Jonathan could see Richie did not know how to deal with it.
He pressed his momentary advantage. "Allavarg takes care of little boys and girls, doesn't he? He plays with them and he looks after them, I'll bet."
Richie nodded uncertainly.
"And," continued Jonathan, smiling what he hoped was a winning, comradely smile at his son, "I'll bet that Allavarg came from some place far, far away, didn't he?"
"Yes," said Richie softly.
"And it's his job to be here and look after the--the nursery?" Jonathan bit his lip. Nursery? Earth? Carooms--Martians? His head began to ache. "Son, you've got to help me understand. Do you--do you murv me?"
* * * * *
Richie shook his head. "No. But I will after--"
"After what?"
"After I grow up."
"Why not now?" asked Jonathan.
The blond head sank lower. "Because you framish, Daddy."
His father nodded, trying to look wise, wincing inwardly as he pictured his colleagues listening in on this conversation. "Well--why don't you help me so I don't framish?"
"I can't." Richie glanced up, his eyes stricken. "Some day, Allavarg says, I'm going to framish, too!"
"Grow up, you mean?" hazarded Jonathan, and this time his smile was real as he looked at the smudged eyes and soft round cheeks. "Why, Richie," he went on, his voice suddenly husky, "it's fun to be a little boy, but there'll be lots to do when you grow up. You--"
"I wish I was Mr. Easton!" Richie said fiercely.
Jonathan held his breath. "What about Mr. Easton?"
Richie squirmed out of the chair and clutched Jonathan's arm. "Please, Daddy! If you let Mr. Easton go back, can I go, too? Please? Can I?"
Jonathan put his hands on his son's shoulders. "Richie! What do you know about Mr. Easton?"
"Please? Can I go with him?" The shining blue eyes pleaded up at him. "If you don't let him go back pretty soon, he's going to framish again! Please! Can I?"
"He's going to framish," nodded Jonathan. "And what then?" he coaxed. "What'll happen after he framishes? Will he be able to tell me about his trip?"
"I dunno," said Richie. "I dunno how he could. After you framish, you don't remember lots of things. I don't think he's even gonna remember he went on a trip." The boy's hands shook Jonathan's arm eagerly. "Please, Daddy! Can I go with him?"
"No!" Jonathan glared and released his hold on Richie. Didn't he have troubles enough without Richie suggesting--"About the nursery," he said briskly. "Why is there a nursery?"
"To take care of us." Richie looked worried. "Why can't I go?"
"Because you can't! Why don't they have the nursery back where Allavarg came from?"
"There isn't any room." The blue eyes studied the man, looking for a way to get permission to go with Mr. Easton.
"No room? What do you mean?"
Richie sighed. Obviously he'd have to explain first and coax later. "Well, you know my school? You know my teacher in school? You know when my teacher was different?" He peered anxiously at Jonathan, and suddenly the man caught on.
"Of course! You mean when they split the kindergarten into two smaller groups because there were too many--"
* * * * *
His voice trailed off. Too many. Too many what? Too many Martians on Mars? Growing population? No way to cut down the birth rate? He pictured the planet with too many people. What to do? Move out. Take another planet. Why didn't they just do that? He put the question to Richie.
"Oh," said his son wisely, "they couldn't because of the framish. They did go other places, but everywhere they went, they framished. And after you framish, you ain't--aren't a Caroom any more. You're a Gunderguck and of course--"
"Huh?"
"--and a Caroom doesn't like to framish and be a Gunderguck," continued Richie happily, as though reciting a lesson learned in school. "He wants to be a Caroom all the time because it's better and more fun and you know lots of things you don't remember after you get to be a Gunderguck. Only--" he paused for a gulp of air--"only there wasn't room for all the Carooms back home and they couldn't find any place where they could be Carooms all the time, because of the framish. So after a long time, and after they looked all over all around, they decided maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they sent some of their little boys and girls--the ones they didn't have room for--to some place where they could be Carooms longer than most other places. And that place," Richie said proudly, "was right here! 'Cause here there's almost as much gladdisl as back home and--"
"Gladdisl?" Jonathan echoed hoarsely. "What's--"
"--and after they start growing up--"
"Gladdisl," Jonathan repeated, more firmly. "Richie, what is it?"
The forehead puckered momentarily. "It's something you breathe, sort of." The boy shied away from the difficult question, trying to remember what Allavarg had said about gladdisl. "Anyway, after the little boys and girls start to grow up and after they framish and be Gundergucks, like you and Mommy, the Carooms back home send some more to take their places. And the Gundergucks who used to be Carooms here in the nursery look after the new little--"
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" Jonathan interrupted suspiciously. "I thought you said Allavarg looks after them."
"He does. But there's so many little Carooms and there aren't many Allavargs and so the Gundergucks have to help. You help," Richie assured his father. "You and Mommy help a little bit."
Big of you to admit it, old man, thought Jonathan, suppressing a smile. "But aren't you our little boy?" he asked. He had a sudden vision of himself addressing the scientists at the Institute: "And so, gentlemen, our babies--who, incidentally, are really Martians--are brought by storks, after all. Except in those cases where--"
"The doctor brought me in a little black bag," said Richie.
* * * * *
The boy stood silent and studied his father. He sort of remembered what Allavarg had said, too. Things like You mustn't ever tell and It's got to be a secret and They'd only laugh at you, Richie, and if they didn't laugh, they might believe you and try to go back home and there just isn't any room.
"I think," said Richie, "I think I better--" He took a deep breath. "Here, Allavarg," he called in a soft, piping voice.
Jonathan raised his head. "Just what do you think you're doing--"
There was a sound behind him, and Jonathan turned startledly.
"Shame on you," said Allavarg, coming through the broken window.
Jonathan's words dropped away in a faint gurgle.
"I'm sorry," said Richie. "Don't be dipplefit."
"It's a mess," Allavarg replied. "It's a krandoor mess!" He waved his arm in the air over Jonathan's head. "And don't think I'm going to forget it!" The insistent hiss of escaping gas hovered over the moving pellet in his hand. "Jivis boy!"
Jonathan coughed suddenly. He got as far as "Now look here" and then found that he could neither speak nor move. The gas or whatever it was stung his eyes and burned in his throat.
"Why don't you just freeble him?" Richie asked unhappily. "You're using up all your gladdisl! Why don't you freeble him and get me another one?"
"Freeble, breeble," grumbled Allavarg, shoving the capsule directly under Jonathan's nose. "Just like you youngsters, always wanting to take the easy way out! Gundergucks don't grow on blansercots, you know."
Jonathan felt tears start in his eyes, partly from the fumes and partly from a growing realization that Allavarg was sacrificing precious air for him. He tried to think. If this was gladdisl and if this would keep a man in the state of being a Caroom, then--
"There," said Allavarg, looking unhappily at the emptied pellet. He shook it, sniffed it and finally returned it to the container at his side.
"I'm sorry," Richie whispered. "But he kept askin' me and askin' me."
"There, there," said Allavarg, going to the window. "Don't fret. I know you won't do it again." He turned and looked thoughtfully at Jonathan. He winked at Richie and then he was gone.
* * * * *
Jonathan rubbed his eyes. He could move now. He opened his mouth and waggled his jaws. Now that the room was beginning to be cleared of the gas, he realized that it had had a pleasant odor. He realized--
Why, it was all so simple! Remembering his sessions with Easton, Jonathan laughed aloud. So simple! The message? Stay away from Mars! No room there! They said I could come back if I gave you the message, but I have to come back alone because there's no room for more people!
No room? Nonsense! Jonathan reached for the phone, dialled the Institute and asked for Dr. Stoughton. No room? On the paradise that was Mars? Well, they'd just have to make room! They couldn't keep that to themselves!
"Hello, Fred?" He leaned back in his chair, feeling a surge of pride and power. Wait till they heard about this! "Just wanted to tell you I solved the Easton thing. Just a simple case of hapsodon. You see, Allavarg came and gave me a tressimox of gladdisl and now that I'm a Caroom again--What? What do you mean, what's the matter? I said I'm not a Gunderguck any more." He stared at the phone. "Why, you spebberset moron! What's the matter with you? Don't you blikkel English?"
From the depths of the big chair across the room, Richie giggled.
JOHN JONES'S DOLLAR
By Harry Stephen Keeler
Take a board with 64 squares on it. Put a grain of wheat on the first square—two on the second—four on the third. Keep doubling in this manner and you will find there isn't enough wheat in the world to fill the sixty-fourth square. It can be the same with compound interest.
On the 201st day of the year 3221 A.D., the professor of history at the University of Terra seated himself in front of the Visaphone and prepared to deliver the daily lecture to his class, the members of which resided in different portions of the earth.
The instrument before which he seated himself was very like a great window sash, on account of the fact that there were three or four hundred frosted glass squares visible. In a space at the center, not occupied by any of these glass squares, was a dark oblong area and a ledge holding a piece of chalk. And above the area was a huge brass cylinder; toward this brass cylinder the professor would soon direct his subsequent remarks.
In order to assure himself that it was time to press the button which would notify the members of the class in history to approach their local Visaphones, the professor withdrew from his vest pocket a small contrivance which he held to his ear. Upon moving a tiny switch attached to the instrument, a metallic voice, seeming to come from somewhere in space, repeated mechanically: "Fifteen o'clock and one minute—fifteen o'clock and one minute—fifteen o'clock and one min—" Quickly, the professor replaced the instrument in his vest pocket and pressed a button at the side of the Visaphone.
As though in answer to the summons, the frosted squares began, one by one, to show the faces and shoulders of a peculiar type of young men; young men with great bulging foreheads, bald, toothless, and wearing immense horn spectacles. One square, however, still remained empty. On noticing this, a look of irritation passed over the professor's countenance.
But, seeing that every other glass square but this one was filled up, he commenced to talk.
"I am pleased, gentlemen, to see you all posted at your local Visaphones this afternoon. I have prepared my lecture today upon a subject which is, perhaps, of more economic interest than historical. Unlike the previous lectures, my talk will not confine itself to the happenings of a few years, but will gradually embrace the course of ten centuries, the ten centuries, in fact, which terminated three hundred years before the present date. My lecture will be an exposition of the effects of the John Jones Dollar, originally deposited in the dawn of civilization, or to be more precise, in the year of 1921—just thirteen hundred years ago. This John Jon—"
At this point in the professor's lecture, the frosted glass square which hitherto had shown no image, now filled up. Sternly he gazed at the head and shoulders that had just appeared.
"B262H72476Male, you are late to class again. What excuse have you to offer today?"
From the hollow cylinder emanated a shrill voice, while the lips of the picture on the glass square moved in unison with the words:
"Professor, you will perceive by consulting your class book, that I have recently taken up my residence near the North Pole. For some reason, wireless communication between the Central Energy Station and all points north of 89 degrees was cut off a while ago, on account of which fact I could not appear in the Visaphone. Hence—"
"Enough, sir," roared the professor. "Always ready with an excuse, B262H72476Male. I shall immediately investigate your tale."
From his coat pocket, the professor withdrew an instrument which, although supplied with an earpiece and a mouthpiece, had no wires whatever attached. Raising it to his lips, he spoke:
"Hello. Central Energy Station, please." A pause ensued. "Central Energy Station? This is the professor of history at the University of Terra, speaking. One of my students informs me that the North Pole region was out of communication with the Visaphone System this morning. Is that statement true? I would—"
A voice, apparently from nowhere, spoke into the professor's ear. "Quite true, Professor. A train of our ether waves accidently fell into parallelism with a train of waves from the Venus Substation. By the most peculiar mischance, the two trains happened to be displaced, with reference to each other, one half of a wave length, with the unfortunate result that the negative points of one coincided with the positive points of maximum amplitude of the other. Hence the two wave trains nullified each other and communication ceased for one hundred and eighty-five seconds—until the earth had revolved far enough to throw them out of parallelism."
"Ah! Thank you," replied the professor. He dropped his instrument into his coat pocket and gazed in the direction of the glass square whose image had so aroused his ire. "I apologize, B262H72476Male, for my suspicions as to your veracity—but I had in mind several former experiences." He shook a warning forefinger. "I will now resume my talk."
"A moment ago, gentlemen, I mentioned the John Jones Dollar. Some of you who have just enrolled with the class will undoubtedly say to yourselves: 'What is a John Jones? What is a Dollar?'
"In the early days, before the present scientific registration of human beings was instituted by the National Eugenics Society, man went around under a crude multi-reduplicative system of nomenclature. Under this system there were actually more John Joneses than there are calories in a British Thermal Unit. But there was one John Jones, in particular, living in the twentieth century, to whom I shall refer in my lecture. Not much is known of his personal life except that he was an ardent socialist—a bitter enemy, in fact, of the private ownership of wealth.
"Now as to the Dollar. At this day, when the Psycho-Erg, a combination of the Psych, the unit of esthetic satisfaction, and the Erg, the unit of mechanical energy, is recognized as the true unit of value, it seems difficult to believe that in the twentieth century and for more than ten centuries thereafter, the Dollar, a metallic circular disk, was being passed from hand to hand in exchange for the essentials of life.
"But nevertheless, such was the case. Man exchanged his mental or physical energy for these Dollars. He then re-exchanged the Dollars for sustenance, raiment, pleasure, and operations for the removal of the vermiform appendix.
"A great many individuals, however, deposited their Dollars in a stronghold called a bank. These banks invested the Dollars in loans and commercial enterprises, with the result that, every time the earth traversed the solar ecliptic, the banks compelled each borrower to repay, or to acknowledge as due, the original loan, plus six one-hundredths of that loan. And to the depositor, the banks paid three one-hundredths of the deposited Dollars for the use of the disks. This was known as three percent, or bank interest.
"Now, the safety of Dollars, when deposited in banks, was not absolutely assured to the depositor. At times, the custodians of these Dollars were wont to appropriate them and proceed to portions of the earth, sparsely inhabited and accessible with difficulty. And at other times, nomadic groups known as 'yeggmen' visited the banks, opened the vaults by force, and departed, carrying with them the contents.
"But to return to our subject. In the year 1921, one of these numerous John Joneses performed an apparently inconsequential action which caused the name of John Jones to go down in history. What did he do?
"He proceeded to one of these banks, known at that time as 'The First National Bank of Chicago,' and deposited there, one of these disks—a silver Dollar—to the credit of a certain individual. And this individual to whose credit the Dollar was deposited was no other person than the fortieth descendant of John Jones who stipulated in paper which was placed in the files of the bank, that the descendancy was to take place along the oldest child of each of the generations which would constitute his posterity.
"The bank accepted the Dollar under that understanding, together with another condition imposed by this John Jones, namely, that the interest was to be compounded annually. That meant that at the close of each year, the bank was to credit the account of John Jones's fortieth descendant with three one-hundredths of the account as it stood at the beginning of the year.
"History tells us little more concerning this John Jones—only that he died in the year 1931, or ten years afterward, leaving several children.
"Now you gentlemen who are taking mathematics under Professor L127M72421Male, of the University of Mars, will remember that where any number such as X, in passing through a progressive cycle of change, grows at the end of that cycle by a proportion p, then the value of the original X, after n cycles, becomes X(1 + p)n.
"Obviously, in this case, X equalled one Dollar; p equalled three one-hundredths; and n will depend upon any number of years which we care to consider, following the date of deposit. By a simple calculation, those of you who are today mentally alert can check up the results that I shall set forth in my lecture.
"At the time that John Jones died, the amount in the First National Bank of Chicago to the credit of John Jones the fortieth, was as follows."
The professor seized the chalk and wrote rapidly upon the oblong space:
1931 10 years elapsed $1.34
"The peculiar sinuous hieroglyphic," he explained, "is an ideograph representing the Dollar.
"Well, gentlemen, time went on as time will, until a hundred years had passed by. The First National Bank still existed, and the locality, Chicago, had become the largest center of population upon the earth. Through the investments which had taken place, and the yearly compounding of interest, the status of John Jones's deposit was now as follows." He wrote:
2021 100 years elapsed $19.10
"In the following century, many minor changes, of course, took place in man's mode of living; but the so-called socialists still agitated widely for the cessation of private ownership of wealth; the First National Bank still accepted Dollars for safe keeping, and the John Jones Dollar still continued to grow. With about thirty-four generations yet to come, the account now stood:
2121 200 years elapsed $364
"And by the end of the succeeding hundred years, it had grown to what constituted an appreciable bit of exchange value in those days—thus:
2221 300 years $6,920
"Now the century which followed contains an important date. The date I am referring to is the year 2299 A.D., or the year in which every human being born upon the globe was registered under a numerical name at the central bureau of the National Eugenics Society. In our future lessons which will treat with that period of detail, I shall ask you to memorize that date.
"The socialists still agitated, fruitlessly, but the First National Bank of Chicago was now the first International Bank of the Earth. And how great had John Jones's Dollar grown? Let us examine the account, both on that important historical date, and also at the close of the 400th year since it was deposited. Look:
2299
2321 378 years
400 years $68,900
$132,000
"But gentlemen, it had not reached the point where it could be termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they at last realized the utter futility of combating the balance of power. The account, though, now stood:
2421 500 years $2,520,000
"It is hardly necessary for me to make any comment. Those of you who are most astute, and others of you who flunked my course before and are now taking it the second time, of course know what is coming.
"During the age in which this John Jones lived, there lived also a man, a so-called scientist called Metchnikoff. We know, from a study of our vast collection of Egyptian Papyri and Carnegie Library books, that this Metchnikoff promulgated the theory that old age—or rather senility—was caused by colon-bacillus. This fact was later verified. But while he was correct in the etiology of senility, he was crudely primeval in the therapeutics of it.
"He proposed, gentlemen, to combat and kill this bacillus by utilizing the fermented lacteal fluid from a now extinct animal called the cow, models of which you can see at any time at the Solaris Museum."
A chorus of shrill, piping laughter emanated from the brass cylinder. The professor waited until the merriment had subsided and then continued:
"I beg of you, gentlemen, do not smile. This was merely one of the many similar quaint superstitions existing in that age.
"But a real scientist, Professor K122B62411Male, again attacked the problem in the twenty-fifth century. Since the cow was now extinct, he could not waste his valuable time experimenting with fermented cow lacteal fluid. He discovered the old v-rays of Radium—the rays which you physicists will remember are not deflected by a magnetic field—were really composed of two sets of rays, which he termed the g rays and the e rays. These last named rays—only when isolated—completely devitalized all colon-bacilli which lay in their path, without in the least affecting the integrity of any interposed organic cells. The great result, as many of you already know, was that the life of man was extended to nearly two hundred years. That, I state unequivocally, was a great century for the human race.
"But I spoke of another happening—one, perhaps, of more interest than importance. I referred to the bank account of John Jones the fortieth. It, gentlemen, had grown to such a prodigious sum that a special bank and board of directors had to be created in order to care for, and reinvest it. By scanning the following notation, you will perceive the truth of my statement:
2521 600 years $47,900,000
"By the year 2621 A.D., two events of stupendous importance took place. There is scarcely a man in this class who has not heard of how Professor P222D29333Male accidentally stumbled upon the scientific fact that the effect of gravity is reversed upon any body which vibrates perpendicularly to the plane of the ecliptic with a frequency which is an even multiple of the logarithm of 2 of the Naperian base 'e.' At once, special vibrating cars were constructed which carried mankind to all planets. That discovery of Professor P222D29333Male did nothing less than open up seven new territories to our inhabitants; namely: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In the great land rush that ensued, thousands who were previously poor became rich.
"But, gentlemen, land which so far had been constituted one of the main sources of wealth, was shortly to become valuable for individual golf links only, as it is today, on account of another scientific discovery.
"This second discovery was in reality, not a discovery, but the perfection of a chemical process, the principles of which had been known for many centuries. I am alluding to the construction of the vast reducing factories, one upon each planet, to which the bodies of all persons who have died on their respective planets are at once shipped by Aerial Express. Since this process is used today, all of you understand the methods employed; how each body is reduced by heat to its component constituents: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, and so forth; how these separated constituents are stored in special reservoirs together with the components from thousands of other corpses; how these elements are then synthetically combined into food tablets for those of us who are yet alive—thus completing an endless chain from the dead to the living. Naturally then, agriculture and stock-raising ceased, since the food problem, with which man had coped from time immemorial, was solved. The two direct results were, first—that land lost the inflated values it had possessed when it was necessary for tillage, and second—that men were at last given enough leisure to enter the fields of science and art.
"And as to the John Jones Dollar, which now embraced countless industries and vast territory on the earth, it stood, in value:
2621 700 years $912,000,000
"In truth, gentlemen, it now constituted the largest private fortune on the terrestrial globe. And in that year, 2621 A.D., there were thirteen generations yet to come, before John Jones the fortieth would arrive.
"To continue. In the year 2721 A.D., an important political battle was concluded in the Solar System Senate and House of Representatives. I am referring to the great controversy as to whether the Earth's moon was a sufficient menace to interplanetary navigation to warrant its removal. The outcome of the wrangle was that the question was decided in the affirmative. Consequently—
"But I beg your pardon, young men. I occasionally lose sight of the fact that you are not so well informed upon historical matters as myself. Here I am, talking to you about the moon, totally forgetful that many of you are puzzled as to my meaning. I advise all of you who have not yet attended the Solaris Museum on Jupiter, to take a trip there some Sunday afternoon. The Interplanetary Suburban Line runs trains every half hour on that day. You will find there a complete working model of the old satellite of the Earth, which, before it was destroyed, furnished this planet light at night through the crude medium of reflection.
"On account of this decision as to the inadvisability of allowing the moon to remain where it was, engineers commenced its removal in the year 2721. Piece by piece, it was chipped away and brought to the Earth in Interplanetary freight cars. These pieces were then propelled by Zoodolite explosive, in the direction of the Milky Way, with a velocity of 11,217 meters per second. This velocity, of course, gave each departing fragment exactly the amount of kinetic energy it required to enable it to overcome the backward pull of the Earth from here to infinity. I dare say those moon-hunks are going yet.
"At the start of the removal of the moon in 2721 A.D., the accumulated wealth of John Jones the fortieth, stood:
2721 800 years $17,400,000,000
"Of course, with such a colossal sum at their command, the directors of the fund had made extensive investments on Mars and Venus.
"By the end of the twenty-eighth century, or the year 2807 A.D., the moon had been completely hacked away and sent piecemeal into space, the job having required 86 years. I give, herewith, the result of John Jones's Dollar, both at the date when the moon was completely removed and also at the close of the 900th year after its deposit:
2807
2821 886 years
900 years $219,000,000,000
$332,000,000,000
"The meaning of those figures, gentlemen, as stated in simple language, was that the John Jones Dollar now comprised practically all the wealth on Earth, Mars, and Venus—with the exception of one university site on each planet, which was, of course, school property.
"And now I will ask you to advance with me to the year 2906 A.D. In this year the directors of the John Jones fund awoke to the fact that they were in a dreadful predicament. According to the agreement under which John Jones deposited his Dollar away back in the year 1921, interest was to be compounded annually at three percent. In the year 2900 A.D., the thirty-ninth generation of John Jones was alive, being represented by a gentleman named J664M42721Male, who was thirty years of age and engaged to be married to a young lady named T246M42652Female.
"Doubtless, you will ask, what was the predicament in which the directors found themselves. Simply this:
"A careful appraisement of the wealth on Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, and likewise Earth, together with an accurate calculation of the remaining heat in the Sun and an appraisement of that heat at a very decent valuation per calorie, demonstrated that the total wealth of the Solar System amounted to $6,309,525,241,362.15.
"But unfortunately, a simple computation showed that if Mr. J664M42721Male married Miss T246M42652Female, and was blessed by a child by the year 2921, which year marked the thousandth year since the deposit of the John Jones Dollar, then in that year there would be due the child, the following amount:
2921 1,000 years $6,310,000,000,000
"It simply showed beyond all possibility of argument, that by 2921 A.D., we would be $474,758,637.85 shy—that we would be unable to meet the debt to John Jones the fortieth.
"I tell you, gentlemen, the Board of Directors was frantic. Such wild suggestions were put forth as the sending of an expeditionary force to the nearest star in order to capture some other Solar System and thus obtain more territory to make up the deficit. But that project was impossible on account of the number of years that it would have required.
"Visions of immense law suits disturbed the slumber of those unfortunate individuals who formed the John Jones Dollar Directorship. But on the brink of one of the biggest civil actions the courts had ever known, something occurred that altered everything."
The professor again withdrew the tiny instrument from his vest pocket, held it to his ear and adjusted the switch. A metallic voice rasped: "Fifteen o'clock and fifty-two minutes—fifteen o'clock and fifty-two minutes—fift—" He replaced the instrument and went on with his talk.
"I must hasten to the conclusion of my lecture, gentlemen, as I have an engagement with Professor C122B24999Male of the University of Saturn at sixteen o'clock. Now, let me see; I was discussing the big civil action that was hanging over the heads of the John Jones Dollar directors.
"Well, this Mr. J664M42721Male, the thirty-ninth descendant of the original John Jones, had a lover's quarrel with Miss T246M42652Female, which immediately destroyed the probability of their marriage. Neither gave in to the other. Neither ever married. And when Mr. J664M42721Male died in 2946 A.D., of a broken heart, as it was claimed, he was single and childless.
"As a result, there was no one to turn the Solar System over to. Immediately, the Interplanetary Government stepped in and took possession of it. At that instant, of course, private property ceased. In the twinkling of an eye almost, we reached the true socialistic and democratic condition for which man had futilely hoped throughout the ages.
"That is all today, gentlemen. Class is dismissed."
One by one, the faces faded from the Visaphone.
For a moment, the professor stood ruminating.
"A wonderful man, that old socialist, John Jones the first," he said softly to himself, "a farseeing man, a bright man, considering that he lived in such a dark era as the twentieth century. But how nearly his well-contrived scheme went wrong. Suppose that fortieth descendant had been born?"
THE END
SECURITY
By Ernest M. Kenyon
If you let a man learn, and study, and work--and clamp a lid on so that nothing he takes into his mind can be let out--one way or another he'll blow a safety valve!
Suddenly Collins snapped the pencil between his fingers and hurled the pieces across the lab, where they clattered, rolled from the bench to the floor, and were still. For a moment he sat leaning against the desk, his hands trembling. He wasn't sure just when the last straw had been added, but he was sure that he had had enough. The restrictions, red tape, security measures of these government laboratories seemed to close in on his mind in boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, always correct Gordon, the easy-mannered, unbearable Mason, all of them gave him a feeling of actual physical sickness.
Gardner's "Nucleonics and Nuclear Problems" lay open on the desk before him, but he looked instead beyond through the clear curving glass windows toward the sweep of green hills and darkening sky and the shadows of the lower forests that gave Fair Oaks its name. Beside him unfinished lay the summaries of the day's experiments, and the unorganized, hurriedly jotted notes for tomorrow's work. The old intellectual alertness was gone. Delight in changing theory, in careful experimentation no longer sprang from his work and were a part of it. There was a dull, indefinable aching in his head and a dry, dissatisfied sensation in his mouth.
Along the ordered walks below his laboratory windows workers and technicians streamed toward the gates, checking out for the day through the usual mass of red tape, passes, and Geiger tests. Lights were flicking on in the long East Wing Dormitory across the quadrangle, and the mess hall, where he had recently eaten a tasteless supper, was lighted.
Shortly after restrictions had really begun to tighten up last fall, he had written to a worker who had published making a minor correction in his calculations and adding some suggestions arising from his own research. A week later his letter was returned completely censored, stamped "Security-Violation." It was that evasive Gordon's fault. He knew it, but he couldn't prove it. Collins suspected that the man was not a top-notch researcher and so was in administration. Perhaps Gordon was jealous of his own work.
Even the Journals were drying up. Endless innocuous papers recalculating the values of harmless constants and other such nonsense were all that was being published. They were hardly worth reading. Others were feeling the throttling effects of security measures, and isolated, lone researchers were slowing down, listless and anemic from the loss of the life blood of science, the free interchange of information.
The present research job he was doing was coming slowly, but what difference did it make? It would never be published. Probably it would be filed with a Department of Defense code number as Research Report DDNE-42 dash-dash-dash. And there it would remain, top-secret, guarded, unread, useless. Somewhere in the desk drawers was the directive worded in the stiff military manner describing the procedures for clearing papers for publication. When he had first come here, he had tried that.
"Well, good, Collins," Gordon, the Division Administrator, had said, "glad to check it over. Always happy when one of our men has something for publication. Gives the Division a good name. I'll let you know, but we have to be careful. Security you know."
Somehow he had never heard. The first time he had made a pest of himself with Gordon who was polite, evasive, always plausible. Gordon, Gordon--it was becoming an obsession with him he knew, but the man appeared at every turn. He personified the system.
In the past months his work had seemed to clog up in details and slow down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invasion of personal rights and freedom, the hamstringing of his work, the feeling of being cut off from the main currents of his field, filled him with despair, anger, and frustration.
* * * * *
Suddenly he raised his head, slammed the notebook shut and switched off the desk lamp. Not tonight. Tomorrow would be time enough to write out this stuff. He needed a drink.
The hall was dark as he locked the door to his lab except at the far end near the stairway where a patch of yellow light shone through an open doorway. Mason, he thought, Allan Mason, the one guy at Fair Oaks Nuclear Energy Laboratories who was always so damnedly cheerful, who didn't seem to mind the security restrictions, and who was seen so often with Gordon. As he walked rapidly past the open doorway, he caught a flashing impression from the corner of his eye of Mason's tall figure bent over his bench, his long legs wrapped around a lab stool, the perpetual unlit pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. Then as he swung quickly toward the stairs, he heard Mason's cheerful hail.
"Hi, Milt, hold up a sec."
Reluctantly he paused at the head of the stairs scowling momentarily, and then slowly turning and retraced his steps.
The lab was brightly lighted, and Mason stretched and smiled pleasantly.
"Come in, old man, I'm about ready to knock off for the evening. How goes it?"
Collins mumbled an O.K. trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, and Mason went on.
"Just finishing up some loose ends so I can get off to the Society meeting on Monday. You going?"
Shaking his head Collins felt his dislike for this man growing. The annual meeting of the North American Society of Theoretical Physicists. He didn't even give it any thought any more. Maybe he could go, but it didn't seem worth the effort. In the past he had tried to go to the meetings, but somehow work, rush work, some change of emphasis had come up on the project, and he had had to cancel his plans. He'd finally given up, but with Mason these things seemed to come easily, and he wondered why--
"That's too bad"--his voice droned pleasantly on, and Collins' eye caught several botany texts in the book rack above Mason's desk. So, he had time to read stuff outside of his field. His work was going well. He had time for meetings and was allowed to go to them--the anger rose slowly like a swelling bubble from the hard core of his stomach. Then he realized that Mason had stopped talking and was looking at him.
"Milt, you look glum tonight. Is there-- Why not have supper with me, and we'll take in the movie in the lounge?"
"I've eaten already." Collins was on his feet. He forced a, "Thanks anyway. See you tomorrow. I'm--" and he was gone.
As he strode angerly across the quadrangle Mason's words and cheerful attitude rankled in his mind. The gravel of the walk spurted from under his shoes, and the night air was clear and cool. It was good at least to feel something other than despair again, even anger.
But once in his study with its attached bedroom and bath that made up his living quarters, he sank to the couch near his desk, all of the fight gone. He needed a drink. Today all the irritations, tensions, and suspicions of the past months seemed to close in on him. His work was going badly. Perhaps seeing Mason had brought it to a head. The fifth of bourbon in the bottom desk drawer was partly gone from the party last month. He took a swallow neat, and the fire of the liquid burned and clawed its way down his throat and spread with blossoming warmth in his stomach.
Kicking off his shoes and loosening his tie he leaned back with the bottle on the floor beside him.
Later in the evening when the early clarity of thought had left him and his mind moved disjointedly in and out of seemingly brilliant, emotional solutions to his problem, he knew he must have a showdown. Lying back on the couch he drifted into sleep determined to have it out with Gordon in the morning--resign if necessary.
* * * * *
The momentary pause of lighting his cigarette gave Collins a chance to decide where to start, as he sat across from Gordon. The Division Administrator was older with a heavy-jowled, close shaven face, and he waited patiently for Collins to speak.
"Dr. Gordon, I am having a great deal of difficulty in making an adjustment both in my work and in my personal relations here at Fair Oaks, and last night I realized that I would have to talk to you about it."
Gordon's face changed slightly, his eyebrows rising almost imperceptibly.
"So, what ... how do you mean, Milt?"
Use of the first name--the familiar approach thought Collins--administrative technique number blank blank dash blank.
"Dr. Gordon, these security measures we are under, the difficulty of publishing, of getting to scientific meetings, the problem of getting furloughs, lack of knowledge of what is going on in my own field, it's just a little too much. It's personally irritating, but it greatly hampers my work as well. Frankly, I'm against the entire security program as it now stands. If it isn't stopped research will ... well, simply be impossible. Free interchange of information is essential to--" His fingers were gripping the arms of his chair.
"Yes, of course, Milt, but corny as it sounds there is a war on you know. Oh, not a war with military weapons--yet, but a cold war of science and engineering, a struggle for supremacy in many fields of knowledge. If information of our work leaks out, gets to the enemy, we might as well not do that work. We can't be too careful."
"I agree, but it goes too far." He leaned forward. "My private mail is read, and on my last furlough I am certain I was watched from the time I left the gates out there until I returned, and I don't like it. I can't prove it, but-- That's getting to the point that life's not worth while."
"Come now, Milt, don't you think you're taking this a little too seriously? You're getting stale, overwrought. You need a fresh point of view. Lots of our people feel as you do at one time or another, but most of us learn to live with these necessary regulations, and do our work in spite of them. Let me make a suggestion, relax, take a little time off, develop a hobby. Why not do some reading in a field of science other than your own. It's good for you. Several of the people here are doing it. I do it, Carter, even Mason for instance--"
Collins could feel the anger rising in him again.
"Look, Gordon, I'm not going to mince words. I'm sick and tired of this mess, and you might as well know it. You can have all your damn relaxations and hobbies, or what have you. I want to do my work, and if I can't do it here, I'm going somewhere where I can do it. In plain English unless we can have an understanding right now--I resign."
It had come out, and Collins was breathing hard, but Gordon's expression hardly changed as he looked over the tips of his joined fingers, while the younger man stopped and crushed out his cigarette viciously in the ash disposer on the arm of his chair. Gordon doodled on a small pad for a moment, his eyes not meeting Collins'. Then he spoke slowly.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Milt. I ... I'm afraid I cannot accept your resignation. You see," he said softly, "none of us can leave Fair Oaks--now."
Collins looked up, amazement and incredulity written on his face.
"What do you mean--can't leave? I can leave any time--"
Gordon slowly shook his head almost sadly. "No, only assistants, technicians, maintenance people, and they are carefully watched or restricted to this area. People like yourself, like me, we have information, knowledge which cannot be let out of government hands at this time. We're here probably for the 'duration'; maybe longer."
"But--this is barbarous. I--" the words clogged, jumbled as he tried to get them out. His emotions ran from anger, to amazement, to indignation, followed by a trickle of fear, and as he stared at Gordon, the fear grew. He could scarcely hear Gordon's words--
"Take my advice--relax--and forget your fears--accept the restrictions and go ahead--read in some other field--come in again when you've thought it out." He was scarcely aware when Gordon slipped a bound journal volume into his hands and walked with him to the door--and closed it behind him.
* * * * *
Collins left Gordon's office in Administration moving slowly, one arm hanging loosely by his side, the other clutching the book. The corridor stretched ahead into B Wing with its laboratories flooded with the glow of mid-morning sunshine, bright and unreal. His mind was dazed, his thinking processes stopped in a kind of stunned unbelief. He could not even quit now. An undercurrent of fear ran close to the surface of his confused mind. It was the end of science, the end of all his work. All of the stifling, strangling restrictions of security on his work, on his private life, came whirling back as a monstrous, formless threat, something unspeakably big and powerful and unbeatable against which he could not fight.
To his right as he moved slowly down the hall the double doors of the main library reading room were open with the stacks and study cubicles beyond, silent and restful. He paused and then entered crossing into the maze of the stacks through a grilled iron doorway. The important thing now was not to meet anyone, not to have to speak or smile or think. It was very important now to be alone and quiet.
He walked until he found an empty cubicle, the endless walls of books, repositories of knowledge, silent and reproachful around him. Knowledge and books such as these would soon be added to no longer. He slumped into the chair and gazed at the tiny reading desk with its softly glowing lamp and the small stack of volumes on the rack left by previous users. Absently he stared for a long time at the volume Gordon had given him as if seeing it for the first time. Then with a deliberate effort he opened it and thumbed through slowly only half seeing its pages. The Journal of Botanical Research.
The pages in the Journal were like a look through an open window. Outside of classified projects in "harmless" fields of research the work of science went on, papers were published, reputations were made, freedom still existed. He remembered Gordon's sleek smile and advice to relax and read in other fields. This stupid useless advice still rankled. Of course, he probably was stale, but to read junk like this!
Silently and in his mind, he cursed the day he had studied physics, better archeology or zoology, anything. Suddenly he stopped riffling the pages and leaned forward, rapidly turning back to something that had caught his eye. It was a three and one-half page paper on "The Statistical Probability of Chromosome Crossover" written in neat sections with several charts and references. It was by M. Mason.
Something clicked in Collins' mind--read the journals--Mason's unconcern with security, the botany books on his desk the night before. It didn't make sense, but it added up to something. Mason knew something and so did Gordon. He half rose. He had to get to the bottom of it. Clutching the bound Journal Collins turned and weaved through the stacks and out of the library waving the protesting librarian aside and strode down the corridor toward the laboratories.
* * * * *
The door to Mason's lab was partially open, and he looked up quizzically from taking an instrument reading as Collins burst in.
"Mason, I--" he planked the bound volume of the Botanical Journal on the lab bench beside the instrument ignoring Mason's wince as the instrument needle quivered with the jar. "Did you write this?" His finger jabbed at the open page.
Mason glanced at Collins, removed a pair of glasses from his white lab coat pocket, and putting them on leaned forward and studied the page for a moment.
"Yes. Not bad either though I shouldn't say it. I didn't know you were interested in Botany." His voice was casual with a slight questioning note.
Collins suddenly felt ridiculous. What was he accusing the man of? Mason had a right to publish on anything he wanted to, still a muddled series of half facts, incidents and suspicions chased through his mind.
Mason walked over to his desk and filling his pipe sat down thoughtfully and leaned back motioning Collins into a nearby chair.
"I think I know what is on your mind, Milt. Maybe I can straighten this out. Gordon told me a little while ago that you wanted to resign."
Collins stiffened. So, these two were working together.
"Milt, did you ever stop to think how lucky we are? Where can you get better equipment, help, coöperation in the country than here?" Collins leaned forward to speak, but Mason went on. "Oh, I know all the problems of security and how it strangles work." He paused for a moment as though trying to grasp the right words.
"Look, Milt, what's the basic problem? Why do security measures strangle research? Isn't it a matter basically of a breakdown in the interchange of ideas? Sure, and it has come about because there has been no method of communication which would not get to and be used by our enemies. So, like yourself, I'm forbidden to publish the results of my work here in the journals. Why? Because those results are in my field of study, chain reactions.
"I'm frustrated just as you have been and science suffers. What do I do? I write articles in a field that isn't restricted, botany. It's a new field of interest to me, a hobby if you like. The stuff is published and gets wide distribution. Every decent library in the country gets it. Every scientist all over the country can read the papers if he cares to. Then the word gets around, by the scientific grapevine, with a little judicious ear-bending. I get a reputation--in Botany.
"Now the botanists know that I am not a botanist. They understand what I am doing. The word spreads, and they leave my stuff alone. The physicists in my specialty know my name, and they get the word, and pretty soon they are glancing over certain botany journals apparently for relaxation. They read my papers. It's slow, but it works." Mason leaned forward and struck a large stick match under the lab bench top. Drawing several puffs through his pipe his eyes were on Collins' confused face. Then he laid the pipe down.
"The enemy botanists may read the botany journals, sure, but the enemy physicists don't. Their totalitarian training has made them inflexible in their thinking, besides they have their hands full trying to keep up in their own fields. The curse of specialization is a blessing to us. When the enemy botanists read it, it makes sense, but it doesn't help them much in their work--more or less innocuous." He waved toward the botany texts on his desk. "It took me six months to learn enough about it to do the job." As he spoke Mason untangled his legs and brought the open journal over to his desk.
"All right, notice in my article I am writing on chromosomes--chains of genes, and my field is--?"
"Chain reactions," Collins finished softly, "but--"
"The article itself is well disguised, but it's a parable. It's botany on the surface, but it gets over enough chain-reaction theory to be good physics, if you read it right. You see botany is what you might call my code field."
The bright light of noon shimmered on the white buildings and green lawns beyond the lab windows. Collins was silent and thoughtful.
"Well, that's about all. Gordon knows. He's in with us, but the Government doesn't suspect--yet. Oh, they may catch on to us. Information may leak out to the enemy. There's some chance, but when we're caught we'll think of something else. Most of us believe it's worth the chance. There's a risk in anything."
Suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and Collins' anger and confusion melted away. In its place was a sense of relief and hope, hope for the future. It wasn't the final answer, but it was a way to keep going. He was not alone any longer. He had friends who understood, who had been through what he had been through. It was a good feeling. He heard Mason's voice again.
"Milt, why don't you do some library work? Botany's my code field. I don't know what yours is, but you've got some catching up to do. There may be some interesting stuff published already in your code field."
Collins did, and he developed his new interest enthusiastically. Gordon had been right. He had been getting stale. Besides, astronomy was a fascinating field, and suns with their revolving planets in some respects are very like atomic systems, if you look at it that way.
THE END
THE MAD PLANET
by Murray Leinster
In his lifetime of 20 years, Burl had never wondered what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had suffered an untimely, unpleasant end, which Burl remembered vaguely as a fading succession of screams as he was carried away at his mother's top speed.
Burl had rarely thought of the old man since. Surely he had never wondered what his great-grandfather thought, and there certainly never entered his head such a hypothetical question as what his many-times-great-grandfather--say of the year 1920--would have thought of Burl's world.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping furtively toward the stream he generically called "water". Towering overhead, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from sight. Clinging to their foot-thick stalks were other fungi, parasites on growths that had once been parasites themselves.
Burl was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth his tribesmen had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His fair skin showed no trace of sunburn. He had never seen the sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which, along with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, perpetual haze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungi, colossal molds and yeasts, comprised the landscape about him.
Once, as he dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his shoulder touched a cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly, from the umbrellalike mass of pulp overhead, a fine, impalpable powder fell on him like snow. It was the season when toadstools sent out their spores, dropping them at the first disturbance.
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. He knew they were deadly poison.
Burl would have been a curious sight to a 20th century man. His skin was pink, like a child's, and sported little hair. Even that atop his head was soft and downy. His chest was larger than his forefathers', and his ears were capable of independent movement, to catch threatening sounds from any direction. The pupils of his large, blue eyes could dilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in almost complete darkness.
He was the result of 30,000 years of human adaptation to changes begun in the latter half of the 20th century.
Then, civilization had been high and apparently secure. Mankind had reached permanent accord, and machinery performed all labor; men needed only supervise its operation. Everyone was well-fed and well-educated, and it seemed that until the end of time Earth would be home to a community of comfortable human beings, pursuing their studies and diversions, illusions and truths. Peace, privacy, and freedom were universal.
But just when men were congratulating themselves on this new Golden Age, fissures opened slowly in the Earth's crust, and carbon dioxide began pouring out into the atmosphere. That gas had long been known to be present in the air, and necessary to plant life. Plants absorbed its carbon, releasing the oxygen for use again in a process called the "carbon cycle".
Scientists noted the Earth's increased fertility, but discounted it as the effect of carbon dioxide released by man's burning of fossil fuels. For years the continuous exhalation from the world's interior went unnoticed.
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures opened, pouring into the already laden atmosphere more carbon dioxide--beneficial in small amounts, but as the world learned, deadly in quantity.
The entire atmosphere grew heavy. It absorbed more moisture and became humid. Rainfall increased. Climates warmed. Vegetation became more luxuriant--but the air gradually became less exhilarating.
Soon mankind's health was affected. Accustomed through long ages to breathing air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men suffered. Only those living on high plateaus or mountaintops remained unaffected. All the world's plants, though nourished and growing to unprecedented size, could not dispose of the continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide.
By the middle of the 21st century it was generally recognized that a new carboniferous period was beginning, when Earth's atmosphere would be thick and humid, unbreathable by man, when giant grasses and ferns would form the only vegetation.
As the 21st century closed, the human race began reverting to savagery. The lowlands were unbearable, the air depressing and enervating. Life there became a sickly, fever-ridden existence. All mankind desired the highlands, and men forgot their two centuries of peace.
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live and breathe. Those forced to remain at sea level died in the poisonous air. Meanwhile, the danger zone crept up as the earth fissures tirelessly poured out steady streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within 500 feet of sea level. The lowlands went uncultivated, becoming jungles unparalleled since the first carboniferous period.
Then men died of sheer inanition at 1,000 feet. The plateaus and mountaintops were crowded with folk struggling for footholds and food beyond the invisible menace that crept up, and up--
These events occured over many years, several generations. Between the announcement of the International Geophysical Institute that carbon dioxide in the air had increased from .04% to .1% and the time when at sea level 6% of the atmosphere was the deadly gas, more than 200 years intervened.
Coming gradually as it did, the poisonous effect of the deadly stuff increased insidiously. First lassitude, then heaviness of brain, then weakness of body. The human population of the entire world slowly declined to a fraction of its former size. At last there was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but the danger level continued to rise.
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to the poison, or face extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that had wiped out entire races and nations, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased in size to secure the oxygen of life, but the poison, inhaled at every breath, left the few survivors sickly and perpetually weary. Their minds lacked energy to cope with new problems or communicate knowledge.
So after 30,000 years, Burl crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus growths. He was ignorant of fire, metals, or the uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His language was a meager group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things.
There was no wood in the scanty territory his tribe furtively inhabited. With the increase in heat and humidity the trees had died out. Those of northern climes went first: oaks, cedars, and maples. Then pines, beeches, cypresses, and finally even jungle forests vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their kin, flourished in the new, steaming atmosphere. The jungles gave place to dense thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns again.
Then fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before on a planet of torrid heat and perpetual miasma, on whose surface the sun never shone directly because of an ever-thickening bank of clouds hanging sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang up. About the dank pools festering over the earth's surface, fungus growths clustered. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrous forms and malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, they spread over the land.
The grasses and ferns gave way to them. Squat footstools, flaking molds, evil-smelling yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextricably mingled as to species, but growing, forever growing and exhaling an odor of dark places.
The strange growths grouped themselves in forests, horrible travesties of the vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew with feverish intensity, while above them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sipping daintily of their corruption.
Of the animal world above water, insects alone endured the change. They multiplied, and enlarged in the thickened air. The sole surviving vegetation--as distinct from fungi--was a degenerate form of the cabbages that had once fed peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage, stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis from which they emerged to spread their wings and fly.
The tiniest butterflies of former days grew until their gaily colored wings measured in terms of feet, while the larger emperor moths extended their purple sails to a breadth of yards upon yards. The overshadowing fabric of their wings would have dwarfed Burl.
Fortunately, they, the largest flying creatures, were harmless. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes found a cocoon ready to open, and waited patiently until the beautiful creature within broke through its matted shell and emerged into the sunlight.
Then, before it could gather energy from the air, or its wings swell to strength and firmness, the tribesmen attacked, tearing the filmy, delicate wings from its body and the limbs from its carcass. And when it lay helpless before them, they carried away the juicy, meat-filled limbs to be eaten, leaving the still living body to stare helplessly at this strange world through multifaceted eyes, and become prey to voracious ants who would soon clamber upon it and carry it in fragments to their underground city.
Not all insects were so helpless or harmless. Burl knew of wasps, almost the length of his own body, with instantly fatal stings. To all wasps, however, some other insect is predestined prey. The sphex feeds solely on grasshoppers; other wasps eat flies only. Burl's furtive tribe feared them but little.
Bees were similarly aloof. They were hard-pressed for survival, those bees. Few flowers bloomed, and they were reduced desperate expedients: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, occasionally the nectarless blooms of rank, giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. They droned overhead nearly as large as he, bulging eyes gazing at him with abstracted preoccupation. And crickets, beetles, spiders--
Burl knew spiders! His grandfather had fallen prey to a hunting tarantula, which had leaped with incredible ferocity from its excavated tunnel in the earth. The vertical pit, two feet in diameter, went down 20 feet. At the bottom, the black-bellied monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn it of approaching prey (Lycosa fasciata).
Burl's grandfather had been careless, and his terrible shrieks as the horrible monster darted from the pit and seized him had lingered vaguely in Burl's mind ever since. Burl had seen, too, the monster webs of another species of spider, and watched from afar as the huge, misshapen creature sucked juices from a three-foot cricket entangled in its trap.
Burl remembered the stripes of yellow, black, and silver crossing its abodomen (Epiera fasciata). He had been fascinated by the struggles of the imprisoned insect, coiled in a hopeless tangle of sticky, gummy ropes the thickness of Burl's finger, cast about its body before the spider attempted to approach.
Burl knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was his and his ancestors' accustomedness to them that made his existence possible. He evaded them, and survived. A moment of carelessness, an instant's relaxation of his habitual caution, and he would be one with his forebears, forgotten meals of long-dead, inhuman monsters.
Three days before, Burl had crouched behind a bulky, shapeless fungus, watching a furious duel between two huge horned beetles. Their jaws, gaping wide, clicked and clashed on each other's armor. Their legs crashed like cymbals as their polished surfaces ground and struck each other. They fought over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.
Burl had watched until a gaping orifice appeared in the armor of the smaller beetle. It uttered a shrill cry, or seemed to. The noise was, actually, the tearing of the horny stuff beneath the jaws of its victorious adversary.
The wounded beetle's struggles weakened. At last it collapsed, and the conqueror placidly began to eat the conquered--alive.
After the meal was finished, Burl approached the scene with caution. An ant, forerunner of many, was already inspecting the carcass.
Burl usually ignored ants. They were stupid, shortsighted insects, not hunters. Save when attacked, they offered no injury. They were scavengers, seeking the dead and dying, but became dangerous, vicious opponents if their prey were questioned. They measured from three inches, for tiny black ants, to a foot for large termites.
Burl heard the tiny clickings of their limbs as they approached. He hastily seized the detached, sharp-pointed snout of the victim, and fled.
Later, he inspected his find curiosly. The victim had been a minotaur beetle, with a sharp-pointed horn like that of a rhinocerous to reinforce its offensive armament, already dangerous because of its wide jaws. A beetle's jaws work side to side, instead of up and down, making its protection complete in no less than three directions.
Burl examined the sharp, daggerlike instrument. He pricked his finger on its point, and flung it aside as he crept to the hiding-place of his tribe. They numbered only 20: four men, six women, the rest adolescents and children.
Burl had wondered at the strange feelings that came over him when he looked at one of the girls. She was younger--perhaps 18--and fleeter of foot than he. They talked, sometimes, and Burl occasionally shared with her an especially succulent find of foodstuffs.
The next morning Burl found the horn where he had thrown it, sticking in the flabby side of a toadstool. He retrieved it, and gradually, far back in his mind, an idea began to form. He sat awhile with the thing in his hand, considering it with a faraway look in his eyes. From time to time he stabbed at a toadstool, awkwardly, but with gathering skill. His imagination began to work fitfully. He visualized himself stabbing food as the larger beetle had stabbed the former owner of the weapon he now possessed.
Burl could not imagine attacking one of the fighting insects. He could only picture himself, dimly, stabbing something that was food with this death-dealing thing. It was no longer than his arm and though clumsy to the hand, an effective and terribly sharp implement.
He thought: Where was there food, food that lived, that would not fight back? Presently he rose and made his way toward the tiny river. Yellow-bellied newts swam in its waters. Aquatic larvae of a thousand insects floated about its surface or crawled along its bottom.
Death lived there, too. Giant crayfish snapped horny claws at the unwary. Mosquitos of four-inch wingspread sometimes hummed above the river. They were dying out for lack of the plant juices on which males of the species lived, but even so they were formidable. Burl had learned to crush them with fragments of fungus.
He crept furtively through the forest of misshapen toadstools, brownish fungus underfoot. Strange orange, red, and purple molds clustered about the bases of the creamy toadstool stalks. Burl paused to run his sharp-pointed weapon through a fleshy stalk and reassure himself that his plan was practicable.
He heard a tiny clicking, and froze into stillness. It was a troop of five heavily laden ants, each eight inches long, returning to their city. They moved swiftly along the route marked with black, odorous formic acid exuded from the bodies of their comrades. Burl waited until they passed, then went on.
He came to the bank of the river. Green scum covered much of its surface, occasionally broken by a slowly enlarging gas bubble released from decomposing matter on the bottom. In the center of the placid stream the current ran faster, and the water itself was visible.
Over the shining current, water-spiders ran swiftly. They had not shared in the general increase in size of the insect world. Depending on surface tension to support them, an increase in size and weight would have deprived them of the means of locomotion.
From the spot where Burl peered at the water, green scum spread out many yards into the stream. He could not see what swam, wriggled, and crawled beneath the evil-smelling covering. He looked up and down the banks.
150 yards downstream, an outcropping of rock made a steep descent to the river, from which shelf-fungi stretched out. Dark red and orange above, light yellow below, they formed a series of platforms above the smoothly flowing stream. Burl moved cautiously toward them.
En route he saw one of the edible mushrooms that formed most of his diet, and paused to break from the flabby flesh an amount that would feed him for many days. Often, his people would find a store of food, carry it to their hiding place, then gorge themselves for days, eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping until all was gone.
Burl was tempted to abandon his plan. He would give Saya of this food, and they would eat together. Saya was the maiden who roused unusual emotions in Burl when she was near, strange impulses to touch and caress her. He did not understand.
He went on, after hesitating. If he brought her food, Saya would be pleased, but if he brought her of the things that swam in the stream, she would be more pleased. Degraded as his tribe had become, Burl was yet a little more intelligent. He was an atavism, a throwback to ancestors who had cultivated the earth and subjugated its animals. He had a vague remnant of pride, unformed but potent.
Burl's people herded together in a leaderless group, coming to the same hiding place to share the finds of the lucky and gather comfort in numbers. They had no weapons. They bashed stones against the limbs of insects they found partly devoured, cracking them open for what scraps of sweet meat remained inside, but sought safety from enemies solely in flight and hiding. If Burl did what no man before had done, if he brought a whole carcass to his tribe, they would admire him.
He reached the rocky outcropping and lay prostrate, staring into the water's shallow depths. A huge crayfish, as long as Burl, leisurely crossed his vision. Small fishes and even huge newts fled before the voracious creature.
Eventually the tide of underwater life resumed its activity. The wriggling dragonfly grubs reappeared. Little flecks of silver swam into view--a school of tiny fish. A larger fish appeared, moving slowly.
Burl's eyes glistened; his mouth watered. He reached down with his long weapon. It barely touched the water. Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and apparent practicability of his scheme spurred him on.
He considered the situation. The shelf-fungi were below him. He rose and moved to a point just above them, then thrust his spear down. They resisted its point. Burl tested them tentatively with his foot, then dared to trust his weight to them. They held firmly. He clambered onto them and lay flat, again peering over the edge.
The large fish, as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and fro below. Burl had seen the former owner of his spear strive to thrust it into an opponent. So when the fish swam by, he thrust sharply downward. To Burl's astonishment, the spear seemed to bend where it entered the water, and missed its mark by inches. He tried again and again.
He grew angry with the fish. Repeated strokes had left it untouched, and it was insultingly unwary, not even trying to flee.
Finally, the big fish stopped directly beneath his eyes. Burl thrust straight down with all his strenth. This time the spear, entering vertically, did not seem to bend. Its point penetrated the scales of the swimmer below, transfixing that lazy fish completely.
An uproar began. The fish, struggling to escape, and Burl, trying to draw it up to his perch, made a huge commotion. Excited, he failed to notice an ominous, approaching ripple on the water.
The unequal combat continued. Burl clung desperately to the end of his spear. Then there was a tremor in Burl's support; it gave way, falling into the stream with a mighty splash. Burl submerged, eyes wide open, facing death.
As he sank, he saw waving before him the gaping claws of the huge crayfish, large enough to sever a limb with one stroke of their jagged jaws. Burl was sure he would die, for he could not swim. The only question was whether he would drown or be devoured first.
But the section of the shelf fungus that had collapsed beneath him was lighter than water. It rapidly surfaced, with Burl still on top. The crayfish, deprived of its prey, wandered off.
Burl's situation seemed scarely improved, however. He was floating downstream, perched--weaponless, alone, and frightened--on a soggy, degenerate fungus. In the water lurked death unseen, on the banks stalked peril, and above, danger fluttered on golden wings.
He finally recovered his self-possession, and looked for his spear. It was floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capture had endangered Burl's life. The fish now floated lifelessly, belly upward.
Burl forgot his predicament upon seeing his prey just out of reach. He gazed at it, mouth watering, while his cranky craft went downstream, spinning slowly in the current. He hastened to the edge of the raft.
It tilted and nearly flung him overboard. Experimenting, Burl soon found that it remained stable if he lay flat across it. He wriggled into position, and waited until the slow revolution of his vessel brought the spear shaft near. He stretched his fingers and arm, and grasped it.
A moment later he was tearing strips of flesh from the fish and cramming the oily mess into his mouth with gusto. He had lost his edible mushroom, yet Burl ate contentedly of what he possessed. He happily visualized the delight with which Saya would receive a gift of part of the fish he had caught.
Burl suddenly realized he was being carried farther and farther from Saya. Stricken with dumb sorrow, he lifted his head and looked longingly at the riverbanks.
A monotonous row of strangely colored fungus growths. No healthy green, but pallid, cream-colored toadstools, some bright orange, lavender, and purple molds, vivid carmine "rusts" and mildews, spreading up the banks from the turgid slime.
In the faintly pinkish light filtering down through the ever-present clouds, myriad flying objects were visible. Now and then a giant cricket or grasshopper made its bulletlike flight from one spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered gaily. Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the cross-shaped flowers of monster cabbages. Occasionally, a slender-waisted, man-sized wasp flew alertly past. And far above soared dragonflies, their spindlelike bodies thrice the length of his own.
Burl ignored them all. He sat, an incongruous creature of pink skin and soft brown hair on an orange fungus floating in midstream, despondent because the current carried him forever farther from the slender-limbed maiden whose glance caused an odd commotion in his breast.
The day wore on. Once, just beyond the riverbank, Burl saw a band of large, red Amazon ants, marching in orderly array, to raid a city of black ants, and steal their eggs. The eggs would be hatched, and the small black creatures enslaved by the brigands. Amazon ants live solely by the labor of their slaves; perforce they are mighty warriors in their world.
Later, etched against the pervasive steaming mist, Burl saw strangely shaped, swollen branches rearing from the ground. They were a hard-rinded fungus that grew on itself in mockery of the vegetation that had vanished from the earth.
He spied pear-shaped objects above some of which floated little clouds of smoke. They, too, were fungi, puffballs, which when touched emit what seems a puff of vapor. These would have towered above Burl's head had he stood beside them.
As the day drew to an end, he saw in the distance what seemed a range of purple hills. Some 70 feet high, they were the agglomeration of a formless growth, multiplying its organisms upon itself until the whole became an irregular, cone-shaped mound. Burl watched them apathetically.
Presently, he ate again of the oily fish. The taste pleased Burl, a rare break from his diet of insipid mushrooms. He stuffed himself, though the size of his prey left most uneaten.
He kept his spear, despite the trouble it had caused. Burl, unusually stubborn for his tribe, still associated the weapon with the food it had secured rather than with his current difficulties. He examined it again; its sharpness was unimpaired.
He next stripped a sinew from the garment about his middle and hung the fish from his neck with it. That left him both hands free. Then he sat cross-legged on the soggily floating fungus, like a pink-skinned Buddha, and watched the shores go by.
Time passed, and sunset drew near. Burl, never having seen the sun, did not think of this as "sunset". To him it was the letting down of darkness from the sky.
Far to the west, the thick mist turned gold, while the thicker clouds above became blurred masses of dull red. Their shadows seemed lavender, from the contrast of shades. The river's still surface reflected faithfully the myriad tints and shadings, and the shining tops of giant mushrooms aside the river glowed faintly pink.
Dragonflies buzzed overhead in swift, angular flight, bodies glistening with metallic luster in the rosy light. Great yellow butterflies flew lightly above the stream. Here, there, everywhere on the water appeared the shell-formed boats of a thousand caddis flies.
Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities and seized the white worms inhabiting the strange craft. The huge bulk of a tardy bee droned heavily overhead. He glanced upward and saw the long proboscis and hairy hinder legs with their scanty load of pollen, the compound eyes with their expression of stupid preoccupation, and the sting that would mean death alike for him and the giant insect, were it used.
The crimson radiance at the edge of the world dimmed. The purple hills had long been left behind. Now the slender stalks of 10,000 round-domed mushrooms lined the riverbank and beneath them spread fungi of all colors, from rawest red to palest blue, fading slowly to a monochromatic background in the glowing dusk.
The buzzing, fluttering, and flapping of diurnal insects died slowly down, while from a million hiding places there crept soft and furry bodies of great moths, who preened themselves and smoothed their feathery antennae before taking to the air. Strong-limbed crickets set up their thunderous noise--grown gravely bass with the increasing size of their sound organs--and there began to gather on the water those slender spirals of tenuous mist that would presently blanket the stream in a mantle of fog.
Night fell. The clouds above seemed to lower and grow dark. Gradually, now a drop and then a drop, the languid fall of large, warm raindrops that would drip from the moisture-laden skies all night began.
Great disks of coolly glowing flame appeared along the stream's edge. The mushrooms there were faintly phosphorescent (Pleurotus phosphoreus) and shone coldly on the "rusts" and fake-fungi beneath. Here and there a ball of lambent flame appeared, drifting idly above the steaming, festering earth.
30,000 years before, men called them "will-o'-the-wisps" but Burl simply accepted them as he accepted all that passed. Only a man attempting to advance in the scale of civilization tries to explain everything. A savage or child is content to observe without comment, unless he repeats legends from wise folk possessed by the itch of knowledge.
Burl watched a long time. The beacons of fireflies as long as his spear flashed intermittently, illuminating the stream for yards around. Softly fluttering wings, in great beats that poured torrents of air onto him, passed above.
The sky was full of winged creatures. Their anguished cries, mating calls, and wing beats broke the night. Above and all around the intense life of the insect world went on ceaselessly, but Burl only rocked sadly back and forth on his frail mushroom boat because he was being carried from his tribe, and from Saya--Saya of swift feet and white teeth, of shy smile. This, after he had dared so greatly to bring her a gift of fresh meat, captured as never before!
Homesick, he lay on his floating atom all night. At last the mushroom raft struck gently and remained grounded on a shallow in the stream.
At daybreak, Burl gazed keenly about. He was 20 yards from shore, and the greenish scum surrounded his now disintegrating vessel. The river had widened until the other bank was barely visible through the haze above the surface, but the nearer shore seemed firm and no more dangerous than the territory his tribe inhabited. He tested the water's depth with his spear, then was struck with the multiple usefulness of that weapon. The water would come but slightly above his ankles.
Burl timidly stepped down into the water, then made for the bank. A soft something clung to one of his bare feet. Terrified, he ran faster, and stumbled ashore. He stared down at his foot. A shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to his heel, and as Burl watched, it swelled slowly, while the pink of its wrinkled folds deepened.
It was simply a leech, sharing in the enlargement nearly all the lower world had undergone, but Burl did not know that. He scraped frantically at it with the side of his spear, and it fell off, leaving a blotch of blood on his skin. It lay, writhing and pulsating, on the ground, and Burl fled.
He found himself in another toadstool forest, and finally paused. He recognized the type of fungus growths around him, and began eating voraciously. In Burl the sight of food always produced hunger--Nature's compensation for his lack of an instinct to store food.
Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from Saya and his tribe. Just 40 miles separated them, but Burl did not think of distances. He had come down the river. He was alone in a land he had never known or seen.
Food was plentiful. The mushrooms surrounding him were edible, a supply of sustenance Burl's whole tribe could not have eaten in many days, but that very fact made him think of Saya. He suddenly remembered the large oily fish he had caught for her, still hanging down his back from the sinew about his neck.
He took it and fingered it all over, getting his hands and himself thoroughly greasy in the process, but he could eat no more. The thought of Saya's pleasure at the sight of it gave him renewed determination.
With all the immediacy of a child or savage he set off. He had come along the bank of the stream. He would return along the bank of the stream.
Through the awkward aisles of the mushroom forest he moved, eyes and ears open for danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of ants on their multifarious businesses in the wood, but he ignored those shortsighted foragers. He feared only one kind of ant, the army ant, which sometimes travels in hordes of millions, eating all in its path. Ages ago, when they were tiny creatures not an inch long, even the largest animals fled from them. Now that they measured a foot long, not even the gorged spiders whose distended bellies were a yard thick dared challenge them.
The mushroom forest ended. A cheerful grasshopper (Ephigger) munched at some dainty it had found. Its hind legs were bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. But a monster wasp--as long as Burl himself--suddenly dropped from the sky and seized the luckless feaster.
The battle was brief. The wasp's flexible abdomen curved delicately. Precise as a surgeon's scalpel, its sting entered the jointed armor just beneath the head of its prey. All struggle ceased.
The wasp grasped the paralyzed--not dead--insect and flew away. Burl grunted, and passed on.
The ground grew rough, impeding Burl's progress. He clambered arduously up steep slopes and cautiously down their farther sides. Once he climbed through a mass of small mushrooms so densely tangled that he had to smash them with blows of his spear to clear a path. They shed torrents of a fiery red liquid that rolled off his greasy breast and sank into the ground (Lactarius deliciosus).
Overconfidence now possessed Burl. He walked less cautiously, more boldly. The fact that he had struck something and destroyed it lent him foolhardy courage.
He climbed to the top of a red clay cliff, 100 feet high. Erosion from the river had carved it ages ago, but now the riverbank came no nearer than a quarter-mile.
Shelf-fungi, large and small, white, yellow, orange, and green, in indescribable confusion and luxuriance, covered the cliffside. From a point halfway up the cliff the inch-thick cable of a spider's web stretched down to an anchorage on the ground. The geometrical pattern of the web glistened evilly.
Somewhere among the cliffside fungi the huge creature waited until some unfortunate prey should struggle helplessly in its monster snare. The spider waited motionless, implacably patient, invicibly certain of prey, utterly merciless to its victims.
Burl strutted at the cliff's edge, a silly little pink-skinned creature with an oily fish slung about his neck, a draggled fragment of moth's wing about his middle, and a minotaur beetle's nose in his hand. He looked scornfully down on the whitely shining trap. He had struck mushrooms, and they had fallen before him. He feared nothing.
60 paces before him, a shaft sank vertically in the sandy, clayey soil. Carefully rounded, lined with silk, it descended 30 feet, then enlarged into a chamber where the owner and digger of the shaft might rest. An inconspicuous trapdoor, camouflaged with mud and earth, sealed the top of the hole. Only a keen eye could have perceived the opening. But a keen eye now peered out from a tiny crack, the eye of the engineer of the underground dwelling.
Eight hairy legs surrounded the creature that hung motionless at the top of the shaft. Two pairs of ferocious mandibles stretched before its fierce mouthparts. Two eyes glittered evilly in the darkness of the burrow. Rough, mangy, brown fur covered the huge misshapen globe of its body.
Implacably malignant, incredibly ferocious, was the brown hunting spider, the American tarantula (Mygale Hentzii). Its body was over two feet in diameter. Its hairy legs, outstretched, would cover a circle three yards across. Eyes glistening, jaws slavering, it watched Burl.
And Burl strutted at the cliff's edge, puffed up with a sense of importance. The white snare of the spinning spider below amused him. He knew the spider would not leave its web to attack. Using his spear, he shoved a chunk of fungus growing at his feet down the cliffside into the colossal web. The black bulk of the hidden spider swung out to investigate. Burl kept pace with it, knocking more lumps of shelf-fungus loose, and laughing as they narrowly missed the confused, black-and-silver creature. Then--
The trap door clicked faintly, and Burl whirled. His laughter became a scream. Approaching with incredible speed, the monster tarantula opened its dripping jaws. Mandibles gaping wide, poison fangs unsheathed, the creature was 30 paces away, 20, 10. It leaped into the air, all eight legs extended to seize!
Still screaming, Burl thrust out his arms to ward off the impact. In his terror, his grasp on his spear became agonized. The spear point shot out, and the tarantula fell on it. Nearly a quarter of the spear entered the body of the ferocious thing.
Transfixed on the spear, the monster writhed nightmarishly, still struggling to reach Burl, who himself was transfixed with horror. Mandibles clashed, awful sounds came from the beast. One of the attenuated, hairy legs rasped across Burl's forearm. He instinctively stepped backward--off the edge of the cliff.
Down through space, eyes glassy with panic, the two creatures--man and skewered tarantula--fell together. With a strangely elastic crash and crackling, they hit the web below.
Burl could be no more fear-struck. Struggling madly in the gummy coils of an immense web, ever binding him more tightly, with a wounded creature still striving to reach him with poison fangs--Burl had reached the limit of panic.
He fought madly to break the coils about him. His arms and breast were greasy from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them, but his legs and body were inextricably fastened by the elastic threads spread for just such prey as he.
He paused, exhausted. Then he saw, five yards away, the silvery and black monster waiting patiently for him to tire. It judged the moment propitious. The tarantula and man were one in its eyes, one struggling thing that had fallen opportunely into its snare. They moved but feebly now. The spider advanced delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly along the web, paying out a cable after it, coming inexorably closer.
Burl's arms were free because of the greasy coating they had received. He waved them wildly, shrieking at the approaching, pitiless monster. It paused. Those moving arms suggested mandibles that might wound or slap.
Spiders take few hazards. This one was no exception. Its spinnerets became busy, and with one of its eight legs, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over both tarantula and man.
Burl fought the descending shroud, striving vainly to thrust it away. Within minutes he was covered in a silken cloth that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy, the giant tarantula, were beneath the same covering, though the tarantula moved but weakly.
The shower ceased. The web spider had decided they were helpless. Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly, as the spider approached to sting and suck the sweet juices from its prey.
Burl froze in an ecstasy of terror, waiting for poison fangs to be thrust into him. He knew the process, having seen the leisurely way giant spiders delicately stung their prey, then withdrew to wait patiently for the venom to take effect.
When their victim ceased to struggle, they drew near again, and sucked the sweet juices from the body until what was once a creature vibrant with life became a shrunken, withered husk--to be flung from the web at nightfall. Most spiders are tidy housekeepers, destroying their snares daily to spin anew.
The bloated, evil creature moved meditatively about the shining sheet of silk it had cast over Burl and the giant tarantula. Now only the tarantula moved feebly. Its body, outlined by a bulge in the concealing shroud, throbbed faintly as it struggled with the spear in its vitals. The rounded protuberance offered an obvious target. The web spider moved quickly forward, and stung.
Galvanized into fresh torment by this new agony, the tarantula writhed in a very hell of pain. Its legs struck out purposelessly, in horrible gestures of delirious suffering. Burl screamed as one touched him, and struggled himself.
His arms and head were free beneath the silken sheet because of the grease and oil coating them. Striving to escape his deadly neighbor, Burl clutched at the threads about him. They did not break, but parted, and a tiny opening appeared. One of the tarantula's attenuated limbs touched him again. With the strength of utter panic he hauled himself away. The opening enlarged, Burl's head emerged into open air, and he stared down 20 feet on an open space carpeted with chitinous remains of his captor's former victims.
Burl's head, breast, and arms were free. But his lower body was held firm by a gummy snare far more tenacious than any birdlime ever manufactured by man.
He hung a moment in his tiny window, despairing. He saw, at a little distance, the monster spider, waiting patiently for its poison to take effect and the struggling of its prey to cease. And the tarantula was weakening, only shuddering now.
Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about his loins and legs. The oil on his hands kept it from clinging to them, and it gave a little. In a flash of inspiration, Burl understood. He reached over his shoulder and grasped the greasy fish; tore it in a dozen places and smeared himself with the now rancid exudation, pushing the sticky threads from his limbs and oiling the surface from which he had thrust it.
He felt the web tremble. To the spider, its poison seemed to have failed. Another sting seemed necessary. It would again inject its deadly venom where the disturbance was manifest--into Burl!
He gasped, and drew himself toward his window. It felt as if he was pulling his legs from his body. His head emerged, his shoulders--half his body was outside the hole.
The colossal spider surveyed him, and made ready to cast another silken sheet over him. The spinnerets became active, and the sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way! He shot through the opening and fell sprawling to the earth below, crashing onto the shrunken shell of a flying beetle which had fallen into the snare and had not escaped.
Burl rolled over and over, then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before him, mandibles extended threateningly, antennae waving wildly. A shrill stridulation filled the air.
In ages past, when ants were tiny creatures fractions of an inch long, scientists knew they possessed a cry. Grooves on the body of the insects, like those on the great legs of crickets, enabled them to generate sounds.
Burl knew the stridulation emanated from the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced. The cry was used to summon others of its city, to help it in difficulty or good fortune.
Clickings sounded nearby. Reinforcements were coming. Normally harmless--except the army ant, that is--the whole ant tribe was formidable when provoked. Utterly fearless, they could pull down a man and slay him as so many infuriated fox terriers might have done 30,000 years before.
Burl fled, without debate, and heard the shrill sound suddenly subside. The ant, shortsighted like all ants, no longer felt threatened and went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted, that of finding among the gruesome relics beneath the spider's web some edible carrion to feed the inhabitants of its city.
Burl ran a few hundred yards, and stopped. It behooved him to move carefully. Even the most familiar territory was full of unexpected dangers; unknown lands such as these were doubly perilous.
Burl too found difficulty in moving. The glutinous stuff from the spider's snare still stuck to his feet, picking up small objects as he went. Old ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor pricked him even through his toughened soles.
He removed them, took a dozen steps and had to stop again. Burl's brain had been uncommonly stimulated lately. It had gotten him into at least one predicament--due to his invention of a spear--but extricated him from another. Reason had led him to oil his body to escape the spider's snare.
Cautiously, Burl looked about. He seemed safe. Then, deliberately, he sat down to think. Never in his life had he done such a thing; his tribesmen were not given to meditation. But a powerful idea had struck Burl--an abstract idea.
When he was in difficulties, something within him seemed to suggest a solution. Would it do so now? He puzzled over the problem. Sharp pebbles, remnants of insect-armor, and other things hurt his feet when he walked. They always had, but never had his feet been sticky so that the irritation continued with him more than one step.
He gazed at his foot, and awaited inspiration. Meanwhile, he slowly removed the sharp-pointed fragments, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum from his feet, they clung to his finger, except where the oil was thick.
Burl's reasoning, before, had been simple and of primary order. Where oil covered him, the web did not. Therefore he would coat the rest of himself with oil. But to apply knowledge gained in one predicament to another difficulty was something he had never done.
A dog may be taught to pull a latchstring to open a door, but the same dog coming to a high, close-barred gate with a latchstring will never think of pulling it. He associates a latchstring with opening the door. Opening a gate is another matter entirely.
Imminent peril had stirred Burl to invention. That was extraordinary enough. But reasoning in cold blood, as he now did, that oil on his feet would nullify the glue there and enable him to walk in comfort--that was as much a triumph of intellect as any masterpiece of art in the ages before. He oiled his feet.
It was an infinitesimal problem, but Burl's struggles with the mental process of reasoning were real. 30,000 years earlier, a wise man declared that education is simply training in thought, in efficient and effective thinking. Burl had received no such training, but now, sitting at the base of a squat toadstool, he reexemplified Rodin's Thinker for the first time in millennia. He was teaching himself how to think.
He stood up, walked, and crowed in delight, then paused a moment in awe of his own intelligence. 35 miles from his tribe, naked, unarmed, ignorant of fire, wood, or any weapons save a spear he had experimented with the day before, abysmally uninformed concerning the very existence of art or science, Burl stopped to assure himself that he was very wonderful.
With touching faith in this new pastime, Burl sat down again and knitted his brows. His questions were easily answered. He was naked. He would fashion garments. He was weaponless. He would find a spear. He was hungry. He would seek food. He was far from from Saya and his tribe. He would go to them. Puerile reasoning, of course, but valuable, because it was conscious reasoning, conscious appeal to his mind for guidance, deliberate metal progression from desire to resolution.
Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really used their brains. The great majority had depended on machines and leaders to think for them. Burl, however, was developing the habit of thinking--a leadership quality, and an invaluable asset to his little tribe.
He stood again and faced upstream. Gigantic butterflies, riotously colored, fluttered overhead through the misty haze. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled through the air like a projectile, transparent wings beating frantically. Occasionally a wasp sped by, intent on its hunting, or a bee droned heavily along, anxious and worried, striving in a nearly flowerless world to gather pollen for the hive.
Here and there Burl saw various flies, some no larger than his thumb, others the size of his whole hand. They fed on juices dripping from maggot-infested mushrooms, when filth more to their liking was unavailable.
Far away a shrill roaring sounded faintly. It was like multitudinous clickings blended into a single sound, but was so distant that it did not gain Burl's attention. He had all the strictly localized vision of a child. What was near was important; what was distant could be ignored.
Had Burl listened, he would have realized that army ants were abroad in countless millions, deploying themselves in a broad array and wreaking greater destruction than so many locusts.
Locusts in past ages had eaten all green things. Only giant cabbages and a few such tenacious rank growths survived. The locusts had vanished along with civilization, knowledge, and most of mankind, but army ants remained as an invincible enemy to men, insects, and fungi alike.
Burl did not notice the sound, however. Preoccupied, he moved forward, briskly though cautiously, searching for garments, food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find them all shortly.
Surely enough he found a thicket of edible fungi just half a mile beyond the spot where he had sat down to think. Burl tugged at one and broke off a piece. Nibbling as he went, he entered a broad plain over a mile across, broken into odd little hillocks by gradually ripening and suddenly developing mushrooms with which he was unfamiliar. Their rounded, blood-red protuberances forced aside the earth as they grew.
Burl passed among them without touching them. They were strange, and strange things meant danger. Besides, he was full of new purpose. He wished garments and weapons.
Above the plain a wasp flew, a heavy object dangling beneath its black belly, ornamented by a single red band. It was a hairy sand wasp, carrying a paralyzed gray caterpillar. After depositing the caterpillar in a deep underground burrow, the wasp would lay an egg on it, then emerge and seal the entrance with dirt and stones. Later, the egg would hatch into a tiny grub, which would feed on the torpid caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a chrysalis and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way to open air.
Uncomprehending, Burl watched the wasp go by, then trudged onward. Reaching the farther side of the plain, he found himself threading the aisles of a fungus forest where the growths were hideous, misshapen travesties of the trees they had supplanted. Bloated, yellow limbs branched off from rounded, swollen trunks. Here and there a pearshaped puffball, Burl's height and half as much again, waited craftily until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of fine dust.
There were dangers here, and Burl moved forward cautiously. He continued to eat from the mass of edible mushroom under his arm, while his large eyes scanned about for threats of harm.
Behind, a high, shrill roaring grew slightly louder, but remained too far away to impress Burl. The army ants were working havoc in the distance. By millions, they were foraging the country, climbing every eminence, descending every depression, antennae waving restlessly, mandibles extended threateningly. The ground was black with them, each ten inches long.
A single such creature would be formidable to an unarmed, naked man like Burl, whose wisest move would be flight, but in numbers they presented a menace from which escape seemed impossible. They advanced steadily and rapidly amid shrill stridulations and multitudinous clickings.
The great helpless caterpillars on the cabbages heard them coming, but were too stupid to flee. Black multitudes covered the rank vegetables, and tiny but voracious jaws tore at the flaccid masses of flesh.
Each creature had some futile means of struggling. Caterpillars writhed and contorted ineffectually. Bees fought their entrance to the gigantic hives with stings and wingbeats. Moths took to the air in helpless blindness when discovered by the relentless throngs of small black insects.
There was a strange contrast between the ground before the advancing horde and that immediately behind it. Before, a busy world, teeming with life. Mushrooms and fungi fought with thinning numbers of giant cabbages for food. Behind the black multitude--nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, every creeping, crawling, or flying thing that did not get aloft before the black tide arrived was lost, torn to bits by tiny mandibles. Even spiders and tarantulas fell before the host of insects, killing many their final struggles, but ultimately overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And the wounded and dying army ants became food for their comrades. There is no mercy among insects.
Surging onward, flowing like a monstrous, murky tide over the yellow, steaming earth, the army ants advanced. Their vanguard reached the river, and recoiled. Burl was five miles distant when they changed course, communicating the altered line of march to those behind with antenna gestures, stridulations, and formic acid trails.
A million tragedies marked the insect army's progress. There was a tiny colony of mining bees--Zebra bees; a single mother, four feet long, had dug a huge gallery with ten cells, in which she laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed fat and large, become bees, and laid eggs in turn, in the same gallery.
Ten such bulky insects now foraged busily for grubs within the ancestral home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless with passing time. Unable to forage herself, the old bee became hive guardian, as is customary among mining bees. She closed the opening of the hive with her head, making a living barrier at the entrance, withdrawing to give entrance and exit only to duly authenticated members of the colony.
She was at her post when the wave of army ants swept over her. Tiny, evil-smelling feet trampled on her. She emerged to fight with mandible and sting for the sanctity of the hive. In a moment she was a shaggy mass of biting ants, rending and tearing her chitinous armor. The other bees emerged, fighting as they came, for the gallery leading down was a dark flood of small insects.
An epic battle raged. Ten huge bees, each four feet long, fighting with leg and jaw, wing and mandible, with the ferocity of tigers. The tiny, vicious ants covered them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in their armor--sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an injured comrade wounded by the huge creature they battled in common.
The outcome, however, was inevitable. Struggle as the bees might, herculean as their efforts might be, they were powerless against the incredible numbers of their assailants, who tore them into tiny fragments and devoured them. Before the last shred of the hive's defenders had vanished, the hive itself was gutted alike of the grubs it contained and the food brought them by such weary effort of the mature bees.
The army ants went on. Only an empty gallery remained, and a few fragments of tough armor, unappetizing even to the omniverous ants.
Meanwhile, Burl was inspecting the rent and scraped remains of a great beetle's shiny casing lying on the ground. A greater beetle had met the first and slain it.
A few minims, little ants barely six inches long, foraged industriously among the remains. A new ant city was to be formed and the queen ant lay hidden a half-mile away. These were the first hatchlings, who would feed larger ants on whom would fall the great work of the city. Burl ignored them--and the rising noise of the advancing army any horde behind him--as he searched with his eyes for a weapon.
The best he could find was a fiercely toothed hind leg. He picked it up, and an angry whine rose from the ground.
One of the black minims was busily detaching a fragment of flesh from the joint of the leg, and Burl had snatched the morsel away. The little creature advanced toward Burl, shrilling angrily. He struck it with the leg. Two of the other minims appeared, attracted by the noise the first had made. Discovering the crushed body of their fellow, they unceremoniously dismembered it and bore it away in triumph.
Burl went on, swinging the toothed limb in his hand. Accustomed to using stones to crush the juicy legs of the giant crickets his tribe sometimes scavenged, he formed a half-defined idea of a club. The sharp teeth of the thing in his hand made him realize that a sidewise blow was better than a spearlike thrust.
The sound behind had become a distant whispering, high-pitched and nearer. The army ants swept over a mushroom forest, and the yellow, branching, treelike growths swarmed with black creatures devouring the substance to which they clung.
A great bluebottle fly, shining with metallic luster, reposed in an ecstasy of feasting, sipping through its long proboscis the dark-colored liquid that dripped slowly from a mushroom. Maggots filled the mushroom, and exuded a solvent pepsin that liquefied the white firm "meat".
They fed on this soup, this gruel, and a surplus dripped to the ground below, where the bluebottle drank eagerly. Burl drew near, and struck. The fly collapsed into a writhing heap. Burl stood over it, pondering.
The army ants came nearer, down into a tiny valley, swarming into and through a little brook over which Burl had leaped. Ants can remain underwater a long time without drowning, so the small stream was but a minor obstacle. The first wave of ants choked the brook bed, forming a living bridge for their comrades.
A quarter mile to the left of Burl's line of march, and a mile behind the spot where he stood over the dead fly, was an acre-wide stretch where giant, rank cabbages had so far resisted the encroachments of the ever-present mushrooms. The pale, cross-shaped cabbage flowers fed many bees, while the leaves fed numberless grubs, worms, and loud-voiced crickets which crouched about on the ground, munching busily at the succulent green stuff. The army ants swept into the green area, ceaselessly devouring all they encountered.
A terrific din arose. The crickets hurtled away in rocketlike flight, a dark cloud of wildly beating wings. They shot aimlessly in any direction; half fell into the black tide of devouring insects and were seized instantly. They uttered terrible cries as they were torn to bits. Horrible inhuman screams reached Burl's ears.
Individual cries of such agony were too commonplace to attract Burl's attention--but the chorus of tormented creatures made him look up. This was no minor horror, but wholesale slaughter. He peered anxiously toward the sound.
A wild stretch of sickly yellow fungus, interspersed with an occasional squat toadstool or splash of vivid color where one of the many "rusts" had found a foothold. To the left, a group of awkward misshapen fungoids clustered in silent mockery of a forest of trees. There a mass of faded green, where the giant cabbages stood. But as Burl watched, the green became slowly black.
From where he stood, Burl could see three great grubs in lazy contentment, eating ceaselessly the cabbages on which they rested. Suddenly first one and then another began to jerk spasmodically. About each, a rim of black appeared. Tiny black motes milled over the cabbages' green surfaces. The grubs and cabbages became black. Horrible contortions of the writhing grubs bespoke their agonies. Then a black wave appeared at the further edge of the stretch of sickly yellow fungus, a glistening, living wave, moving forward rapidly with the roar of clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations.
The hair rose on Burl's head. He knew all too well the meaning of that tide of shining bodies! With a gasp of terror, intellectual preoccupations forgotten, he turned and fled in ultimate panic. And the tide came inexorably on.
Clinging desperately to his sharp-toothed club, Burl darted through the tangled aisles of the little mushroom forest with heedless disregard of the dangers that might await him there. Flies buzzed about him loudly, huge creatures, glittering with metallic luster. One struck him on the shoulder, tearing his skin with vibrating wings.
Burl thrust it away and sped on. The oil covering him had turned rancid, and the odor attracted these connoisseurs of the fetid.
A heavy weight settled onto his head, then doubled. Two of the creatures had dropped into his oily hair, to sip the rancid oil through disgusting proboscises. Burl shook them off with his hand and ran madly on. His ears were keenly attuned to the sound of the army ants behind him, and it grew little fainter.
The clicking roar continued, but the buzzing of flies began to overshadow it. In Burl's time flies had no great heaps of putrid matter in which to lay eggs. Ants--those busy scavengers--carted all carrion away long before it acquired the gamy flavor beloved by fly maggots. Only in isolated spots were flies really numerous, but there they clustered in clouds that darkened the sky.
Such a buzzing, turbulent cloud surrounded the madly running figure of Burl. It seemed as though a miniature whirwind of winged bodies and multifaceted eyes kept pace with the little pink-skinned man. He twirled his club before him, and almost every stroke connected with a thinly armored body which collapsed in a spurt of reddish liquid.
Pain like a red-hot iron struck Burl's back. One of the stinging flies had thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into his flesh to suck blood.
Burl yelped--and ran full-tilt into the thick stalk of a blackened, draggled toadstool. There was a crackling as of wet punk or brittle rotten wood. The toadstool collapsed with a sickening splash. Many flies had laid eggs in the fungoid, and it was a teeming mass of corruption and ill-smelling liquid.
As the toadstool's "head" crashed to the ground, it fell into a dozen pieces, and the earth for yards around was spattered with a stinking liquid in which tiny, headless maggots twitched convulsively.
The buzzing of the flies took on a satisfied note, and they settled by hundreds about the edges of the foul pools, becoming lost in frenzied feasting while Burl staggered to his feet and darted off again. Now he was but a minor attraction to the flies, and but one or two pursued him. From every direction they hurried to the toadstool banquet.
Burl ran on. He passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of a giant cabbage. A great grasshopper crouched on the ground, tremendous jaws crunching the rank vegetation voraciously. Several huge worms ate steadily from their resting places among the leaves. One had slung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which would have thatched a dozen huts for men--and was placidly anchoring itself in prepartion for the spinning of a cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis. All, even the mighty grasshopper, would soon be torn to myriad mouthfuls and devoured by the great black tide of relentlessly advancing army ants.
The clicking roar of their advance overwhelmed all other sounds, now. Burl ran madly, breath coming in great gasps, eyes wide with panic. Alone of all the world about him, he knew the danger behind. The creatures he passed went about their business with the terrifying efficiency of the insect world.
There is something strangely daunting in the actions of an insect. It moves so directly, with uncanny precision, utterly indifferent to anything but the end in view. Cannibalism is almost universal. The paralysis of prey, so it remains alive and fresh--though in agony--for weeks on end, is commonplace. The eating piecemeal of still-living victims is a matter of course.
Absolute mercilessness, utter callousness, incredible inhumanity beyond anything in the animal world is the way of insects. And these vast cruelties are performed by armored, machinelike creatures with an abstraction and a routine air that suggests a horrible Nature behind them all.
Indeed, Burl now passed within yards of a space where a female dung beetle was devouring the mate whose honeymoon had begun that same day. And behind a clump of mushrooms, a great yellow-banded spider coyly threatened a smaller male of her own species. He was discreetly ardent, but if he won the favor of the gruesome creature he wooed, he would also become her next meal.
Burl's heart pounded madly. The breath whistled in his nostrils. Behind, the wave of army ants drew nearer. They met the feasting flies. Some took flight and escaped, but those too engrossed in their delicious meal were seized, and vanished into tiny maws. The twitching little maggots, stranded on the earth by the scattering of their soupy broth, were likewise torn to pieces. The serried ranks of black insects went on.
Combined, the tiny clickings of their limbs, the stridulations of the creatures, the agonized cries of their victims, and the rending of fungi, cabbages, flesh, and chitin, produced a deafening din.
Burl was putting forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled, his breathing was agony, sweat dripped down his forehead. This little, naked man ran for his insignificant life, as if his continued survival among the million tragedies of that single day were the purpose for which the whole universe existed.
He sped across an open space 100 yards long. A thicket of beautifully golden mushrooms (Agaricus caesareus) barred his way. Beyond them a range of strange hills began, purple, green, black and gold, melting into each other, branching off from each other, inextricably tangled.
They rose to a height of 70 feet, and above them a little grayish haze had gathered. There was a layer of tenous vapor on their surfaces, which slowly rose and coiled, gathering into a tiny cloudlet above their tips.
The hills themselves were actually masses of mushrooms, yeasts, "musts", and fungoids of every description, which had grown upon and about each other until these great piles of strangely colored, spongy stuff had gathered into one gigantic mass that undulated unevenly across the level earth for miles. Covered with purple mold, this mass seemed a range of purple hills, but here and there patches of other vivid colors showed through.
Burl burst through the golden thicket and attacked the ascent. His feet sank into the spongy hillock. Panting, gasping, he staggered across the top. He plunged into a little valley on the farther side, up another slope. Ten minutes he forced himself on, then collapsed in a little hollow, still gripping his sharp-toothed club.
He lay motionless, breathing in great gasps, limbs stubbornly refusing to move. Above, a bright yellow butterfly with a 30-foot wingspan fluttered lightly. The sound of the army ants grew nearer.
Burl, lying in an exhausted, panting heap on the purple mass of fungus, was conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt warm. He knew nothing of fire or the sun's heat; the only sensation of warmth he had ever known occurred when his tribesmen huddled together in their hiding place to banish the damp chill of the night with the heat of their bodies.
The heat Burl now felt was hotter, fiercer. He rolled over with tremendous effort, and for a moment the fungus was cool and soft beneath him. Then, slowly, the sensation of heat began again, and increased until Burl's skin was red and inflamed from the irritation.
The tenuous vapor, too, made Burl's lungs smart and eyes water. He breathed in great, choking gasps, but the period of rest--short as it had been--enabled him to rise and stagger on. He crawled painfully to the top of the slope, and looked back.
The hillcrest on which he stood was higher than those he had passed earlier, and he could see clearly the whole purple range. He had nearly reached the farther edge of the range, which was here half a mile wide.
A thin, dark cloud had gathered overhead. To the right and left, Burl saw the hills fading into the distance, growing fainter in the haze. He saw, too, the advancing cohorts of army ants, creeping over the tangled mass of fungus growths. They fed as they went, on the fungus that had gathered into these incredible monstrosities.
Burl leaned heavily on his club and watched resignedly. He could run no more. The army ants were spreading everywhere over the mass of fungus. They would reach him soon.
Far to the right the vapor thickened. A column of smoke arose. What Burl did not know and would never know was that far down in the interior of that compressed mass of fungus, slow oxidation had been occurring. The temperature of the interior had risen. In the darkness and dampness deep inside the hills, spontaneous combustion had begun.
Just as the vast piles of coal the railroad companies of 30,000 years before had gathered together sometimes began to burn fiercely in their interiors, just as the farmers' piles of damp straw suddenly burst into flames without cause, so these huge piles of tinderlike mushrooms had been burning slowly within themselves.
There had been no flames, because the surface remained intact and nearly airtight. But when the army ants began tearing at the edible surfaces despite the heat they encountered, fresh air found its way to the smoldering masses of fungus. Slow combustion became rapid combustion. Dull heat became fierce flames. The slow trickle of thin smoke became a huge column of thick, choking, acrid stuff that set the army ants into spasms of convulsive writhing.
Flames burst out from a dozen points. Columns of blinding smoke rose skyward. A pall of fume-laden smoke gathered above the range of purple hills, while Burl watched apathetically. And the serried ranks of army ants marched into the widening furnaces.
They had recoiled from the river, because instinct had warned them. 30,000 years without danger from fire, however, had extinguished their racial fear of fire. They marched into the blazing orifices they had opened in the hills, snapping their mandibles at the leaping flames, springing at the glowing tinder.
The blazing area widened, as the purple surface was undermined and fell in. Uncomprehending, Burl watched the phenomenon. He stood, panting more and more slowly, breathing more and more easily, until the glow from the approahing flames reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes.
He retreated slowly, leaning on his club and looking back. The black wave of army ants was sweeping into the fire, into the incredible heat of that carbonized material burning with an open flame. At last there were only the little bodies of stragglers from the great ant army, scurrying here and there over the ground their comrades had denuded of all living things. The entire main army had vanished--burnt to ashes in the furnace of the hills.
There had been agony in that flame, dreadful agony such as no man would like to dwell on: the insanely courageous ants attacking with horny jaws the burning masses of fungus, rolling over and over with flaming missiles clutched in their mandibles, sounding shrill war cries between screams of agony--blinded, antennae burnt off, lidless eyes scorched by licking flames, yet going madly forward on flaming feet to attack, ever attack this unknown enemy.
Burl limped over the hills. Twice he saw small groups of army ants. They had passed between the widening surfaces their comrades had opened, and were feeding voraciously on the hills they traversed. Once Burl was spied, and a shrill war cry sounded, but he moved on, and the ants were busy eating. A single ant charged. Burl brought down his club, and a writhing body remained to be eaten later by its comrades.
Burl emerged from the range of mushroom hills as night fell. Utter blackness covered the whole mad land, save where luminous mushrooms shed pale light and fireflies the length of Burl's arm shed fitful gleams on a jungle of fungus growths and monstrous insects. From the sky, now a drop and then a drop, the nightly rain began.
The ground was hard beneath Burl's feet. He picked his path with his large blue eyes, pupils expanded to great size, and listened keenly for sounds of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of mushrooms 100 yards away. There were sounds of preening, and delicate feet padding on the ground. The throbbing beat of huge wings began suddenly, and a body lurched into flight.
A fierce, downward air current smote Burl, and he looked up in time to catch the outline of a huge moth passing above. He turned to watch its line of flight, and saw a strange glow in the sky behind him. The mushroom hills still burned.
He crouched beneath a squat toadstool to wait for dawn.
Slowly, slowly, the sodden rainfall continued. Drop by drop, all night long, warm pellets of liquid fell from the sky. They boomed against the hollow heads of toadstools, and splashed into the steaming pools that lay festering all over the fungus-covered earth.
And all night long the great fires grew and spread in the mass of already half-carbonized mushroom. The flare at the horizon intensified. Eyes wide and full of wonder, Burl watched it grow nearer. He had never seen flame before.
The flames brightened the overhanging clouds. Over a stretch a dozen miles long and as much as three miles across, seething furnaces sent columns of dense smoke up to the roof of clouds, luminous from the glow below them, and spreading out to form an intermediate layer below the cloudbanks.
It was like the glow of the many lights of a vast city thrown against the sky--but the last great city had molded into fungus-covered rubbish eons ago. Like the flitting of airplanes above a populous city, too, was the flitting of fascinated creatures above the glow.
Moths and great flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge with time's passing, they fluttered a dance of death above the flames. As the fire grew nearer, Burl could see them.
Colossal, delicately formed creatues swooped above the strange blaze. Moths with riotously colored wings of 30-foot spread beat the air with mighty strokes, huge eyes glowing like carbuncles as they stared with frenzied, intoxicated devotion into the flames below.
Burl saw a great peacock moth soar above the burning mushroom hills. Its wings were 40 feet across, and fluttered like gigantic sails as the moth gazed down at the flaming furnace. The separate flames had united, now, and a single sheet of white-hot burning stuff spread across the country for miles, sending up clouds of smoke through which fascinated creatures flew.
Feathery antennae of the finest lace spread before the head of the peacock moth, and its body was softest, richest velvet. A ring of snow-white down marked where its head began, and the red glow from below eerily illuminated its maroon body.
For one instant it was outlined clearly. Its eyes glowed more redly than any ruby's fire, and the great, delicate wings were poised in flight. Burl caught the reflected flash of flames on two great iridescent spots on the widespread wings. Shining purple and vivid red, the glow of opal and sheen of pearl, all the glory of chalcedony and chrysoprase formed a single wonder in the glare of burning fungus. Then white smoke swirled about the great moth, dimming the radiance of its gorgeous dress.
Burl saw it dive straight into the thickest and brightest of the licking flames, flying madly, eagerly, into the searing, hellish heat--a willing, drunken sacrifice to the god of fire.
Monster flying beetles with horny wing cases stiffly stretched blundered above the reeking, smoking pyre. In the red light they shone like burnished metal, and their clumsy bodies with spurred and fierce-toothed limbs hurtled like meteors through the luminous haze of ascending smoke.
Burl saw strange collisions and stranger meetings. Male and female flying creatures circled and spun dances of love and death in the wild radiance from the funeral pyre of the purple hills. They mounted higher than Burl could see, drunk with the ecstasy of life, then descended to plunge headlong to death in the roaring fires below.
From everywhere they came. Moths of brightest yellow with soft, furry bodies palpitant with life flew madly into the column of light that reached to the overhanging clouds. Moths of deepest black, with gruesome symbols on their wings, danced, like motes in a bath of sunlight, above the glow.
And Burl sat crouched beneath an overshadowing toadstool, watching--and listening. A continual faint hiss penetrated the sound of fire: raindrops turning to steam. From afar, Burl heard a strange, deep bass muttering. Unbeknownst to him, it was the chorus of insect-eating giant frogs, reaching his ears 15 miles from their vast swamp.
The night wore on, while the flying creatures above the fire danced and died, ever replaced by fresh arrivals. Burl sat tensely still, awed yet uncomprehending. At last the sky grew dimly gray, then brighter, and day began. The flames of the burning hills grew faint as the fire died, and at last Burl crept from his hiding place and stood erect.
He turned to continue his odyssey, and saw the remains of one of the tragedies of the night.
A huge moth had flown into the flames, been horribly scorched, and floundered out again. Unable to return to its devouring deity, it now lay immovable, one beautiful, delicate wing burned in gaping holes, eyes dimmed by flame, and exquisitely tapering limbs crushed by the force with which it had struck the ground. It lay helpless, only its broken antennae moving restlessly, painfully.
Burl approached, and picked up a stone. He moved on presently, a velvet cloak across his shoulders, gleaming with all the colors of the rainbow. A gorgeous mass of soft, blue moth fur covered his middle, and bound to his forehead were two yard-long, golden fragments of the moth's magnificent antennae. In a strip of sinew about his waist was thrust the fiercly toothed limb of a fighting beetle. He soon added to his inventory a sharp-pointed spear from another scorched victim of the flames. It was longer than he himself.
So equipped, Burl resumed his trek to Saya, looking like a prince of Ind on a bridal journey--though no mere prince ever wore such raiment in days of greatest glory.
For miles Burl threaded his way through a forest of towering toadstools, decorated with colorful rusts and molds. Twice he avoided huge bubbling pools of festering green slime, and once hid fearfully as a monster scarabeus beetle lumbered within three yards of him, moving heavily with a clanking of limbs like some great machine.
Burl saw the creature's mighty armor and inward-curving jaws, and envied its weapons. The time was not yet come, however, when he would smile at the great insect and hunt it for the juicy flesh inside those armored limbs.
Burl was still a savage, still ignorant, still timid. His principle advance had been that whereas he had fled without reasoning, he now paused to see if he need flee.
He was a strange sight, moving cautiously through the shadowed lanes of the mushroom forest. Against the play of color from his borrowed plumage his pink skin showed in odd contrast. He looked like some proud knight walking slowly through the gardens of a goblin's castle. But he was still a fearful creature, superior to the monsters about him only in the possession of latent intelligence. He was weak--and therein lay his greatest promise. 100,000 years before, his ancestors had been forced by lack of claws and fangs to develop brains.
Burl was sunk as low as they, but he had to combat more horrifying enemies and more inexorable threats. His ancestors had invented knives, spears, and flying missiles. The creatures about Burl had knives and spears a thousand times more deadly than the weapons that had made his ancestors masters of the woods and forests.
Burl was in comparison vastly more weak than his forebears had been; that weakness that would someday lead him and those who followed him to heights his ancestors had never known. But now--
He heard a discordant, deep bass bellow, from a spot not 20 yards away. In a flash of panic he darted behind a clump of mushrooms and hid, panting in sheer terror.
The bellow came again, this time with a querulous note. Burl heard a crashing and plunging as of a struggle. A mushroom broke with a brittle snapping, and the spongy thud as it fell was followed by a tremendous commotion. Something was desperately fighting something else, but Burl could not identify the combatants.
The noise gradually faded. Presently Burl's breathing slowed, and his courage returned. He stole from his hiding place, and would have retreated, but something held him back. Instead of creeping from the scene, he crept cautiously toward the source of the noise.
He peered between two cream-colored toadstool stalks and saw the cause of the noise. A wide, funnel-shaped snare of silk was spread before him, 20 yards across and equally deep. Individual threads were plainly visible, but in the mass it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Supported by tall mushrooms, it was anchored to the ground below, and drew away to a tiny point through which a hole led to some unknown recess. And all the space of the wide snare was hung with threads, fine, twisted threads no more than half the thickness of Burl's finger.
This was the trap of a labyrinth spider. Not one of the interlacing threads was strong enough to hold the feeblest prey, but they numbered in the thousands. A great cricket had become entangled in the maze of sticky lines. Its limbs thrashed out, smashing the snare lines at every stroke, but at every stroke meeting and becoming entangled with a dozen more. It struggled mightily, emitting at intervals its horrible, deep bass cry.
Burl watched, fascinated. Most insects have their allotted victims and touch no others. These posed no threat to him, so Burl had little interest in them. But spiders are terrifyingly impartial. A spider devouring some luckless insect was an example of what might happen to Burl.
The opening at the rear of the funnel-shaped snare darkened. The snare drew itself into a tunnel there, in which the spider had waited and watched. Now it swung out lightly, advancing toward the cricket. It was a gray spider (Agelena labyrinthica), with twin black ribbons on its thorax, aside the head, and two stripes of speckled brown and white on its abdomen. Burl also saw two curious appendages like tails.
The cricket struggled only feebly now, its cries muted by the confining threads fettering its limbs. Burl saw the spider throw itself at the cricket and witnessed the final, convulsive shudder of the insect as the spider's fangs pierced its tough armor. The sting lasted a long time, and finally Burl realized the spider was feeding, sucking the succulent juices from the now dead cricket. When at last the carcass was drained, the spider pawed the lifeless creature for a few moments and left it.
A sudden thought came to Burl and took his breath away. For a second his knees knocked together in self-induced panic. He watched the gray spider carefully with growing determination. He, Burl, had killed a hunting spider at the red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been accidental, and had nearly cost him his own life, but he had killed a spider of the most deadly kind.
Now great ambition grew in Burl's heart. His tribe had always feared spiders too much to study their habits, but they knew a few things. The most important: snare spiders never left their lairs to hunt--never! Burl hoped to make daring application of that knowledge.
He drew back from the white, shining snare and crept softly to the rear. The fabric gathered itself into a point and continued 20 feet as a tunnel, in which the spider would dream of its last meal and await its next victim. Burl made his way to a point where the tunnel was just 10 feet away. Soon, through the threads of the tunnel, he saw the thick gray bulk of the spider return to its resting place.
Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was slave to an idea. He drew near and aimed his deadly, pointed spear at the bulge in the tunnel where the spider lay. He thrust it home with all his strength--and ran away at top speed, glassy-eyed from terror.
Much later he ventured near again, heart still in his mouth, ready to flee at the slightest sound. All was still. Burl had missed the horrible convulsions of the wounded spider, had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs against the piercing weapon, had not seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped as the mortally wounded spider struggled madly to free itself.
He came back beneath the overshadowing toadstools, quietly and cautiously, to find a great rent in the silken tunnel, and the great gray bulk lifeless and still, half-fallen through the opening the spear had made. A little puddle of evil-smelling liquid lay on the ground below, and from time to time a droplet dripped from the spear into the puddle with a splash.
Burl looked at what he had done, saw the dead body of the creature he had slain, saw the ferocious mandibles and keen, deadly fangs. The creature's dead eyes stared at him malignantly, and the hairy legs remained braced as if further to enlarge the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen.
Exultation filled Burl's heart. His tribe had been furtive vermin for thousands of years, hiding or fleeing from mighty insects, and, if overtaken, screaming shrilly in terror while helplessly awaiting death.
Burl had turned the tables. He had slain an enemy of his tribe. His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and fearfully, but a sudden exultant yell burst from Burl's lips--the first hunting cry from the lips of a man in 300 centuries!
The next second his pulse nearly stopped in sheer panic at having made such a noise. He listened apprehensively but there was no sound. He approached his prey and carefully withdrew his spear. The viscid liquid made it slimy and slippery; he wiped it dry against a leathery toadstool. Then Burl had to conquer his illogical fear again before daring to touch the creature he had slain.
He moved off presently, with the belly of the spider on his back and two hairy legs over his shoulders. The other limbs hung limp, trailing on the ground. Burl was now a still more curious sight wrapped in a shining cloak of iridescent colors, wearing a headdress of golden antennae, and hauling the hideous bulk of a gray spider.
He moved through the mushroom forest, and, because of the thing he carried, all creatures fled before him. They did not fear man--their instinct was slow-moving--but during all the millions of years that insects have existed, spiders have preyed on them.
Burl heard loud humming and buzzing as he topped a rise opening onto a valley of torn and blackened mushrooms. He stopped and looked down.
There was not a single yellow top among the mushrooms. Each was infected with tiny maggots which had liquefied the tough meat of the mushroom and caused it to drip to the ground below. The liquid had gathered at the center of the depression to form a golden-red lake. And all about its edges, in ranks and rows, by thousands, by millions, were ranged the green-gold, shining bodies of great flies.
They were small, compared to other insects. Their increase in size had been limited due to an imperative necessity of their race.
The flesh flies laid their eggs by hundreds in decaying carcasses. The others laid their eggs by hundreds in mushrooms. To feed the maggots that would hatch, a relatively great quantity of food was needed, therefore the flies must remain small, or the body of a single grasshopper, say, would furnish food for but two or three grubs instead of the hundreds it must support.
Burl stared down at the golden pool. Bluebottles, greenbottles, and all flies of metallic luster gathered at the Lucullan feast of corruption. Their buzzing as they darted above the odorous pool of golden liquid made the sound Burl had heard. Their bodies flashed and glittered as they darted about, seeking a place to alight and join the orgy.
Those which clustered at the banks of the pool were still as if carved from metal. Their huge, red eyes glowed, and their bodies shone with obscene fatness. Flies are the most disgusting of all insects. Burl watched them, watched the interlacing streams of light as they buzzed eagerly above the pool, seeking a place at the festive board.
A drumming roar sounded. A golden speck appeared in the sky, a slender, needlelike body with transparent, shining wings and two huge eyes. It grew nearer and became a dragonfly 20 feet long, its body shimmering, purest gold. It poised above the pool, then darted down. Its jaws snapped viciously and repeatedly; each time the glittering body of a fly vanished.
A second dragonfly appeared, its body a vivid purple, and a third. They swooped and rushed above the golden pool, snapping in midair, making abrupt, angular turns, creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. At the moment they were nothing more nor less than slaughtering machines. Their multifaceted eyes burned with bloodlust. In that mass of buzzing flies even the most voracious appetite must be sated, but the dragonflies kept on. Slender, graceful creatures, they dashed here and there above the pond like the mythical dragons for which they had been named.
A few miles farther on Burl recognized a familiar landmark. He knew it well, but always from a safe distance. A mass of rock had heaved itself up from the nearly level plain he was traversing, and formed an outjutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung a sheer drop, making an inverted ledge--a roof over nothingness--which a hairy creature had transformed into a fairylike dwelling. A white hemisphere clung tenaciously to the rock above, and long cables anchored it firmly.
A Clotho spider (Clotho Durandi, LATR) had built a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within that half-globe was a monster, resting on a cushion of softest silk. If one went too near, one of the little inverted arches, seemingly firmly closed by a wall of silk, would open and a creature out of a dream of hell emerge, to run with fiendish agility toward its prey.
Yes, Burl knew the place. Hung on the outer walls of the silken palace were stones and tiny boulders, discarded fragments of former meals, and gutted armor from limbs of ancient prey. And most terrible was another decoration that dangled from the castle of this insect ogre: the shrunken, desiccated figure of a man, all juices extracted, life gone.
That man's death had saved Burl's life two years before. They had been together, seeking edible mushrooms. The Clotho spider sprang suddenly from behind a great puffball, and the two men froze in terror. It came swiftly forward and chose its victim. Burl had escaped when the other man was seized. Now he looked meditatively at the hiding place of his ancient enemy. Someday--
But now he passed on. He passed the thicket in which great moths hid during the day, and the turgid pool of slime and yeast where a monster water snake lurked. He penetrated the little wood of shining mushrooms that produced light at night, and the shadowed place where truffle-hunting beetles went chirping thunderously at dark hours.
Then Burl saw Saya, a flash of pink skin vanishing behind the thick stalk of a squat toadstool. He ran forward, calling her name. She appeared, and saw the figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. Horrified, she cried out, and Burl understood. He dropped his burden, then went swiftly toward her.
They met. Saya waited timidly until she saw who this man was, and astonishment filled her face. Gorgeously attired, in an iridescent cloak from the whole wing of a great moth, with a strip of softest fur from a night-flying creature about his middle, with golden feathery antennae bound on his forehead, and a fierce spear in his hands--this was not the Burl she knew.
But he moved slowly toward her, filled with fierce delight at seeing her again, thrilling with joy at her slender gracefulness and the dark richness of her tangled hair. He held out his hands and touched her shyly. Then, manlike, he babbled excitedly of his adventures, and dragged her toward his great victim, the gray-bellied spider.
Saya trembled when she saw the furry bulk lying on the ground, and almost fled when Burl advanced and took it on his back. But something of the pride that filled him came vicariously to her. She smiled a flashing smile, and Burl stopped short in his explanation, tongue-tied. His eyes became pleading and soft. He laid the huge spider at her feet and spread out his hands imploringly.
30,000 years of savagery had not lessened Saya's femininity. She became aware that Burl was her slave, that these wonderful things he wore and had done meant nothing if she did not approve. She drew away--saw the misery in Burl's face--and abruptly ran into his arms and clung to him, laughing happily. And suddenly Burl understood that all these things he had done, even the slaying of a great spider, were of no importance whatever beside this most wonderful thing that had just happened, and told Saya so quite humbly, but holding her very close to him as he did.
And so Burl came back to his tribe. He had left nearly naked, with but a wisp of moth wing twisted about his middle, a timid, fearful, trembling creature. He returned triumphantly, walking slowly, fearlessly down a broad lane of golden mushrooms toward the hiding place of his people.
On his shoulders was draped a great and many-colored cloak made from the whole of a moth's wing. Soft fur was about his middle. A spear was in his hand, a fierce club at his waist. He and Saya bore between them the dead body of a huge spider--aforetime the dread of the pink-skinned, naked men. But to Burl the most important thing of all was that Saya walked beside him openly, acknowledging him before all the tribe.
THE THIEF OF TIME
By S. P. Meek
"That man never entered and stole that money as the picture shows, unless he managed to make himself invisible."
Harvey Winston, paying teller of the First National Bank of Chicago, stripped the band from a bundle of twenty dollar bills, counted out seventeen of them and added them to the pile on the counter before him.
The teller turned to the stacked pile of bills. They were gone! And no one had been near!
"Twelve hundred and thirty-one tens," he read from the payroll change slip before him. The paymaster of the Cramer Packing Company nodded an assent and Winston turned to the stacked bills in his rear currency rack. He picked up a handful of bundles and turned back to the grill. His gaze swept the counter where, a moment before, he had stacked the twenties, and his jaw dropped.
"You got those twenties, Mr. Trier?" he asked.
"Got them? Of course not, how could I?" replied the paymaster. "There they are...."
His voice trailed off into nothingness as he looked at the empty counter.
"I must have dropped them," said Winston as he turned. He glanced back at the rear rack where his main stock of currency was piled. He stood paralyzed for a moment and then reached under the counter and pushed a button.
The bank resounded instantly to the clangor of gongs and huge steel grills shot into place with a clang, sealing all doors and preventing anyone from entering or leaving the bank. The guards sprang to their stations with drawn weapons and from the inner offices the bank officials came swarming out. The cashier, followed by two men, hurried to the paying teller's cage.
"What is it, Mr. Winston?" he cried.
"I've been robbed!" gasped the teller.
"Who by? How?" demanded the cashier.
"I—I don't know, sir," stammered the teller. "I was counting out Mr. Trier's payroll, and after I had stacked the twenties I turned to get the tens. When I turned back the twenties were gone."
"Where had they gone?" asked the cashier.
"I don't know, sir. Mr. Trier was as surprised as I was, and then I turned back, thinking that I had knocked them off the counter, and I saw at a glance that there was a big hole in my back racks. You can see yourself, sir."
The cashier turned to the paymaster.
"Is this a practical joke, Mr. Trier?" he demanded sharply.
"Of course not," replied the paymaster. "Winston's grill was closed. It still is. Granted that I might have reached the twenties he had piled up, how could I have gone through a grill and taken the rest of the missing money without his seeing me? The money disappeared almost instantly. It was there a moment before, for I noticed when Winston took the twenties from his rack that it was full."
"But someone must have taken it," said the bewildered cashier. "Money doesn't walk off of its own accord or vanish into thin air—"
A bell interrupted his speech.
"There are the police," he said with an air of relief. "I'll let them in."
The smaller of the two men who had followed the cashier from his office when the alarm had sounded stepped forward and spoke quietly. His voice was low and well pitched yet it carried a note of authority and power that held his auditors' attention while he spoke. The voice harmonized with the man. The most noticeable point about him was the inconspicuousness of his voice and manner, yet there was a glint of steel in his gray eyes that told of enormous force in him.
"I don't believe that I would let them in for a few moments, Mr. Rogers," he said. "I think that we are up against something a little different from the usual bank robbery."
"But, Mr. Carnes," protested the cashier, "we must call in the police in a case like this, and the sooner they take charge the better chance there will be of apprehending the thief."
"Suit yourself," replied the little man with a shrug of his shoulders. "I merely offered my advice."
"Will you take charge, Mr. Carnes?" asked the cashier.
"I can't supersede the local authorities in a case like this," replied Carnes. "The secret service is primarily interested in the suppression of counterfeiting and the enforcement of certain federal statutes, but I will be glad to assist the local authorities to the best of my ability, provided they desire my help. My advice to you would be to keep out the patrolmen who are demanding admittance and get in touch with the chief of police. I would ask that his best detective together with an expert finger-print photographer be sent here before anyone else is admitted. If the patrolmen are allowed to wipe their hands over Mr. Winston's counter they may destroy valuable evidence."
"You are right, Mr. Carnes," exclaimed the cashier. "Mr. Jervis, will you tell the police that there is no violence threatening and ask them to wait for a few minutes? I'll telephone the chief of police at once."
As the cashier hurried away to his telephone Carnes turned to his companion who had stood an interested, although silent spectator of the scene. His companion was a marked contrast to the secret service operator. He stood well over six feet in height, and his protruding jaw and shock of unruly black hair combined with his massive shoulders and chest to give him the appearance of a man who labored with his hands—until one looked at them. His hands were in strange contrast to the rest of him. Long, slim, mobile hands they were, with tapering nervous fingers—the hands of a thinker or of a musician. Telltale splotches of acid told of hours spent in a laboratory, a tale that was confirmed by the almost imperceptible stoop of his shoulders.
"Do you agree with my advice, Dr. Bird?" asked Carnes deferentially.
The noted scientist, who from his laboratory in the Bureau of Standards had sent forth many new things in the realms of chemistry and physics, and who, incidentally, had been instrumental in solving some of the most baffling mysteries which the secret service had been called upon to face, grunted.
"It didn't do any harm," he said, "but it is rather a waste of time. The thief wore gloves."
"How in thunder do you know that?" demanded Carnes.
"It's merely common sense. A man who can do what he did had at least some rudiments of intelligence, and even the feeblest-minded crooks know enough to wear gloves nowadays."
Carnes stepped a little closer to the doctor.
"Another reason why I didn't want patrolmen tramping around," he said in an undertone, "is this. If Winston gave the alarm quickly enough, the thief is probably still in the building."
"He's a good many miles away by now," replied Dr. Bird with a shrug of his shoulders.
Carnes' eyes opened widely. "Why?—how?—who?" he stammered. "Have you any idea of who did it, or how it was done?"
"Possibly I have an idea," replied Dr. Bird with a cryptic smile. "My advice to you, Carnes, is to keep away from the local authorities as much as possible. I want to be present when Winston and Trier are questioned and I may possibly wish to ask a few questions myself. Use your authority that far, but no farther. Don't volunteer any information and especially don't let my name get out. We'll drop the counterfeiting case we were summoned here on for the present and look into this a little on our own hook. I will want your aid, so don't get tied up with the police."
"At that, we don't want the police crossing our trail at every turn," protested Carnes.
"They won't," promised the doctor. "They will never get any evidence on this case, if I am right, and neither will we—for the present. Our stunt is to lie low and wait for the next attempt of this nature and thus accumulate some evidence and some idea of where to look."
"Will there be another attempt?" asked Carnes.
"Surely. You don't expect a man who got away with a crime like this to quit operations just because a few flatfeet run around and make a hullabaloo about it, do you? I may be wrong in my assumption, but if I am right, the most important thing is to keep all reference to my name or position out of the press reports."
The cashier hastened up to them.
"Detective-Captain Sturtevant will be here in a few minutes with a photographer and some other men," he said. "Is there anything that we can do in the meantime, Mr. Carnes?"
"I would suggest that Mr. Trier and his guard and Mr. Winston go into your office," replied Carnes. "My assistant and I would like to be present during the questioning, if there are no objections."
"I didn't know that you had an assistant with you," answered the cashier.
Carnes indicated Dr. Bird.
"This gentleman is Mr. Berger, my assistant," he said. "Do you understand?"
"Certainly. I am sure there will be no objection to your presence, Mr. Carnes," replied the cashier as he led the way to his office.
A few minutes later Detective-Captain Sturtevant of the Chicago police was announced. He acknowledged the introductions gruffly and got down to business at once.
"What were the circumstances of the robbery?" he asked.
Winston told his story, Trier and the guard confirming it.
"Pretty thin!" snorted the detective when they had finished. He whirled suddenly on Winston.
"Where did you hide the loot?" he thundered.
"Why—uh—er—what do you mean?" gulped the teller.
"Just what I said," replied the detective. "Where did you hide the loot?"
"I didn't hide it anywhere," said the teller. "It was stolen."
"You had better think up a better one," sneered Sturtevant. "If you think that you can make me believe that that money was stolen from you in broad daylight with two men in plain sight of you who didn't see it, you might just as well get over it. I know that you have some hiding place where you have slipped the stuff and the quicker you come clean and spill it, the better it will be for you. Where did you hide it?"
"I didn't hide it!" cried the teller, his voice trembling. "Mr. Trier can tell you that I didn't touch it from the time I laid it down until I turned back."
"That's right," replied the paymaster. "He turned his back on me for a moment, and when he turned back, it was gone."
"So you're in on it too, are you?" said Sturtevant.
"What do you mean?" demanded the paymaster hotly.
"Oh nothing, nothing at all," replied the detective. "Of course Winston didn't touch it and it disappeared and you never saw it go, although you were within three feet of it all the time. Did you see anything?" he demanded of the guard.
"Nothing that I am sure of," answered the guard. "I thought that a shadow passed in front of me for an instant, but when I looked again, it was gone."
Dr. Bird sat forward suddenly. "What did this shadow look like?" he asked.
"It wasn't exactly a shadow," said the guard. "It was as if a person had passed suddenly before me so quickly that I couldn't see him. I seemed to feel that there was someone there, but I didn't rightly see anything."
"Did you notice anything of the sort?" demanded the doctor of Trier.
"I don't know," replied Trier thoughtfully. "Now that Williams has mentioned it, I did seem to feel a breath of air or a motion as though something had passed in front of me. I didn't think of it at the time."
"Was this shadow opaque enough to even momentarily obscure your vision?" went on the doctor.
"Not that I am conscious of. It was just a breath of air such as a person might cause by passing very rapidly."
"What made you ask Trier if he had the money when you turned around?" asked the doctor of Winston.
"Say-y-y," broke in the detective. "Who the devil are you, and what do you mean by breaking into my examination and stopping it?"
Carnes tossed a leather wallet on the table.
"There are my credentials," he said in his quiet voice. "I am chief of one section of the United States Secret Service as you will see, and this is Mr. Berger, my assistant. We were in the bank, engaged on a counterfeiting case, when the robbery took place. We have had a good deal of experience along these lines and we are merely anxious to aid you."
Sturtevant examined Carnes' credentials carefully and returned them.
"This is a Chicago robbery," he said, "and we have had a little experience in robberies and in apprehending robbers ourselves. I think that we can get along without your help."
"You have had more experience with robberies than with apprehending robbers if the papers tell the truth," said Dr. Bird with a chuckle.
The detective's face flushed.
"That will be enough from you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," he said. "If you open your mouth again, I'll arrest you as a material witness and as a possible accomplice."
"That sounds like Chicago methods," said Carnes quietly. "Now listen to me, Captain. My assistant and I are merely trying to assist you in this case. If you don't desire our assistance we'll proceed along our own lines without interfering, but in the meantime remember that this is a National Bank, and that our questions will be answered. The United States is higher than even the Chicago police force, and I am here under orders to investigate a counterfeiting case. If I desire, I can seal the doors of this bank and allow no one in or out until I have the evidence I desire. Do you understand?"
Sturtevant sprang to his feet with an oath, but the sight of the gold badge which Carnes displayed stopped him.
"Oh well," he said ungraciously. "I suppose that no harm will come of letting Winston answer your fool questions, but I'll warn you that I'll report to Washington that you are interfering with the course of justice and using your authority to aid the getaway of a criminal."
"That is your privilege," replied Carnes quietly. "Mr. Winston, will you answer Mr. Berger's question?"
"Why, I asked him because he was right close to the money and I thought that he might have reached through the wicket and picked it up. Then, too—"
He hesitated for a moment and Dr. Bird smiled encouragingly.
"What else?" he asked.
"Why, I can't exactly tell. It just seemed to me that I had heard the rustle that bills make when they are pulled across a counter. When I saw them gone, I thought that he might have taken them. Then when I turned toward him, I seemed to hear the rustle of bills behind me, although I knew that I was alone in the cage. When I looked back the money was gone."
"Did you see or hear anything like a shadow or a person moving?"
"No—yes—I don't know. Just as I turned around it seemed to me that the rear door to my cage had moved and there may have been a shadow for an instant. I don't know. I hadn't thought of it before."
"How long after that did you ring the alarm gongs?"
"Not over a second or two."
"That's all," said Dr. Bird.
"If your high and mightiness has no further questions to ask, perhaps you will let me ask a few," said Sturtevant.
"Go ahead, ask all you wish," replied Dr. Bird with a laugh. "I have all the information I desire here for the present. I may want to ask other questions later, but just now I think we'll be going."
"If you find any strange finger-prints on Winston's counter, I'll be glad to have them compared with our files," said Carnes.
"I am not bothering with finger-prints," snorted the detective. "This is an open and shut case. There would be lots of Winston's finger-prints there and no others. There isn't the slightest doubt that this is an inside case and I have the men I want right here. Mr. Rogers, your bank is closed for to-day. Everyone in it will be searched and then all those not needed to close up will be sent away. I will get a squad of men here to go over your building and locate the hiding place. Your money is still on the premises unless these men slipped it to a confederate who got out before the alarm was given. I'll question the guards about that. If that happened, a little sweating will get it out of them."
"Are you going to arrest me?" demanded Trier in surprise.
"Yes, dearie," answered the detective. "I am going to arrest you and your two little playmates if these Washington experts will allow me to. You will save a lot of time and quite a few painful experiences if you will come clean now instead of later."
"I demand to see my lawyer and to communicate with my firm," said the paymaster.
"Time enough for that when I am through with you," replied the detective.
He turned to Carnes.
"Have I your gracious permission to arrest these three criminals?" he asked.
"Yes indeed, Captain," replied Carnes sweetly. "You have my gracious permission to make just as big an ass of yourself as you wish. We're going now."
"By the way, Captain," said Dr. Bird as he followed Carnes out. "When you get through playing with your prisoners and start to look for the thief, here is a tip. Look for a left-handed man who has a thorough knowledge of chemistry and especially toxicology."
"It's easy enough to see that he was left-handed if he pulled that money out through the grill from the positions occupied by Trier and his guard, but what the dickens led you to suspect that he is a chemist and a toxicologist?" asked Carnes as he and the doctor left the bank.
"Merely a shrewd guess, my dear Watson," replied the doctor with a chuckle. "I am likely to be wrong, but there is a good chance that I am right. I am judging solely from the method used."
"Have you solved the method?" demanded Carnes in amazement. "What on earth was it? The more I have thought about it, the more inclined I am to believe that Sturtevant is right and that it is an inside job. It seems to me impossible that a man could have entered in broad daylight and lifted that money in front of three men and within sight of a hundred more without some one getting a glimpse of him. He must have taken the money out in a grip or a sack or something like that, yet the bank record shows that no one but Trier entered with a grip and no one left with a package for ten minutes before Trier entered."
"There may be something in what you say, Carnes, but I am inclined to have a different idea. I don't think it is the usual run of bank robbery, and I would rather not hazard a guess just now. I am going back to Washington to-night. Before I go any further into the matter, I need some rather specialized knowledge that I don't possess and I want to consult with Dr. Knolles. I'll be back in a week or so and then we can look into that counterfeiting case after we get this disposed of."
"What am I to do?" asked Carnes.
"Sit around the lobby of your hotel, eat three meals a day, and read the papers. If you get bored, I would recommend that you pay a visit to the Art Institute and admire the graceful lions which adorn the steps. Artistic contemplations may well improve your culture."
"All right," replied Carnes. "I'll assume a pensive air and moon at the lions, but I might do better if you told me what I was looking for."
"You are looking for knowledge, my dear Carnes," said the doctor with a laugh. "Remember the saying of the sages: To the wise man, no knowledge is useless."
A huge Martin bomber roared down to a landing at the Maywood airdrome, and a burly figure descended from the rear cockpit and waved his hand jovially to the waiting Carnes. The secret service man hastened over to greet his colleague.
"Have you got that truck I wired you to have ready?" demanded the doctor.
"Waiting at the entrance; but say, I've got some news for you."
"It can wait. Get a detail of men and help us to unload this ship. Some of the cases are pretty heavy."
Carnes hurried off and returned with a gang of laborers, who took from the bomber a dozen heavy packing cases of various sizes, several of them labelled either "Fragile" or "Inflammable" in large type.
"Where do they go, Doctor?" he asked when the last of them had been loaded onto the waiting truck.
"To the First National Bank," replied Dr. Bird, "and Casey here goes with them. You know Casey, don't you, Carnes? He is the best photographer in the Bureau."
"Shall I go along too?" asked Carnes as he acknowledged the introduction.
"No need for it. I wired Rogers and he knows the stuff is coming and what to do with it. Unpack as soon as you get there, Casey, and start setting up as soon as the bank closes."
"All right, Doctor," replied Casey as he mounted the truck beside the driver.
"Where do we go, Doctor?" asked Carnes as the truck rolled off.
"To the Blackstone Hotel for a bath and some clean clothes," replied the doctor. "And now, what is the news you have for me?"
"The news is this, Doctor. I carried out your instructions diligently and, during the daylight hours, the lions have not moved."
Dr. Bird looked contrite.
"I beg your pardon, Carnes," he said. "I really didn't think when I left you so mystified how you must have felt. Believe me, I had my own reasons, excellent ones, for secrecy."
"I have usually been able to maintain silence when asked to," replied Carnes stiffly.
"My dear fellow, I didn't mean to question your discretion. I know that whatever I tell you is safe, but there are angles to this affair that are so weird and improbable that I don't dare to trust my own conclusions, let alone share them. I'll tell you all about it soon. Did you get those tickets I wired for?"
"Of course I got them, but what have two tickets to the A. A. U. track meet this afternoon got to do with a bank robbery?"
"One trouble with you, Carnes," replied the doctor with a judicial air, "is that you have no idea of the importance of proper relaxation. Is it possible that you have no desire to see Ladd, this new marvel who is smashing records right and left, run? He performs for the Illinois Athletic Club this afternoon, and it would not surprise me to see him lower the world's record again. He has already lowered the record for the hundred yard dash from nine and three-fifths to eight and four-fifths. There is no telling what he will do."
"Are we going to waste the whole afternoon just to watch a man run?" demanded Carnes in disgust.
"We will see many men run, my dear fellow, but there is only one in whom I have a deep abiding interest, and that is Mr. Ladd. Have you your binoculars with you?"
"No."
"Then by all means beg, borrow or steal two pairs before this afternoon. We might easily miss half the fun without them. Are our seats near the starting line for the sprints?"
"Yes. The big demand was for seats near the finish line."
"The start will be much more interesting, Carnes. I was somewhat of a minor star in track myself in my college days and it will be of the greatest interest to me to observe the starting form of this new speed artist. Now Carnes, don't ask any more questions. I may be barking up the wrong tree and I don't want to give you a chance to laugh at me. I'll tell you what to watch for at the track."
The sprinters lined up on the hundred yard mark and Dr. Bird and Carnes sat with their glasses glued to their eyes watching the slim figure in the colors of the Illinois Athletic Club, whose large "62" on his back identified him as the new star.
"On your mark!" cried the starter. "Get set!"
"Ah!" cried Dr. Bird. "Did you see that Carnes?"
The starting gun cracked and the runners were off on their short grind. Ladd leaped into the lead and rapidly distanced the field, his legs twinkling under him almost faster than the eye could follow. He was fully twenty yards in the lead when his speed suddenly lessened and the balance of the runners closed up the gap he had opened. His lead was too great for them, and he was still a good ten yards in the lead when he crossed the tape. The official time was posted as eight and nine-tenths seconds.
"Another thirty yards and he would have been beaten," said Carnes as he lowered his glasses.
"That is the way he has won all of his races," replied the doctor. "He piles up a huge lead at first and then loses a good deal at the finish. His speed doesn't hold up. Never mind that, though, it is only an additional point in my favor. Did you notice his jaws just before the gun went?"
"They seemed to clench and then he swallowed, but most of them did some thing like that."
"Watch him carefully for the next heat and see if he puts anything into his mouth. That is the important thing."
Dr. Bird sank into a brown study and paid no attention to the next few events, but he came to attention promptly when the final heat of the hundred yard dash was called. With his glasses he watched Ladd closely as the runner trotted up to the starting line.
"There, Carnes!" he cried suddenly. "Did you see?"
"I saw him wipe his mouth," said Carnes doubtfully.
"All right, now watch his jaws just before the gun goes."
The final heat was a duplicate of the first preliminary. Ladd took an early lead which he held for three-fourths of the distance to the tape, then his pace slackened and he finished only a bare ten yards ahead of the next runner. The time tied his previous world's record of eight and four-fifths seconds.
"He crunched and swallowed all right, Doctor," said Carnes.
"That is all I wanted to be sure of. Now Carnes, here is something for you to do. Get hold of the United States Commissioner and get a John Doe warrant and go back to the hotel with it and wait for me. I may phone you at any minute and I may not. If I don't, wait in your room until you hear from me. Don't leave it for a minute."
"Where are you going, Doctor?"
"I'm going down and congratulate Mr. Ladd. An old track man like me can't let such an opportunity pass."
"I don't know what this is all about, Doctor," replied Carnes, "but I know you well enough to obey orders and to keep my mouth shut until it is my turn to speak."
Few men could resist Dr. Bird when he set out to make a favorable impression, and even a world's champion is apt to be flattered by the attention of one of the greatest scientists of his day, especially when that scientist has made an enviable reputation as an athlete in his college days and can talk the jargon of the champion's particular sport. Henry Ladd promptly capitulated to the charm of the doctor and allowed himself to be led away to supper at Bird's club. The supper passed off pleasantly, and when the doctor requested an interview with the young athlete in a private room, he gladly consented. They entered the room together, remained for an hour and a half, and then came out. The smile had left Ladd's face and he appeared nervous and distracted. The doctor talked cheerfully with him but kept a firm grip on his arm as they descended the stairs together. They entered a telephone booth where the doctor made several calls, and then descended to the street, where they entered a taxi.
"Maywood airdrome," the doctor told the driver.
Two hours later the big Martin bomber which had carried the doctor to Chicago roared away into the night, and Bird turned back, reentered the taxi, and headed for the city alone.
When Carnes received the telephone call, which was one of those the doctor made from the booth in his club, he hurried over to the First National Bank. His badge secured him an entrance and he found Casey busily engaged in rigging up an elaborate piece of apparatus on one of the balconies where guards were normally stationed during banking hours.
"Dr. Bird said to tell you to keep on the job all night if necessary," he told Casey. "He thinks he will need your machine to-morrow."
"I'll have it ready to turn on the power at four A.M.," replied Casey.
Carnes watched him curiously for a while as he soldered together the electrical connections and assembled an apparatus which looked like a motion picture projector.
"What are you setting up?" he asked at length.
"It is a high speed motion picture camera," replied Casey, "with a telescopic lens. It is a piece of apparatus which Dr. Bird designed while he was in Washington last week and which I made from his sketches, using some apparatus we had on hand. It's a dandy, all right."
"What is special about it?"
"The speed. You know how fast an ordinary movie is taken, don't you? No? Well, it's sixteen exposures per second. The slow pictures are taken sometimes at a hundred and twenty-eight or two hundred and fifty-six exposures per second, and then shown at sixteen. This affair will take half a million pictures per second."
"I didn't know that a film would register with that short an exposure."
"That's slow," replied Casey with a laugh. "It all depends on the light. The best flash-light powder gives a flash about one ten-thousandth of a second in duration, but that is by no means the speed limit of the film. The only trouble is enough light and sufficient shutter speed. Pictures have been taken by means of spark photography with an exposure of less than one three-millionth of a second. The whole secret of this machine lies in the shutter. This big disc with the slots in the edge is set up before the lens and run at such a speed that half a million slots per second pass before the lens. The film, which is sixteen millimeter X-ray film, travels behind the lens at a speed of nearly five miles per second. It has to be gradually worked up to this speed, and after the whole thing is set up, it takes it nearly four hours to get to full speed."
"At that speed, it must take a million miles of film before you get up steam."
"It would, if the film were being exposed. There is only about a hundred yards of film all told, which will run over these huge drums in an endless belt. There is a regular camera shutter working on an electric principle which remains closed. When the switch is tripped, the shutter opens in about two thirty-thousandths of a second, stays open just one one-hundredth of a second, and then closes. This time is enough to expose nearly all of our film. When we have our picture, I shut the current down, start applying a magnetic brake, and let it slow down. It takes over an hour to stop it without breaking the film. It sounds complicated, but it works all right."
"Where is your switch?"
"That is the trick part of it. It is a remote control affair. The shutter opens and starts the machine taking pictures when the back door of the paying teller's cage is opened half an inch. There is also a hand switch in the line that can be opened so that you can open the door without setting off the camera, if you wish. When the hand switch is closed and the door opened, this is what happens. The shutter on the camera opens, the machine takes five thousand pictures during the next hundredth of a second, and then the shutter closes. Those five thousand exposures will take about five minutes to show at the usual rate of sixteen per second."
"You said that you had to get plenty of light. How are you managing that?"
"The camera is equipped with a special lens ground out of rock crystal. This lens lets in ultra-violet light which the ordinary lens shuts out, and X-ray film is especially sensitive to ultra-violet light. In order to be sure that we get enough illumination, I will set up these two ultra-violet floodlights to illumine the cage. The teller will have to wear glasses to protect his eyes and he'll get well sunburned, but something has to be sacrificed to science, as Dr. Bird is always telling me."
"It's too deep for me," said Carnes with a sigh. "Can I do anything to help? The doctor told me to stand by and do anything I could."
"I might be able to use you a little if you can use tools," said Casey with a grin. "You can start bolting together that light proof shield if you want to."
"Well, Carnes, did you have an instructive night?" asked Dr. Bird cheerfully as he entered the First National Bank at eight-thirty the next morning.
"I don't see that I did much good, Doctor. Casey would have had the machine ready on time anyway, and I'm no machinist."
"Well, frankly, Carnes, I didn't expect you to be of much help to him, but I did want you to see what Casey was doing, and a little of it was pretty heavy for him to handle alone. I suppose that everything is ready?"
"The motor reached full speed about fifteen minutes ago and Casey went out to get a cup of coffee. Would you mind telling me the object of the whole thing?"
"Not at all. I plan to make a permanent record of the work of the most ingenious bank robber in the world. I hope he keeps his word."
"What do you mean?"
"Three days ago when Sturtevant sweated a 'confession' out of poor Winston, the bank got a message that the robbery would be repeated this morning and dared them to prevent it. Rogers thought it was a hoax, but he telephoned me and I worked the Bureau men night and day to get my camera ready in time for him. I am afraid that I can't do much to prevent the robbery, but I may be able to take a picture of it and thus prevent other cases of a like nature."
"Was the warning written?"
"No. It was telephoned from a pay station in the loop district, and by the time it was traced and men got there, the telephoner was probably a mile away. He said that he would rob the same cage in the same manner as he did before."
"Aren't you taking any special precautions?"
"Oh, yes, the bank is putting on extra guards and making a lot of fuss of that sort, probably to the great amusement of the robber."
"Why not close the cage for the day?"
"Then he would rob a different one and we would have no way of photographing his actions. To be sure, we will put dummy money there, bundles with bills on the outside and paper on the inside, so if I don't get a picture of him, he won't get much. Every bill in the cage will be marked as well."
"Did he say at what time he would operate?"
"No, he didn't, so we'll have to stand by all day. Oh, hello, Casey, is everything all right?"
"As sweet as chocolate candy, Doctor. I have tested it out thoroughly, and unless we have to run it so long that the film wears out and breaks, we are sitting pretty. If we don't get the pictures you are looking for, I'm a dodo, and I haven't been called that yet."
"Good work, Casey. Keep the bearings oiled and pray that the film doesn't break."
The bank had been opened only ten minutes when the clangor of gongs announced a robbery. It was practically a duplicate of the first. The paying teller had turned from his window to take some bills from his rack and had found several dozens of bundles missing. As the gongs sounded, Dr. Bird and Casey leaped to the camera.
"She snapped, Doctor!" cried Casey as he threw two switches. "It'll take an hour to stop and half a day to develop the film, but I ought to be able to show you what we got by to-night."
"Good enough!" cried Dr. Bird. "Go ahead while I try to calm down the bank officials. Will you have everything ready by eight o'clock?"
"Easy, Doctor," replied Casey as he turned to the magnetic brake.
By eight o'clock quite a crowd had assembled in a private room at the Blackstone Hotel. Besides Dr. Bird and Carnes, Rogers and several other officials of the First National Bank were present, together with Detective-Captain Sturtevant and a group of the most prominent scientists and physicians gathered from the schools of the city.
"Gentlemen," said Dr. Bird when all had taken seats facing a miniature moving picture screen on one wall, "to-night I expect to show you some pictures which will, I am sure, astonish you. It marks the advent of a new departure in transcendental medicine. I will be glad to answer any questions you may wish to ask and to explain the pictures after they are shown, but before we start a discussion, I will ask that you examine what I have to show you. Lights out, please!"
He stepped to the rear of the room as the lights went out. As his eyes grew used to the dimness of the room he moved forward and took a vacant seat. His hand fumbled in his pocket for a second.
"Now!" he cried suddenly.
In the momentary silence which followed his cry, two dull metallic clicks could be heard, and a quick cry that was suddenly strangled as Dr. Bird clamped his hand over the mouth of the man who sat between him and Carnes.
"All right, Casey," called the doctor.
The whir of a projection machine could be heard and on the screen before them leaped a picture of the paying teller's cage of the First National Bank. Winston's successor was standing motionless at the wicket, his lips parted in a smile, but the attention of all was riveted on a figure who moved at the back of the cage. As the picture started, the figure was bent over an opened suitcase, stuffing into it bundles of bills. He straightened up and reached to the rack for more bills, and as he did so he faced the camera full for a moment. He picked up other bundles of bills, filled the suitcase, fastened it in a leisurely manner, opened the rear door of the cage and walked out.
"Again, please!" called Dr. Bird. "And stop when he faces us full."
The picture was repeated and stopped at the point indicated.
"Lights, please!" cried the doctor.
The lights flashed on and Dr. Bird rose to his feet, pulling up after him the wilted figure of a middle-aged man.
"Gentlemen," said the doctor in ringing tones, "allow me to present to you Professor James Kirkwood of the faculty of the Richton University, formerly known as James Collier of the Bureau of Standards, and robber of the First National Bank."
Detective-Captain Sturtevant jumped to his feet and cast a searching glance at the captive.
"He's the man all right," he cried. "Hang on to him until I get a wagon here!"
"Oh, shut up!" said Carnes. "He's under federal arrest just now, charged with the possession of narcotics. When we are through with him, you can have him if you want him."
"How did you get that picture, Doctor?" cried the cashier. "I watched that cage every minute during the morning and I'll swear that man never entered and stole that money as the picture shows, unless he managed to make himself invisible."
"You're closer to the truth than you suspect, Mr. Rogers," said Dr. Bird. "It is not quite a matter of invisibility, but something pretty close to it. It is a matter of catalysts."
"What kind of cats?" asked the cashier.
"Not cats, Mr. Rogers, catalysts. Catalysts is the name of a chemical reaction consisting essentially of a decomposition and a new combination effected by means of a catalyst which acts on the compound bodies in question, but which goes through the reaction itself unchanged. There are a great many of them which are used in the arts and in manufacturing, and while their action is not always clearly understood, the results are well known and can be banked on.
"One of the commonest instances of the use of a catalyst is the use of sponge platinum in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. I will not burden you with the details of the 'contact' process, as it is known, but the combination is effected by means of finely divided platinum which is neither changed, consumed or wasted during the process. While there are a number of other catalysts known, for instance iron in reactions in which metallic magnesium is concerned, the commonest are the metals of the platinum group.
"Less is known of the action of catalysts in the organic reactions, but it has been the subject of intensive study by Dr. Knolles of the Bureau of Standards for several years. His studies of the effects of different colored lights, that is, rays of different wave-lengths, on the reactions which constitute growth in plants have had a great effect on hothouse forcing of plants and promise to revolutionize the truck gardening industry. He has speeded up the rate of growth to as high as ten times the normal rate in some cases.
"A few years ago, he and his assistant, James Collier, turned their attention toward discovering a catalyst which would do for the metabolic reactions in animal life what his light rays did for plants. What his method was, I will not disclose for obvious reasons, but suffice it to say that he met with great success. He took a puppy and by treating it with his catalytic drugs, made it grow to maturity, pass through its entire normal life span, and die of old age in six months."
"That is very interesting, Doctor, but I fail to see what bearing it has on the robbery."
"Mr. Rogers, how, on a dark day and in the absence of a timepiece, would you judge the passage of time?"
"Why, by my stomach, I guess."
"Exactly. By your metabolic rate. You eat a meal, it digests, you expend the energy which you have taken into your system, your stomach becomes empty and your system demands more energy. You are hungry and you judge that some five or six hours must have passed since you last ate. Do you follow?"
"Certainly."
"Let us suppose that by means of some tonic, some catalytic drug, your rate of metabolism and also your rate of expenditure of energy has been increased six fold. You would eat a meal and in one hour you would be hungry again. Having no timepiece, and assuming that you were in a light-proof room, you would judge that some five hours had passed, would you not?"
"I expect so."
"Very well. Now suppose that this accelerated rate of digestion and expenditure of energy continued. You would be sleepy in perhaps three hours, would sleep about an hour and a quarter, and would then wake, ready for your breakfast. In other words, you would have lived through a day in four hours."
"What advantage would there be in that?"
"None, from your standpoint. It would, however, increase the rate of reproduction of cattle greatly and might be a great boom to agriculture, but we will not discuss this phase now. Suppose it were possible to increase your rate of metabolism and expenditure of energy, in other words, your rate of living, not six times, but thirty thousand times. In such a case you would live five minutes in one one-hundredth of a second."
"Naturally, and you would live a year in about seventeen and one-half minutes, and a normal lifespan of seventy years in about twenty hours. You would be as badly off as any common may-fly."
"Agreed, but suppose that you could so regulate the dose of your catalyst that its effect would last for only one one-hundredth of a second. During that short period of time, you would be able to do the work that would ordinarily take you five minutes. In other words, you could enter a bank, pack a satchel with currency and walk out. You would be working in a leisurely manner, yet your actions would have been so quick that no human eye could have detected them. This is my theory of what actually took place. For verification, I will turn to Dr. Kirkwood, as he prefers to be known now."
"I don't know how you got that picture, but what you have said is about right," replied the prisoner.
"I got that picture by using a speed of thirty thousand times the normal sixteen exposures per second," replied Dr. Bird. "That figure I got from Dr. Knolles, the man who perfected the secret you stole when you left the Bureau three years ago. You secured only part of it and I suppose it took all your time since to perfect and complete it. You gave yourself away when you experimented on young Ladd. I was a track man myself in my college days and when I saw an account of his running, I smelt a rat, so I came back and watched him. As soon as I saw him crush and swallow a capsule just as the gun was fired, I was sure, and got hold of him. He was pretty stubborn, but he finally told me what name you were running under now, and the rest was easy. I would have got you in time anyway, but your bravado in telling us when you would next operate gave me the idea of letting you do it and photographing you at work. That is all I have to say. Captain Sturtevant, you can take your prisoner whenever you want him."
"I reckoned without you, Dr. Bird, but the end hasn't come yet. You may send me up for a few years, but you'll never find that money. I'm sure of that."
"Tut, tut, Professor," laughed Carnes. "Your safety deposit box in the Commercial National is already sealed until a court orders it opened. The bills you took this morning were all marked, so that is merely additional proof, if we needed it. You surely didn't think that such a transparent device as changing your name from 'James Collier' to 'John Collyer' and signing with your left hand instead of your right would fool the secret service, did you? Remember, your old Bureau records showed you to be ambidextrous."
"What about Winston's confession?" asked Rogers suddenly.
"Detective-Captain Sturtevant can explain that to a court when Mr. Winston brings suit against him for false arrest and brutal treatment," replied Carnes.
"A very interesting case, Carnes," remarked the doctor a few hours later. "It was an enjoyable interlude in the routine of most of the cases on which you consult me, but our play time is over. We'll have to get after that counterfeiting case to-morrow."
REEL LIFE FILMS
By Sam Merwin
Pity the poor purveyor of mere entertainment in today's world. He can't afford to offend a soul, yet must have a villain.
Twenty-five years ago Cyril Bezdek and E. Carter Dorwin would have met in a private railway car belonging to one of them. They might even have met in a private train. At any rate they would have met in absolute privacy. But it being the present, they had to be content with a series of adjoining rooms taking up less than one half of a car on the Super-Sachem, fastest coast-to-coast train in the country.
Their meeting in private was very important. Upon its results hinged the future of Gigantic Studios, one of Hollywood's big three production companies.
Dorwin was the powerful plenipotentiary of the Consolidated Trust Company of Manhattan and backer of Gigantic's multimillion-dollar productions. He was on his way West to make sure that the interests of his bank were being adequately served by the studio.
Bezdek was Gigantic's supreme production boss. Former office boy, writer, prop man, assistant-director, director, producer, and story editor, he was the works--unless Dorwin decided otherwise during this meeting and pulled the props out from under him. He had thought Dorwin's trip sufficiently important to fly to Kansas City and get aboard the Super-Sachem to be with the banker during the remainder of his trip.
They had dined in the privacy of Dorwin's suite--Bezdek as befitted his tortured duodenum on yogurt and Melba toast--Dorwin on caviar, consommé, a thick steak with full trimmings, and a golden baked Alaska accompanied by Armagnac.
"How do you manage to keep thin?" Bezdek asked him, honestly envious. "Polo, tennis? Golf would never do it."
"I haven't exercised in ten years," said the banker, biting off the end of a Havana Perfecto. He studied the little movie-maker over the flame of his lighter. Outside, the flat expanse of Kansas rushed past through the night at close to a hundred miles an hour.
"Some people are lucky," said Bezdek, adjusting the broad knot of his hand-painted Windsor tie. He was remarshaling his thoughts and ideas. It was very important that he and Dorwin be in perfect accord before they reached Hollywood.
The banker, who was new to the movie-making branch of his business, spoke first. "I presume," he said finally, "that you're aware of the current feeling in our New York office?"
The movie magnate gestured carelessly with a Saxony gun-club sleeve, revealing a platinum wristwatch strap. "We hear rumors now and again," he said. "It's about our science fiction films." Bezdek avoided making it a question. He was far too shrewd for that.
The banker, finding himself thus at a disadvantage, said amicably, "It's not that the fantasy series isn't making money, understand." He paused, looking faintly distressed. "It's just that, frankly, we feel they're getting too far away from reality. Trips to Mars and Venus--strange creatures.... It's not real--it's not dignified. Frankly, we question whether an institution like ours can afford to be connected with anything so--so ephemeral. After all ..."
He paused as sounds of a scuffle in the corridor penetrated the room and something or somebody was banged hard against the door. Bezdek, frowning, jumped up nervously and went to the door, opened it, looked out.
"What's going on out there?" he inquired tartly. "Ty!"
"Sorry, Mr. Bezdek," said Ty Falter, the mogul's private secretary, bodyguard and constant companion. He was leaning against the far wall of the corridor, mopping a cut lower lip with a bloody handkerchief. He was a tall, deceptively sleepy-looking young man who virtually never slept.
At the end of the corridor two lesser aides were half-dragging a tall figure between them. Bezdek frowned as he caught a glimpse of a nodding head in half profile--a near-perfect profile which showed no sign of a bruise.
"How did that creep get in here?" he snapped. "That's the same character who tried to nail me at the K.C. airport."
"Yes, sir," said Ty Falter apologetically. He glanced at his skinned knuckles. "It was like hitting a brick," he said. He shook his head, added, "Sorry, Mr. Bezdek. I don't know how he got in here."
"Your job is to keep crackpots like that away from me," said the mogul. He turned and went back inside the compartment. Dorwin was still sitting as before.
"Eavesdroppers?" the banker inquired with unruffled poise.
"Not likely," said Bezdek, dropping into his seat. "Probably a movie-crazy kid trying to chisel a screen test."
* * * * *
The incident had brought back his heartburn. He wanted to take a couple of his pills but not in front of Dorwin. The banker might think he was cracking up. These damned New Yorkers had no idea of the pressure under which he labored. He sipped a glass of flat soda water.
"Where were we?" Dorwin said quietly. Somehow to Bezdek he gave the impression of remorseless rationality. "Oh, yes, these fantasy movies--we're a little worried about them."
"I thought you might be," said Bezdek, leaning forward and using the full magnetism of his personality. Now that the issue was out in the open his discomfort was eased. "Actually we don't think of our interplanetary cycle as fantasy, Dorwin. We think of them as forecasts of the future, as prophecy."
"They're still a far cry from reality, or even the usual escapism," said the banker. "Confidentially, I happen to know that it will be years--perhaps decades--before we make any live contact with the other planets. Our national interests demand that we prevent atomic power from superseding older methods before investments have realized on their holdings to the fullest extent. And it is upon development of atomic power that space-flight hinges at present."
"Certainly I understand that--sound business," said Bezdek with his one-sided smile. "I hope they wait for many years."
Dorwin looked faintly astonished. "From these pictures of yours I must confess I had derived a totally different impression of your theories," he said slowly, flicking two inches of pale grey ash into the silver tray at his elbow.
"Listen to me," said the movie-maker, again leaning toward his vis-à-vis. "We're making these pictures now because when the first man or men come back from other planets our science fiction cycle is finished. It will cease to be escape. We will then be faced with the reality of what they really find--and that's bound to be a great deal different from the sort of thing we're feeding them now."
"It's a point I hadn't considered," said the banker, reaching for the brandy. He nodded to himself as he poured it, then looked up at Bezdek and asked, "But why this--space opera is the colloquial term, I believe? Why not stick closer to real life?"
Bezdek sat back and the slanting smile creased his features again. "Minorities," he said. "That's why. Crackpot minorities object loudly at being portrayed in films they don't like. We don't want to tread on anybody's toes--there's trouble enough in the world as it is. People want villains. But unless we make our villains--even minor villains--people from nowhere we get boycotted somewhere by somebody. And that costs us money."
"Yes, of course," said the banker, "but I fail to see--"
"It's simple." Bezdek was in full cry now and interrupted openly. "People like conflict in their movies. If it's a Western they want their heroes to fight Indians or Mexicans or rustlers. The Indians and Mexicans object to being the villains and they've got big sympathetic followings. Okay, so we use rustlers or renegade white men and we still make Westerns--but not many. No plot variety."
He sipped more soda water. "It's the same with everything else. Unless we're in a war with a legitimate enemy to hate we can't use villains. It's almost enough to make a man wish--"
"Not with the H-bomb, Bezdek," said Dorwin frigidly.
"Of course not--I was only speaking figuratively," said the movie-maker hastily. "I'm as much against war as anyone. But that's what makes these interplanetary movies great stuff. We can run in all the villains we want--make them just as bad as we want. Audiences really like to have someone they can hate."
"I see," said Dorwin. He permitted himself to look faintly pleased. "After all, a Martian can hardly protest what we do with him. I see your point now."
"You've got it," said Bezdek, beaming now. He leaned forward and added, "Furthermore, we've got four new pictures in the works for the space cycle that are really going to--"
He broke off, interrupted by a knock at the door. He stared at the banker, seeking someone to share his annoyance, found Dorwin staring out the window, frowning.
"The train seems to have stopped," said the banker.
Bezdek turned to the window. It was true. The night was clouded and dark but he could make out a single tree in faint silhouette and it was not moving. The knock on the stateroom door came again.
"I'd better see who it is," said Bezdek, rising. "Maybe something is wrong."
He opened the door quickly--all but fell back into his seat. The tall young man with the too-perfect features--the man who had tried in vain to speak to him at the Kansas City airport, who had been forcibly evicted earlier from the car--stood there!
The young man smiled and it was much too cold to be ingratiating if that was its intent. He said, looking down on both men, "I think you will wish to talk to me now."
The sheer effrontery of it rendered Cyril Bezdek speechless for the first time in years. Looking past the intruder through the angle of the open door he could see Ty Falter sitting on the corridor floor, leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed, his head canted at an odd angle.
It was Dorwin who first found words. "Who are you?" he inquired. "What do you want?"
"I am from Mars," said the stranger. "I have come here to enter a protest against the manner in which Mr. Bezdek's motion pictures are portraying my people."
The movie-maker's mouth dropped open. He closed it quickly, glanced across at the banker, saw equal bewilderment on that usually poker-face. On impulse, Bezdek reached for the buzzer that would summon aid and pressed it firmly several times.
"No one will answer," said the intruder in a voice remarkable not for its accent but for its lack of any. "We have been forced to--to immobilize this train in order to see you. It has been very difficult to reach you, Mr. Bezdek, I am sure through no fault of your own. But the people of my planet feel very strongly about this matter and I must get some satisfaction for them."
"So help me," said the mogul, his thin face purple with anger, "if this is a gag I'll see you jailed for it! And before you're jailed you're going to have a very unpleas--"
"No, Mr. Bezdek--Mr. Dorwin--this is not a joke. We of Mars are proud of our culture, our civilization. We do not like being portrayed as evil and ridiculous creatures. We're not like those filthy Venerians. We Martians have a great self-respect."
"Ostrich feathers!" Bezdek roared at the dead-panned intruder. "You may not be aware of it but there are severe penalties for holding up a train on this--in this country. You can't go around slugging people either. Look at Ty out there."
"Your servant will be all right," said the intruder, "as will the others aboard this train. I can release them whenever you agree that my mission is to be taken seriously."
"All right," said Bezdek, whose mind was nothing if not acrobatic. "Suppose you are from Mars. Tell me why your people object to our movies. Surely they aren't seeing them on Mars?"
"No. But your Earthmen will reach our planet soon and your opinion of us will be shaped in some degree by these movies they have seen. And since the relationships of the near-future are of vital import to us now we must not be represented as other than we are. Such misconceptions could breed interplanetary war." He shuddered.
"I think you're crazy!" said Bezdek. He turned to the banker, who was again staring out the window.
"There's something out there--look," said Dorwin.
"That is our ship," the intruder told them blandly. "That is why we stopped the train here. It is the only flat area sufficiently unsettled for our landing and departure without detection. We must return at once or lose perihelion."
"Let me see," said Bezdek. He peered through the window. There was something out there--something black and vague and shaped like an immense turtle with jagged projections. He tried to tell himself he was seeing things, failed.
"Amazing!" said E. Carter Dorwin. "It's utterly amazing!"
"Incredible is the word for it," Bezdek said wearily. He faced the intruder, said bluntly, "Very well, you say you're from Mars. And I say to your face that you aren't!"
"You seem remarkably sure, Mr. Bezdek."
"And why not?" The movie-maker was in his element now, delivering the clincher in an argument. "Our scientists have proved conclusively that Earthmen cannot exist on Mars without space-suits. You say you're a Martian. Yet you look like one of us. So if you can live on Mars, how can you live in our atmosphere without a space-suit of some sort? There's one for you to answer!" He chortled.
"But I am wearing protection--a protective suit arranged to give the impression that I am an Earthman." A flicker of something akin to distaste passed over his singularly immobile face.
"I'd like to see what you do look like," said Dorwin, suddenly entering into the eerie conversation.
Something like a sigh escaped the intruder. Then he said, "Very well. It is important that you believe me, so--" His hands went to the top of his scalp and deliberately he peeled the life-like mask slowly from the hidden features of his thoroughly Martian face!
It was a very odd face--not at all human. It reminded Bezdek a little of an immutably sad Bassett Hound he kept in his Hollywood kennel. It made Dorwin think of his mother-in-law. It was not a frightening face and the single eye in the center of the forehead held them with its mournful regard, held them, held them ...
When they were thoroughly under its hypnotic spell the Martian began to speak softly ...
* * * * *
Ty Falter was slow in waking up. But when he realized that he was lying there in the corridor he came to with a start. If Bezdek ever found out about this he'd be cooked as far as Hollywood went!
He got to his feet, his unsteadiness helped not at all by the fact that the train chose that moment to start with a jerk. He grabbed at the wall as a meteor flashed through the dark of the Kansas night outside the window.
Funny, he thought, the damned thing was going up, not down. But he forgot about the meteor as he heard the voices coming from the stateroom he was being paid to guard. He reeled over to the partly opened door and listened.
Bezdek was talking volubly, enthusiastically as he did when he spoke of the actual making of a picture. "... so we'll only have to reshoot a few sequences, Dorwin. The cost will be nothing compared to the returns. Think of it! Our space-pilot hero crashes on Venus. He has to fight horrible slimy swamp creatures--we can make them look like crocodiles with six or eight legs--to reach the mountaintop where the girl is hiding ..."
He paused and Dorwin said gravely, "I'm glad, since these space operas seem to be necessary, that you have decided to locate them on a real planet like Venus rather than a fictitious one like Mars. If minority pressure groups force us to use fantasy then it is as well to stay as credible as possible."
"Right, Dorwin! Right on the nose!" cried Bezdek. "And we can make real villains out of these Venerians, real bang-up nasty heavies!"
The banker's voice came through the door again. He said doubtfully, "But how can we be sure about the Venerians ..."
"Because I can feel it here!" cried the movie-maker. The thump that accompanied his final word told Ty that his boss had smote himself dramatically over the heart as he delivered the climactic line.
SONG IN A MINOR KEY
By C. L. Moore
He had been promising himself this moment for how many lonely months and years on alien worlds?
Beneath him the clovered hill-slope was warm in the sun. Northwest Smith moved his shoulders against the earth and closed his eyes, breathing so deeply that the gun holstered upon his chest drew tight against its strap as he drank the fragrance of Earth and clover warm in the sun. Here in the hollow of the hills, willow-shaded, pillowed upon clover and the lap of Earth, he let his breath run out in a long sigh and drew one palm across the grass in a caress like a lover's.
He had been promising himself this moment for how long--how many months and years on alien worlds? He would not think of it now. He would not remember the dark spaceways or the red slag of Martian drylands or the pearl-gray days on Venus when he had dreamed of the Earth that had outlawed him. So he lay, with his eyes closed and the sunlight drenching him through, no sound in his ears but the passage of a breeze through the grass and a creaking of some insect nearby--the violent, blood-smelling years behind him might never have been. Except for the gun pressed into his ribs between his chest and the clovered earth, he might be a boy again, years upon years ago, long before he had broken his first law or killed his first man.
No one else alive now knew who that boy had been. Not even the all knowing Patrol. Not even Venusian Yarol, who had been his closest friend for so many riotous years. No one would ever know--now. Not his name (which had not always been Smith) or his native land or the home that had bred him, or the first violent deed that had sent him down the devious paths which led here--here to the clover hollow in the hills of an Earth that had forbidden him ever to set foot again upon her soil.
He unclasped the hands behind his head and rolled over to lay a scarred cheek on his arm, smiling to himself. Well, here was Earth beneath him. No longer a green star high in alien skies, but warm soil, new clover so near his face he could see all the little stems and trefoil leaves, moist earth granular at their roots. An ant ran by with waving antennae close beside his cheek. He closed his eyes and drew another deep breath. Better not even look; better to lie here like an animal, absorbing the sun and the feel of Earth blindly, wordlessly.
* * * * *
Now he was not Northwest Smith, scarred outlaw of the spaceways. Now he was a boy again with all his life before him. There would be a white-columned house just over the hill, with shaded porches and white curtains blowing in the breeze and the sound of sweet, familiar voices indoors. There would be a girl with hair like poured honey hesitating just inside the door, lifting her eyes to him. Tears in the eyes. He lay very still, remembering.
Curious how vividly it all came back, though the house had been ashes for nearly twenty years, and the girl--the girl ...
He rolled over violently, opening his eyes. No use remembering her. There had been that fatal flaw in him from the very first, he knew now. If he were the boy again knowing all he knew today, still the flaw would be there and sooner or later the same thing must have happened that had happened twenty years ago. He had been born for a wilder age, when men took what they wanted and held what they could without respect for law. Obedience was not in him, and so--
As vividly as on that day it happened he felt the same old surge of anger and despair twenty years old now, felt the ray-gun bucking hard against his unaccustomed fist, heard the hiss of its deadly charge ravening into a face he hated. He could not be sorry, even now, for that first man he had killed. But in the smoke of that killing had gone up the columned house and the future he might have had, the boy himself--lost as Atlantis now--and the girl with the honey-colored hair and much, much else besides. It had to happen, he knew. He being the boy he was, it had to happen. Even if he could go back and start all over, the tale would be the same.
And it was all long past now, anyhow; and nobody remembered any more at all, except himself. A man would be a fool to lie here thinking about it any longer.
Smith grunted and sat up, shrugging the gun into place against his ribs.
STAR HUNTER
By Andre Norton
I
Nahuatl's larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind's age-old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted, belly-path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other worlds, Wass was the serpent.
A night wind was rising, stirring the exotic, half-dozen other worlds' foliage planted cunningly on the terrace to simulate the mystery of an off-world jungle.
"Hume?" The inquiry seemed to come out of thin air over his head.
"Hume," he repeated his own name calmly.
A shaft of light brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes struck through the massed vegetation, revealing a path. Hume lingered for a moment, offering a counterstroke of indifference in what he had always known would be a test of wits. Wass was Veep of a shadowy empire, but that was apart from the world in which Ras Hume moved.
He strode deliberately down the corridor illuminated between leaf and blossom walls. A grotesque lump of crystal leered at him from the heart of a tharsala lilly bed. The intricate carving of a devilish nonhuman set of features was a work of alien art. Tendrils of smoke curled from the thing's flat nostrils, and Hume sniffed the scent of a narcotic he recognized. He smiled. Such measures might soften up the usual civ Wass interviewed here. But a star pilot turned out-hunter was immunized against such mind clouding.
There was a door, the lintel and posts of which had more carving, but this time Terran, Hume thought--old, very old. Perhaps rumor was right, Milfors Wass might be truly native Terran and not second, third, nor fourth generation star stock as most of those who reached Nahuatl were.
The room beyond that elaborately carved entrance was, in contrast, severe. Rust walls were bare of any pattern save an oval disk of cloudy golden shimmer behind the chair at the long table of solid ruby rock from Nahuatl's poisonous sister planet of Xipe. Without a pause he walked to the chair and seated himself without invitation to wait in the empty room.
That clouded oval might be a com device. Hume refused to look at it after his first glance. This interview was to be person to person. If Wass did not appear within a reasonable length of time he would leave.
And Hume hoped to any unseen watcher he presented the appearance of a man not impressed by stage settings. After all he was now in the seller's space boots, and it was a seller's market.
Ras Hume rested his right hand on the table. Against the polished glow of the stone, the substance of it was flesh-tanned brown--a perfect match for his left. And the subtle difference between true flesh and false was no hindrance in the use of those fingers or their strength. Save that it had pushed him out of command of a cargo-cum-liner and hurled him down from the pinnacle of a star pilot. There were bitter brackets about his mouth, set there by that hand as deeply as if carved with a knife.
It had been four years--planet time--since he had lifted the Rigal Rover from the launch pad on Sargon Two. He had suspected it might be a tricky voyage with young Tors Wazalitz, who was a third owner of the Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz line, and a Gratz chewer. But one did not argue with the owners, except when the safety of the ship was concerned. The Rigal Rover had made a crash landing at Alexbut, and a badly injured pilot had brought her in by will, hope and a faith he speedily lost.
He received a plasta-hand, the best the medical center could supply and a pension for life, forced by the public acclaim for a man who had saved ships and lives. Then--the sack because a crazed Tors Wazalitz was dead. They dared not try to stick Hume with a murder charge; the voyage record tapes had been shot straight through to the Patrol Council, and the evidence on those could be neither faked nor tampered with. They could not give him a quick punishment, but they could try to arrange a slow death. The word had gone out that Hume was off pilot boards. They had tried to keep him out of space.
And they might have done it, too, had he been the usual type of pilot, knowing only his trade. But some odd streak of restlessness had always led him to apply for the rim runs, the very first flights to newly opened worlds. Outside of the survey men, there were few qualified pilots of his seniority who possessed such a wide and varied knowledge of the galactic frontiers.
So when he learned that the ships' boards were irrevocably closed to him, Hume had signed up with the Out-Hunters' Guild. There was a vast difference between lifting a liner from a launching pad and guiding civ hunters to worlds surveyed and staked out for their trips into the wild. Hume relished the exploration part--he disliked the leading-by-the-hand of nine-tenths of the Guild's clients.
But if he had not been in the Guild service he would never have made that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped through to the floor.
The newcomer was small compared to the former pilot, but he had breadth of shoulder which made the upper part of his torso overbalance his thin hips and legs. He was dressed most conservatively except for a jeweled plaque resting on the tightly stretched gray silk of his upper tunic at heart level. Unlike Hume he wore no visible arms belt, but the other did not doubt that there were a number of devices concealed in that room to counter the efforts of any assassin.
The man from the mirror spoke with a flat, toneless voice. His black hair had been shaven well above his ears, the locks left on top of his skull trained into a kind of bird's crest. As Hume, his visible areas of flesh were deeply browned, but by nature rather than exposure to space, the pilot guessed. His features were harsh, with a prominent nose, a back-slanting forehead, eyes dark, long and large, with heavy lids.
"Now--" He spread both his hands, palm down and flat on the table, a gesture Hume found himself for some unknown reason copying. "You have a proposition?"
But the pilot was not to be hurried, any more than he was to be influenced by Wass' stage-settings.
"I have an idea," he corrected.
"There are many ideas." Wass leaned back in his chair, but he did not remove his hands from the table. "Perhaps one in a thousand is the kernel of something useful. For the rest, there is no need to trouble a man."
"Agreed," Hume returned evenly. "But that one idea in a thousand can also pay off in odds of a million to one, when and if a man has it."
"And you have such a one?"
"I have such a one." It was Hume's role now to impress the other by his unshakable confidence. He had studied all the possibilities. Wass was the right man, perhaps the only partner he could find. But Wass must not know that.
"On Jumala?" Wass returned.
If that stare and statement was intended to rattle Hume it was a wasted shot. To discover that he had just returned from that frontier planet required no ingenuity on the Veep's part.
"Perhaps."
"Come, Out-Hunter Hume. We are both busy men, this is no time to play tricks with words and hints. Either you have made a find worth the attention of my organization or you have not. Let me be the judge."
This was it--the corner of no return. But Wass had his own code. The Veep had established his tight control of his lawless organization by set rules, and one of them was, don't be greedy. Wass was never greedy, which is why the patrol had never been able to pull him down, and those who dealt with him did not talk. If you had a good thing, and Wass accepted temporary partnership, he kept his side of the bargain rigidly. You did the same--or regretted your stupidity.
"A claimant to the Kogan estate--that good enough for you?"
Wass showed no surprise. "And how would such a claimant be profitable to us?"
Hume appreciated that "us"; he had an in now. "If you supply the claimant, surely you can claim a reward, in more ways than one."
"True. But one does not produce a claimant out of a Krusha dream. The investigation for any such claim now would be made by a verity lab and no imposture will pass those tests. While a real claimant would not need your help or mine."
"Depends upon the claimant."
"One you discovered on Jumala?"
"No." Hume shook his head slowly. "I found something else on Jumala--an L-B from Largo Drift intact and in good shape. From the evidence now in existence it could have landed there with survivors aboard."
"And the evidence of such survivors living on--that exists also?"
Hume shrugged, his plasta-flesh fingers flexed slightly. "It has been six planet years, there is a forest where the L-B rests. No, no evidence at present."
"The Largo Drift," Wass repeated slowly, "carrying, among others, Gentlefem Tharlee Kogan Brodie."
"And her son Rynch Brodie, who was at the time of the Largo Drift's disappearance a boy of fourteen."
"You have indeed made a find." Wass gave that simple statement enough emphasis to assure Hume he had won. His one-in-a-thousand idea had been absorbed, was now being examined, amplified, broken down into details he could never have hoped to manage for himself, by the most cunning criminal brain in at least five solar systems.
"Is there any hope of survivors?" Wass attacked the problem straight on.
"No evidence even of there being any passengers when the L-B planeted. Those are automatic and released a certain number of seconds after an accident alarm. For what it's worth the hatch of this one was open. It could have brought in survivors. But I was on Jumala for three months with a full Guild crew and we found no sign of any castaways."
"So you propose--?"
"On the basis of my report Jumala has been put up for a safari choice. The L-B could well be innocently discovered by a client. Every one knows the story with the case dragging through the Ten Sector-Terran Courts now. Gentlefem Brodie and her son might not have been news ten years ago. Now, with a third of the Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz control going to them, any find linked with the Largo Drift would gain full galactic coverage."
"You have a choice of survivor? The Gentlefem?"
Hume shook his head. "The boy. He was bright, according to the stories since, and he would have the survival manual from the ship to study. He could have grown up in the wilds of an unopened planet. To use a woman is too tricky."
"You are entirely right. But we shall require an extremely clever imposter."
"I think not." Hume's cool glance met Wass'. "We only need a youth of the proper general physical description and the use of a conditioner."
Wass' expression did not change, there was no sign that Hume's hint had struck home. But when he replied there was a slight change in the monotone of his voice.
"You seem to know a great deal."
"I am a man who listens," Hume replied, "and I do not always discount rumor as mere fantasy."
"That is true. As one of the guild you would be interested in the root of fact beneath the plant of fiction," Wass acknowledged. "You appear to have done some planning on your own."
"I have waited and watched for just such an opportunity as this," Hume answered.
"Ah, yes. The Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz combine incurred your displeasure. I see you are also a man who does not forget easily. And that, too, I understand. It is a foible of my own, Out-Hunter. I neither forget nor forgive my enemies, though I may seem to do so and time separates them from their past deeds for a space."
Hume accepted that warning--both must keep any bargain. Wass was silent for a moment, as if to leave time for the thought to root itself, then he spoke again.
"A youth with the proper physical qualifications. Have you any such in mind?"
"I think so." Hume was short.
"He will need certain memories; those take time to tape."
"Those dealing with Jumala, I can supply."
"Yes. You will have to provide a tape beginning with his arrival on that world. For such family material as is necessary I shall have ready. An interesting project, even apart from its value to us. This is one to intrigue experts."
Expert psycho-techs--Wass had them. Men who had slipped over the border of the law, had entered Wass' organization and prospered there. There were some techs crooked enough to enjoy such a project for its own sake, indulging in forbidden experimentation. For a moment, but only for a moment, something in Hume jibbed at the intent of carrying through his plan. Then he shrugged that tinge aside.
"How soon do you wish to move?"
"How long will preparation take?" Hume asked in return, for the second time battling a taste of concern.
"Three months, maybe four. There's research to be done and tapes to be made."
"It will be six months probably before the Guild sets up a safari for Jumala."
Wass smiled. "That need not worry us. When the time comes for a safari, there shall also be clients, impeccable clients, asking for it to be planned."
There would be, too, Hume knew. Wass' influence reached into places where the Veep himself was totally unknown. Yes, he could count on an excellent, well above suspicion, set of clients to discover Rynch Brodie when the time came.
"I can deliver the boy tonight, or early tomorrow morning. Where?"
"You are sure of your selection?"
"He fulfills the requirements, the right age, general appearance. A boy who will not be missed, who has no kin, no ties, and who will drop out of sight without any questions to be asked."
"Very well. Get him at once. Deliver him here."
Wass swept one hand across the table surface. On the red of the stone there glowed for seconds an address. Hume noted it, nodded. It was one in the center of the port town, one which could be visited at an odd hour without exciting any curiosity. He rose.
"He will be there."
"Tomorrow, at your convenience," Wass added, "you will come to this place." Again the palm moved and a second address showed on the table.
"There you will begin your tape for our use. It may take several sessions."
"I'm ready. I still have the long report to make to the Guild, so the material is still available on my note tapes."
"Excellent. Out-Hunter Hume, I salute a new colleague." At last Wass' right hand came up from the table. "May we both have luck equal to our industry."
"Luck to equal our desires," Hume corrected him.
"A very telling phrase, Out-Hunter. Luck to equal our desires. Yes, let us both deserve that."
2
The Starfall was a long way down scale from the pleasure houses of the upper town. Here strange vices were also merchandise, but not such exotics as Wass provided. This was strictly for crewmen of the star freighters who could be speedily and expertly separated from a voyage's pay in an evening. The tantalizing scents of Wass' terraces were reduced here to simply smells, the majority of which were not fragrant.
There had already been two fatal duels that evening. A tubeman from a rim ship had challenged a space miner to settle a difference with those vicious whips made from the tail casings of Flangoid flying lizards, an encounter which left both men in ribbons, one dead, one dying. And a scarred, ex-space marine had blaster-flamed one of the Star-and-Comet dealers into charred human ash.
The young man who had been ordered to help clear away the second loser retired to the stinking alley outside to lose the meal which was part of his meager day's pay. Now he crawled back inside, his face greenish, one hand pressed to his middle section.
He was thin, the fine bones of his face tight under the pallid skin, his ribs showing even through the sleazy fabric of the threadbare tunic with its house seal. When he leaned his head back against the grime encrusted wall, raising his face to the light, his hair had the glint of bright chestnut, a gold which was also red. And for his swamper's labor he was almost fastidiously clean.
"You--Lansor!"
He shivered as if an icy wind had found him and opened his eyes. They seemed disproportionately large in his skin and bone face and were of an odd shade, neither green nor blue, but somewhere between.
"Get going, you! Ain't paying out good credits for you to sit there like you was buying on your own!" The Salarkian who loomed above him spoke accentless, idiomatic Basic Space which came strangely from between his yellow lips. A furred hand thrust the handle of a mop-up stick at the young man, a taloned thumb jerked the direction in which to use that evil-smelling object. Vye Lansor levered himself up the wall, took the mop, setting his teeth grimly.
Someone had spilled a mug of Kardo and the deep purple liquid was already patterning the con-stone floor past any hope of cleaning. But he set to work slapping the fringe of the noisome mop back and forth to sop up what he could. The smell of the Kardo uniting with the general effluvia of the room and its inhabitants heightened his queasiness.
Working blindly in a half stupor, he was not aware of the man sitting alone in the booth until his mop spattered the ankle of one of the drinking girls. She struck him sharply across the face with a sputtering curse in the tongue of Altar-Ishtar.
The blow sent him back against the open lattice of the booth. As he tried to steady himself another hand reached up, fingers tightened about his wrist. He flinched, tried to jerk away from that hold, only to discover that he was the other's prisoner.
And looking down at his captor in apprehension, he was aware even then of the different quality of this man. The patron wore the tunic of a crewman, lighter patches where the ship's badges should have been to show that he was not engaged. But, though his tunic was shabby, dirty, his magnetic boots scuffed and badly worn, he was not like the others now enjoying the pleasures of the Starfall.
"This one--he makes trouble?" The vast bulk of the Vorm-man who was the Starfall's private law moved through the crowd with serene confidence in his own strength, which no one there, unless blind, deaf, and out-of-the-senses drunk, could dispute. His scaled, six-fingered, claw hand reached out for Lansor and the boy cringed.
"No trouble!" There was the click of authority in the voice of the man in the booth. His face, moments earlier taut and sharp with intelligence, was suddenly slack, his tone slurred as he answered: "Looks like an old shipmate. No trouble, just want a drink with an old shipmate."
But the grip which had pulled Vye forward, swung him around and down on the other bench in the booth, was anything but slack. The Vorm-man glanced from the patron of the Starfall to its least important employee and then grinned, thrusting his fanged jaws close to Lansor's.
"If the master wants to drink, you dirt-rat, you drink!"
Vye nodded vigorously, and then put his hand to his mouth, afraid his stomach was about to betray him again. Apprehensive, he watched the Vorm-man turn away. Only when that broad, green-gray back was lost in the smoky far reaches of the room did he expel his breath again.
"Here--" The grip was gone from his wrist, but fingers now put a mug into his hand. "Drink!"
He tried to protest, knew it was hopeless, and used both hands to get the mug to his lips, mouthing the stinging liquid in dull despair. Only, instead of bringing nausea with it, the stuff settled his stomach, cleared his head, with an after glow with which he managed to relax from the tense state of endurance which filled his hours in the Starfall.
Half of the mug's contents inside him and he dared to raise his eyes to the man opposite him. Yes, this was no common crewman, nor was he drunk as he had pretended for the Vorm-man. Now he watched the milling crowd with a kind of detachment, though Vye was sure he was aware of every move he himself made.
Vye finished the liquid. For the first time since he had come into this place two months earlier he felt like a real person again. And he had wits enough to guess that the potion he had just swallowed contained some drug. Only now he did not care at all. Anything which could wipe out in moments all the shame, fear, and sick despair the Starfall had planted in him was worth swallowing. Why the other had drugged him was a mystery, but he was content to wait for enlightenment.
Lansor's companion once more applied that compelling pressure to the younger man's bony forearm. Linked by that hold they left the Starfall, came into the cooler, far more pleasant atmosphere of the street. They were a block away before Vye's guide halted, though he did not release his prisoner.
"Forty names of Dugor!" he spat.
Lansor waited, breathing in the air of early morning. The confidence of the drug still held. At the moment he was certain nothing could be as bad as the life behind him, he was willing to face what this strange patron of the Starfall had in mind.
The other slapped his hand down on an air-car call button, stood waiting until one of the city flitters landed on beam before them.
From the seat of the air-car Vye noted they were heading into the respectability of the upper city, away from the stews ringing the launch port. He tried to guess their destination or purpose, not that either mattered much. Then the car descended on a landing stage.
The stranger waved Lansor through a doorway, down a short corridor into a room of private quarters. Vye sat down gingerly on the foam seat extending from the wall as he neared. He stared about. Dimly he could just remember rooms which had this degree of comfort, but so dimly now he could not be sure they did not exist only in his vivid imagination. For Vye's imagination had buoyed him first through the drab existence in a State Child's Crèche, then through a state-found job which he had lost because he could not adapt to the mechanical life of a computer tender, and had been an anchor and an escape when he had sunk through the depths of the port to the last refuge in the Starfall.
Now he pressed both his hands into the soft stuff of the seat and gaped at a small tri-dee on the wall facing him, a miniature scene of life on some other planet wherein a creature enveloped in short black and white striped fur crept belly flat, to stalk long-legged, short-winged birds making blood-red splotches against yellow reed banks under a pale violet sky. He feasted on its color, on the sense of freedom and off-world wonders which it raised in him.
"Who are you?"
The stranger's abrupt question brought him back, not only to the room but to his own precarious position. He moistened his lips, no longer quite so aglow with confidence.
"Vye--Vye Lansor." Then he added his other identification, "S. C. C. 425061."
"State child, eh?" The other had pushed a button for a refresher cup, then was sipping its contents slowly. He did not ring for a second to offer Vye. "Parents?"
Lansor shook his head. "I was brought in after the Five-Hour Fever epidemic. They didn't try to keep records, there were too many of us."
The man was watching him levelly over the rim of that cup. There was something cold in that study, something which curbed Vye's pleasant feeling of only moments earlier. Now the other set down his drink, crossed the room. Cupping his hand under Lansor's chin, he brought up his head in a way which stirred a sullen resentment in the younger man, yet something told him resistance would only bring trouble.
"I'd say Terran stock--not more than second generation." He was talking to himself more than to Vye. He loosed his hold on the boy's chin, but he still stood there surveying him from head to foot. Lansor wanted to squirm, but he fought that impulse, and managed to meet the other's gaze when it reached his face again.
"No--not the usual port-drift. I was right all the way." Now he looked at Vye again as if the younger man did have a brain, emotions, some call on his interest as a personality. "Want a job?"
Lansor pressed his hand deeper into the foam seat. "What--what kind?" He was angry and ashamed at that small betraying break in his voice.
"You have scruples?" The stranger appeared to think that amusing. Vye reddened, but he was also more than a little surprised that the man in the worn space uniform had read hesitancy right. Someone out of the Starfall should not be too particular about employment, and he could not tell why he was.
"Nothing illegal, I assure you." The man crossed to set his refresher cup in the empty slot. "I am an Out-Hunter."
Lansor blinked. This had all taken on some of the fantastic aura of a dream. The other was eyeing him impatiently, as if he had expected some reaction.
"You may inspect my credentials if you wish."
"I believe you," Vye found his voice.
"I happen to need a gearman."
But this wasn't happening! Of course, it couldn't happen to him, Vye Lansor, state child, swamper in the Starfall. Things such as this did not happen, except in a thaline dream, and he wasn't a smoke eater! It was the kind of dream a man didn't want to wake from, not if he was port-drift.
"Would you be willing to sign on?"
Vye tried to clutch reality to himself, to remain level-headed. A gearman for an Out-Hunter! Why five men out of six would pay a large premium for a chance at such rating. The chill of doubt cut through the first hazy rosiness. A swamper from a port-side dive simply did not become a gearman for a Guild Hunter.
Again it was as if the stranger read his thoughts. "Look here," he spoke abruptly. "I had a bad time myself, years ago. You resemble someone to whom I owe a debt. I can't repay him, but I can make the scales a little even this way."
"Make the scales even." Vye's fading hope brightened. Then the Out-Hunter was a follower of the Fata Rite. That would explain everything. If you could not repay a good deed to the one you owed, you must balance the Eternal Scales in another fashion. He relaxed again, a great many of his unasked questions so answered.
"You will accept?"
Vye nodded eagerly. "Yes, Out-Hunter." He still could not believe that this was happening.
The other pressed the refresher button, and this time he handed Lansor the brimming cup. "Drink on the bargain." His words had the ring of command.
Lansor drank, gulping down the contents of the cup, and suddenly was aware of being tired. He leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed.
Ras Hume took the cup from the lax fingers of the young man. So far, very good. Chance appeared to be playing on his side of the board. It had been chance which had steered him into the Starfall just three nights ago when he had been in quest of his imposter. And Vye Lansor was better than he dared hope to find. The boy had the right coloring, he had been batted around enough to fall for the initial story, he was malleable now. And after Wass' techs worked on him he would be Rynch Brodie--heir to one-third of Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz!
"Come!" He touched Vye on the shoulder. The boy opened his eyes but his gaze did not focus as he got slowly to his feet. Hume glanced at his planet-time watch. It was still very early; the chance he must run in getting Lansor out of this building was small if they went at once. Guiding the younger man with a light hold above the elbow, he walked him out back to the flitter landing stage. The air-car was waiting. Hume's sense of being a gambler facing a run of good luck grew as he shepherded the boy into the flitter, punched a cover destination and took off.
On another street he transferred himself and his charge into a second air-car, set the destination to within a block of the address Wass had given him. Not much later he walked Vye into a small lobby with a discreet list of names posted in its rack. No occupations attached to those colored streamers Hume noted. This meant either that their owners represented luxury trades, where a name signified the profession or service, or that they were covers--perhaps both. Wass' world fringed many different circles, intermingled with some quite surprising professions dedicated to the comfort, pleasure or health of the idle rich, off-world nobility, and the criminal elite.
Hume fingered the right call button, knowing that the thumb pattern he had left on Wass' conference table would have already been relayed as his symbol of admission here. A flicker of light winked below the name, the wall to the right shimmered, and produced a doorway. Steering Vye to it, Hume nodded to the man waiting there. He was a flat-faced Eucorian of the servant caste, and now he reached out to draw Lansor over the threshold.
"I have him, gentlehomo." His voice was as expressionless as his face. There was another shimmer and the door disappeared.
Hume brushed his hand down the outer side of his thigh, wiping flesh against the coarse stuff of the crew uniform. He left the lobby frowning at his own thoughts.
Stupid! A swamper from one of the worst rat holes in the port. Like as not that youngster would have had his brains kicked out in a brawl, or been fried to a crisp when some drunk got wild with a blaster, before the year was out. He'd done him a real kindness, given him a chance at a future less than one man in a billion ever had the power to even dream about. Why, if Vye Lansor had known what was going to happen to him, he would have been so willing to volunteer, that he would have dragged Hume here. There was no reason to have any regrets over the boy, he had never had it so good--never! There was only one small period of risk for Vye to face. Those days he would have to spend alone on Jumala between the time Wass' organization would plant him there and the coming of Hume's party to "discover" him. Hume himself would tape every possible aid to cover that period. All the knowledge of a Guild Out-Hunter, added to the information gathered by the survey, would be used to provide Rynch Brodie with the training necessary for wilderness survival. Hume was already listing the items to be included as he strode down the street, his tread once more assured.
3
His head ached dully, of that he was conscious first. As he turned, without opening his eyes, he felt the brush of softness against his cheek, and a pungent odor fill his nostrils.
He opened his eyes, stared up past a rim of broken rock toward the cloudless, blue-green sky. A relay clicked into proper place deep in his mind.
Of course! He had been trying to lure a strong-jaws out of its traphole with hooked bait, then his foot had slipped. Rynch Brodie sat up, flexed his bare thin arms, and moved his long legs experimentally. No broken bones, anyway. But still he frowned. Odd--that dream which jarred with the here and now.
Crawling to the side of the creek, he dipped head and shoulders into the water, letting the chill of the stream flush away some of his waking bewilderment. He shook himself, making the drops fly from his uncovered torso and arms, and then discovered his hunting tackle.
He stood for a moment fingering each piece of his scanty clothing, recalling every piece of labor or battle which had added pouch, belt, strip of fabric to his equipment. Yet--there was still that odd sense of strangeness, as if none of this was really his.
Rynch shook his head, wiped his wet face with his arm. It was all his, that was sure, every bit of it. He'd been lucky, the survival manual on the L-B had furnished him with general directions and this was a world which was not unfriendly--not if one was prepared for trouble.
He climbed up and loosened the net, coiling its folds into one hand, taking the good spear in his other. A bush stirred ahead, against the pull of the light breeze. Rynch froze, then the haft of his spear slid into a new hand grip, the coils of his net spun out. A snarl cut over the purr of water.
The scarlet blot which sprang for his throat was met with the flail of the net. Rynch stabbed twice at the creature he had so swept off balance. A water-cat, this year's cub. Dying, its claws, over-long in proportion to its paws, drew inch deep furrows in the earth and gravel. Its eyes, almost the same shade as its long, burr-entangled body fur, glared up at him in deathly enmity.
As Rynch watched, that feeling that he was studying something strange, utterly alien, came to him once again. Yet he had hunted water-cats for many seasons. Fortunately they were solitary, evil-tempered beasts that marked out a roaming territory to defend it from others of their kind, and not too many were to be encountered in cross-country travel.
He stooped to pull his net from the now still paws. Some definite place he must reach. The compulsion to move on in that sudden flash shook him, raised the dull ache still troubling his temples into a punishing throb. Going down on his knees, Rynch once more turned to the stream water; this time after splashing it onto his face, he drank from his cupped hands.
Rynch swayed, his wet hands over his eyes, digging fingertips into the skin of his forehead to ease that pain bursting in his skull. Sitting in a room, drinking from a cup--it was as if a shadow picture fitted over the reality of the stream, rocks and brush about him. He had sat in a room, had drank from a cup--that action had been important!
A sharp, hot pain made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked down. From the gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of blue-black, hard-shelled things, their clawed forelimbs extended, blue sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their heads, all turned towards the dead feline.
Rynch slapped out vigorously, stumbled into the water loosening the hold of two vicious scavengers on the torn skin of his ankle when he waded out knee-deep. Already that black tongue of small bodies licked across the red-haired side of the hunter. Within minutes the corpse would be only well-cleaned bones.
Retrieving his spear and net, Rynch immersed both in the water to clean off attackers, and hurried on, splashing through the creek until he was well away from the vicinity of the kill. A little later he flushed a four-footed creature from between two rocks and killed it with one blow from his spear haft. He skinned his kill, feeling the substance of the skill. Was it exceedingly rough hide, or rudimentary scales? And knew a return of that puzzlement.
He felt, he thought painfully as he toasted the dry looking, grayish meat on a sharpened stick, as if a part of him knew very well what manner of animal he had killed. And yet, far inside him, another person he could not understand stood aloof watching in amazement.
He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with his mother.
Memory presented him automatically with a picture of a thin woman with a narrow, rather unhappy face, a twist of elaborately dressed hair in which jeweled lights sparkled. There had been something bad--memory was no longer exact but chaotic. And his head ached as he tried to recall that time with greater clarity. Afterwards the L-B and a man with him in it--
"Simmons Tait!"
An officer, badly hurt. He had died when the L-B landed here. Rynch had a clear memory of himself piling rocks over Tait's twisted body. He had been alone then with only the survival manual and some of the L-B supplies. The important thing was that he must never forget he was Rynch Brodie.
He licked grease from his fingers. The ache in his head made him drowsy. He curled up on a patch of sun-warmed sand and slept.
Or did he? His eyes were open again. Now the sky above him was no longer a bowl of light, but rather a muted halo of evening. Rynch sat up, his heart pounding as if he had been racing to outdistance the rising wind now pushing against his half-naked body.
What was he doing here? Where was here?
Panic, carried through from that awakening, dried his mouth, roughened his skin, made wet the palms of the hands he dug into the sand on either side of him. Vaguely, a picture projected into his mind--he had sat in a room, and watched a man come to him with a cup. Before that, he had been in a place of garish light and evil smells.
But he was Rynch Brodie, he had come here on an L-B when he was a boy, he had buried the ship's officer under a pile of rocks, managed to survive by himself because he had applied the aids in the boat to learn how. This morning he had been hunting a strong-jaw, tempting it out of its hiding by a hook and line and a bait of fresh killed skipper.
Rynch's hands went to his face, he crouched forward on his knees. That all was true, he could prove it--he would prove it! There was the strong-jaw's den back there, somewhere on the rise where he had left the snapped haft of the spear he had broken in his fall. If he could find the den, then he would be sure of the reality of everything else.
He had only had a very real dream--that was it! Only, why did he continue to dream of that room, that man, and the cup? Of the place of lights and smells, which he hated so much that the hate was a sour taste in his fright-dried mouth? None of it had ever been a part of Rynch Brodie's world.
Through the dusk he started back up the stream bed, towards the narrow little valley where he had wakened after that fall. Finally, finding shelter within the heart of a bush, he crouched low, listening to the noises of another world which awoke at night to take over the stage from the day dwellers.
As he plodded back, he fought off panic, realizing that some of those noises he could identify with confidence, while others remained mysteries. He bit down hard on the knuckles of his clenched fist, attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did he know at once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a leather-winged, feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from downstream was just a noise?
"Rynch Brodie--Largo Drift--Tait." He tasted the blood his teeth drew from his own skin as he recited that formula. Then he scrambled up. His feet tangled in the net, and he went down again, his head cracking on a protruding root.
Nothing tangible reached him in that brush shelter. What did venture out of hiding to investigate was a substance none of his species could have named. It was neither body, nor mind--perhaps it was closest to alien emotion.
Making contact stealthily, but with confidence, it explored after its own fashion. Then, puzzled, it withdrew to report. And since that to which it reported was governed by a set pattern which had not been altered for eons, its only answer was a basic command reaffirmed. Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly. Where it should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry influence to the sleeper's brain, it found a jumble of impressions, interwoven until they made a protective barrier.
The invader strove to find some pattern, or meaning--withdrew baffled. But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here, cleared a passage there.
Rynch awoke at dawn, slowly, dazedly, sorting out sounds, smells, thoughts. There was a room, a man, trouble and fear, then there was he, Rynch Brodie, who had lived in this wilderness on an unmapped frontier world for the passage of many seasons. That world was about him now, he could feel its winds, hear its sounds, taste, smell. It was not a dream--the other was the dream. It had to be!
Prove it. Find the L-B, retrace the trail of yesterday past the point of the fall which had started all this. Right there was the slope down which he must have tumbled. Above, he would find the den he had been exploring when the accident had occurred.
Only--he did not find it. His mind had produced a detailed picture of that rounded depression, at the bottom of which the strong-jaw lurked. But when he reached the crown of the bluff, nowhere did he sight the mounded earth of the pit's rim. He searched carefully for a good length, both north and south. No den--no trace of one. Yet his memory told him that there had been one here yesterday.
Had he fallen elsewhere and stumbled on, dazed, to fall a second time?
Some disputant inside him said no to that. This was where he had regained consciousness yesterday and there was no den!
He faced away from the river, breathing fast. No den--was there also no L-B? If he had passed this way dazed from a former fall, surely he would have left some trace.
There was a crushed, browned plant flattened by weight. He stooped to finger the wilted leaves. Something had come in this direction. He would back-track. Rynch gave a hunter's attention to the ground.
A half-hour later he found nothing but some odd, almost obliterated marks on grass too resilient to hold traces very long. And from them he could make nothing.
He knew where he was, even if he did not know how he got here. The L-B--if it did exist--was to the west. He had a vivid mental picture of the rocket shape, its once silvery sides dulled by exposure, canted crookedly amid trees. And he was going to find it!
Beyond the edge of any conscious sense there was a new stir. He was contacted again, tested. A forest called delicately in its alien way. Rynch had a fleeting thought of trees, was not aware of more than a mild desire to see what lay in their shade.
For the present his own problem held him. That which beckoned was defeated, repulsed by his indifference. While Rynch started at a steady distance to trot towards the east, far away a process akin to a relay clicked into a second set of impulse orders.
* * * * *
Well above the planet Hume spun a dial to bring in the image of the wide stretches of continents, the small patches of seas. They would set down on the western land mass. Its climate, geographical features and surface provided the best site. And he had the very important co-ordinates for their camp already taped in the directo.
"That's Jumala."
He did not glance around to see what effect that screen view had on the other four men in the control cabin of the safari ship. Just now he was striving to master his impatience. The slightest hint could give birth to a suspicion which would blast their whole scheme. Wass might have had a hand in the selection of the three clients, but they would certainly be far from briefed on the truth of any discovery made on Jumala--they had to be for the safety of the whole enterprise.
The fourth man, serving as his gearman for this trip, was Wass' own insurance against any wrong move on Hume's part. And the Out-Hunter respected him as being man enough to be wary of giving any suspicion of going counter to the agreed plan.
Dawn was touching up the main points of the western continent, and he must set this spacer down within a day's journey of the abandoned L-B. Exploration in that direction would be the first logical move for his party. They could not be openly steered to the find, but there were ways of directing a hunt which would do as well.
Two days ago, according to schedule, their castaway had been deposited here with a sub-conscious command to remain in the general area. There had been a slight element of risk in leaving him alone, armed only with the crude weapons he could manipulate, but that was part of the gamble.
They were down--right on the mark. Hume saw to the unpacking and activating of those machines and appliances which would protect and serve his civ clients. He slapped the last inflate valve on a bubble tent, watched it critically as it billowed from a small roll of fabric into a weather resistant, one-room, air-conditioned and heated shelter.
"Ready and waiting for you to move in, Gentlehomo," he reported to the small man who stood gazing about him with a child's wondering interest in the new and strange.
"Very ingenious, Hunter. Ah--now just what might that be?" His voice was also eager as he pointed a finger to the east.
4
Hume glanced up alertly. There was a bare chance that "Brodie" might have witnessed their arrival and might be coming in now to save them all a great amount of time and trouble by acting the overjoyed, rescued castaway.
But he could sight nothing at all in that direction to excite any attention. The distant mountains provided a stark, dark blue background. Up their foothills and lower slopes was a thick furring of trees with foliage of so deep a green as to register black from this distance. And on the level country was the lighter blue-green of the other variety of wood edging the open country about the river. In there rested the L-B.
"I don't see anything!" he snapped, so sharply the little man stared at him in open surprise. Hume forced a quick smile.
"Just what did you sight, Gentlehomo Starns? There is no large game in the woodlands."
"This was not an animal, Hunter. Rather a flash of light, just about there." Again he pointed.
Sun, Hume thought, could have been reflected from some portion of the L-B. He had believed that small spacer so covered with vines and ringed in by trees that it could not have been so sighted. But a storm might have disposed of some of nature's cloaking. If so Starns' interest must be fed, he would make an ideal discoverer.
"Odd." Hume produced his distance glasses. "Just where, Gentlehomo?"
"There." Starns obligingly pointed a third time.
If there had been anything to see it was gone now. But it did lie in the right direction. For a second or two Hume was uneasy. Things seemed to be working too well; his cynical distrust was triggered by fitting so smoothly.
"Might be the sun," he observed.
"Reflected from some object you mean, Hunter? But the flash was very bright. And there could be no mirror surface in there, surely there could not be?"
Yes, things were moving too fast. Hume might be overly cautious but he was determined that no hint of any pre-knowledge of the L-B must ever come to these civs. When they would find the Largo Drift's life boat and locate Brodie, there would be a legal snarl. The castaway's identity would be challenged by a half dozen distant and unloving relatives, and there would be an intense inquiry. These civs must be the impartial witnesses.
"No, I hardly believe in a mirror in an uninhabited forest, Gentlehomo," he chuckled. "But we are on a hunting planet and not all its life forms have yet been classified."
"You are thinking of an intelligent native race, Hunter?" Chambriss, the most demanding of the civ party, strode up to join them.
Hume shook his head. "No native intelligence on a hunting world, Gentlehomo. That is assured before the planet is listed for a safari. However, a bird or flying thing, perhaps with metallic plumage or scales to catch the sunlight, might under the right circumstances seem a flash of light. That has happened before."
"It was very bright," Starns said doubtfully. "We might look over there later."
"Nonsense!" Chambriss spoke briskly as one used to overriding the conflicting wishes in any company. "I came here for a water-cat, and a water-cat I'm going to have. You don't find those in wooded areas."
"There will be a schedule," Hume announced. "Each of you has signed up, according to contract, for a different trophy. You for a water-cat, Gentlehomo. And you, Gentlehomo Starns, want to make tri-dees of the pit-dragons. While Gentlehomo Yactisi wishes to try electo fishing in the deep holes. To alternate days is the fair way. And, who knows, each of you may discover your own choice near the other man's stake out."
"You are quite right, Hunter," Starns nodded. "And since my two colleagues have chosen to try for a water creature, perhaps we should start along the river."
It was two days, then, before they could work their way into the woods. One part of Hume protested, the more cautious section of his mind was appeased. He saw, beyond the three clients now turning over and sorting space bags, Wass' man glanced at the woods and then back to Starns. And, being acutely aware of all undercurrents here, Hume wondered what the small civ had actually seen.
The camp was complete, a cluster of seven bubble tents not too far from the ship. At least this crowd did not appear to consider that the Hunter was there to do all the serious moving and storing of supplies. All three of the clients pitched in to help, and Wass' man went down to the river to return with half a dozen silver-fins cleaned and threaded on a reed, ready to broil over the cook unit.
A fire in the night was not needed except to afford the proper stage setting. But it was enjoyed. Hume leaned forward to feed the flames, and Starns pushed some lengths of driftwood closer.
"You have said, Hunter, that hunting worlds never contain intelligent native life. Unless the planet is minutely explored how can your survey teams be sure of that fact?" His voice bordered on the pedantic, but his interest was plain.
"By using the verifier." Hume sat crosslegged, his plasta-hand resting on one knee. "Fifty years ago, we would have had to keep rather a lengthy watch to be sure of a free world. Now, we plant verifiers at suitable test points. Intelligence means mental activity of some sort--any of which would be recorded on the verifier."
"Amazing!" Starns extended his plump hands to the flames in the immemorial gesture of a human attracted not only to the warmth of the burning wood, but to its promise of security against the forces of the dark. "No matter how few, or how scattered your native thinkers may be, you record them without missing any?"
Hume shrugged. "Maybe one or two," he grinned, "might get through such a screening. But we have yet to discover a planet with such a sparse native life as that at the level of intelligence."
Yactisi juggled a cup in and out of the firelight. "I agree, this is most interesting." He was a thin man, with scanty drab gray hair and dark skin, perhaps the result of the mingling of several human races. His eyes were slightly sunken, so that it was difficult in this light to read their expression. He was, Hume had already decided, a class one brain and observant to a degree, which could either be a help or a menace. "There have been no cases of failure?"
"None reported," Hume returned. All his life he had relied on machines operating, of course, under the competent domination of men trained to use them properly. He understood the process of the verifier, had seen it at work. At the Guild Headquarters there were no records of its failure; he was willing to believe it was infallible.
"A race residing in the sea now--could you be sure your machine would discover its presence?" Starns continued to question.
Hume laughed. "Not to be found on Jumala, you may be sure of that--the seas here are small and shallow. Such, not to be picked up by the verifier, would have to exist at great depths and never venture on land. So we need not fear any surprises here. The Guild takes no chances."
"As it always continues to assure one," Yactisi replied. "The hour grows late. I wish you rewarding dreams." He arose to go to his own bubble tent.
"Yes, indeed!" Starns blinked at the fire and then scrambled up in turn. "We hunt along the river, then, tomorrow?"
"For water-cat," Hume agreed. Of the three, he believed Chambriss the most impatient. Might as well let him pot his trophy as soon as possible. The ex-pilot deduced there would be little cooperation in exploration from that client until he was satisfied in his own quest.
Rovald, Wass' man, lingered by the fire until the three civs were safe in their bubbles.
"River range tomorrow?" he asked.
"Yes. We can't rush the deal."
"Agreed." Rovald spoke with a curtness he did not use when the civs were present. "Only don't delay too long. Remember, our boy's roaming around out there. He might just be picked off by something before these stumble-footed civs catch up with him."
"That's the chance we knew we'd have to take. We don't dare raise any suspicion. Yactisi, for one, is no fool, neither is Starns. Chambriss just wants to get his water-cat, but he could become nasty if anyone tried to steer him."
"Too long a wait might run us into trouble. Wass doesn't like trouble."
Hume spun around. In the half light of the fire his features were set, his mouth grim. "Neither do I, Rovald, neither do I!" he said softly, but with an icy promise beneath the words.
Rovald was not to be intimidated. He grinned. "Set your fins down, fly-boy. You need Wass--and I'm here to hold his stakes for him. This is a big deal, we won't want any misses!"
"There won't be any--not from my side." Hume stepped away from the fire, approached a post which gleamed with a dull, red line of fire down either side. He pressed a control button. That red line flared into a streak of brilliance. Now encircling the bubble tents and the space ship was a force field: routine protection of a safari camp on a strange world and one Hume had set as a matter of course.
He stood for a long moment staring through that invisible barrier toward the direction of the wood. It was a dark night, there were scudding clouds to hide the stars, which meant rain probably before morning. This was no time to be plagued by uncertain weather.
Somewhere out there Brodie was holed up. He hoped the boy had long ago reached the "camp" so carefully erected and left for his occupancy. The L-B, that stone covered "grave" showing signs of several years' occupancy, was all assembled and constructed to the last small detail. Far less might have deceived the civs in this safari. But as soon as the story of their find leaked, there would be others on the scene, men trained to assess the signs of a castaway's fight for survival. His own Guild training and the ability of Wass' renegade techs should bring them through that test.
What had Starns seen? The glint of sun on the tail of the L-B, tilted now to the sky? Hume walked slowly back to the fire, when he saw Rovald going up the ramp into the spacer. He smiled. Did Wass think he was stupid enough not to guess that the Veep's man would be in com touch with his employer? Rovald was about to report along some channel of the shadow world that they had landed and that the play was about to begin. Hume wondered idly how far and through how many relays that message would pass before it reached its destination.
He stretched and yawned, moving to his sleeping pad. Tomorrow they must find Chambriss a water-cat. Hume shoved Brodie into the back of his mind to center his thoughts on the various ways of delivering, to the waiting sportsman, a fair-sized alien feline.
The lights in the bubbles went out one by one. Within the circle barrier of the force field men slept. And by midnight the rain began to fall, streaming down the sides of the bubbles, soaking the ashes of the fire.
Out of the dark crept that which was not thought, not substance, but alien to the off-world men. But the barrier, meant to deter multi-footed creatures, with wings or no visible limbs at all, proved to be a better protection than its creators had hoped. There was no penetration--only a baffled butting of one force against another. And then the probe withdrew as undetected as it had come.
Only, the thing which had no intelligence, as humankind rated intelligence, did possess the ability to fathom the nature of that artificial barrier. The force field was examined, its nature digested. First approach had failed. The second was now ready--ready as it had not been months before when the first coming of these creatures had alerted the very ancient watchdog on Jumala.
Deep in the darker woods on the mountain sides there was a stirring. Things whimpered in their sleep, protested subconsciously commands they could never understand, only obey. With the coming of dawn there would be a marshaling of hosts, a new assault--not on the camp, but on any leaving its protection. And also on the boy now sleeping in a shallow cave formed by the swept roots of a tree--a tree which had crashed when the L-B landed.
Again, fortune favored Hume. With the dawn the rain was over. There was a cloudy sky overhead, but he believed the day would clear. The roily, rushing water of the river would aid Chambriss' quest. Water-cats holed up in the banks, but rising water often forced them out of such dens. A course parallel to the stream bed could well show them the tracks of one of the felines.
They started off in a group, Hume leading, with Chambriss treading briskly behind him, Rovald bringing up the rear in the approved trail technique. Chambriss carried a needler, Starns was unarmed except for a small protection stunner, his tri-dee box slung on his chest by well-worn carrying straps. Yactisi shouldered an electric pole, wore its control belt buckled about his middle, though Hume had warned him that the storm would prevent any deep hole fishing.
Only a short distance from the campsite they came upon the unmistakable marks of a water-cat's broad paws, pressed in so heavy and distinct a pattern that Hume knew the animal could not be far ahead. The indentations were deep, and he measured the distance between them with the length of his hand.
"Big one!" Chambriss exclaimed in satisfaction. "Going away from the river, too."
That point puzzled Hume slightly. The red coated felines might be washed out of their burrows, but they did not willingly head so sharply away from the water. He squatted on his heels and surveyed the stretch of countryside between them and the distant wood with care.
The grass was this season's, still growing, not tall enough to afford cover for an animal with paws as large as these prints. There were two clumps of brush. It could have holed up in either, waiting to attack any trailer--but why? It had not been wounded, nor frightened by their party, there was no reason for it to set an ambush on its back trail.
Starns and Yactisi dropped back, though Starns was fussing with his tri-dee. Rovald caught up. He had drawn his ray tube in answer to Hume's hand wave. Any action foreign to the regular habits of an animal was to be mistrusted.
Getting to his feet Hume paced along the line of marks. They were fresh--hot fresh. And they still led in a straight line for the woods. With another wave of his hand he stopped Chambriss. The civ was trained in spite of his eagerness and obeyed. Hume left the tracks, made a detour which brought him to a point from which he could study those clumps of brush. No sign except that line of prints pointed to the woods. And if the party kept on, they might well come upon the L-B!
He decided to risk it. But when they were less than a couple of yards from the tree fringe his hand shot up to direct Chambriss to fire towards the quivering bush.
Only, that formless half seen thing, hardly to be distinguished in color from the vegetation, was no water-cat. There was a thin, ragged cry. Then the creature plunged backward, was gone.
"What in the name of nine Gods was that?" Chambriss demanded.
"I don't know." Hume went forward, jerked the needler dart from a tree trunk. "But don't shoot again--not unless you are sure of what you are aiming at!"
5
Moisture from the night's rain hung on the tree leaves, clung in globules to Rynch's sweating body. He lay on a wide branch trying to control the heavy panting which supplied his laboring lungs. And he could still hear the echoes of the startled cries which had come from the men who had threaded through the woods to the up-pointed tail fins of the L-B.
Now he tried to reason why he had run. They were his own kind, they would take him out of the loneliness of a world heretofore empty of his species. But that tall man--the one who had led the party into the irregular clearing about the life boat--
Rynch shivered, dug his nails into the wood on which he lay. At the sight of that man, dream and reality had crashed together, sending him into panic-stricken flight. That was the man from the room--the man with the cup!
As his heart quieted he began to think more coherently. First, he had not been able to find the strong-jaws's den. Then the marks on the ground at the point from which he had fallen and the L-B were here, just as he remembered. But not far from the small ship he had discovered something more--a campsite with a shelter fashioned out of spalls and vines, containing possessions a castaway might have accumulated.
That man would come, Rynch was sure of that, but he was too spent to struggle on.
No, the answer to every part of the puzzle lay with that man. To go back to the ship clearing was to risk capture--but he had to know. Rynch looked with more attention at his present surroundings. Deep mold under the trees here would hold tracks. There might just be another way to move. He eyed the spread of limbs on a neighbor tree.
His journey through those heights was awkward and he sweated and cringed when he disturbed vocal treetop dwellers. He was also to discover that close to the site of the L-B crash others waited.
He huddled against the bole of a tree when he made out the curve of a round bulk holding tight to the tree trunk aloft. Though it was balled in upon itself he was sure the creature was fully as large as he, and the menacing claws suggested it was a formidable opponent.
When it made no move to follow him Rynch began to hope it had only been defending its own hiding place, for its present attitude suggested concealment.
Still facing that featureless blob in the tree, the man retreated, alert for the first sign of advance on the part of the creature above. None came, and he dared to slip around the bole of the tree under which he stood, listening intently for any corresponding movement overhead. Now he was facing that survivor's camp.
Another object crouched in the dark of the lean-to shelter, just as its fellow was on sentry duty in the tree! Only this one did not have the self-color of the foliage to disguise it. Four-limbed, its long forearms curved about its bent knees, its general outline almost that of a human--if a human went clothed in a thick fuzz. The head hunched right against the shoulders as if the neck were very short, or totally lacking, was pear-shaped, with the longer end to the back, and the sense organs of eyes and nose squeezed together on the lower quarter of the rounded portion, with a line of wide mouth to split the blunt round of the muzzle. Dark pits for eyes showed no pupil, iris, or cornea. The nose was a black, perfectly rounded tube jutting an inch or so beyond the cheek surface. Grotesque, alien and terrifying, it made no hostile move. And, since it had not turned its head, he could not be sure it had even sighted him. But it knew he was there, he was certain of that. And was waiting--for what? As the long seconds crawled by Rynch began to believe that it was not waiting for him. Heartened, he pulled at the vine loop, climbed back into the tree.
Minutes later he discovered that there were more than two of the beasts waiting quietly about the camp, and that their sentry line ran between him and the clearing of the L-B. He withdrew farther into the wood, intent upon finding a detour which would bring him out into the open lands. Now he wanted to join forces with his own kind, whether those men were potential enemies or not.
As time passed the beasts closed about the clearing of the camp. Afternoon was fading into evening when he reached a point several miles downstream near the river. Since he had come into the open he had not sighted any of the watchers. He hoped they did not willingly venture out of the trees where the leaves were their protection.
Rynch went flat on the stream bank, made a worm's progress up the slope to crouch behind a bush and survey the land immediately ahead. There stood an off-world spacer, fins down, nose skyward, and grouped not too far from its landing ramp, a collection of bubble tents. A fire burned in their midst and men were moving about it.
Now that he was free from the wood and its watchers and had come so near to his goal, Rynch was curiously reluctant to do the sensible thing, to rise out of concealment and walk up to that fire, to claim rescue by his own kind.
The man he sought stood by the fire, shrugging his arms into a webbing harness which brought a box against his chest. Having made that fast he picked up a needler by its sling. By their gestures the others were arguing with him, but he shook his head, came on, to be a shadow stalking among other shadows. One of the men trailed him, but as they reached a post planted a little beyond the bubble tents he stopped, allowed the explorer to advance alone into the dark.
Rynch went to cover under a bush. The man was heading to the stream bed. Had they somehow learned of his own presence nearby, were they out to find him? But the preparations the tall man had made seemed more suited to going on patrol. The watchers! Was the other out to spy on them? That idea made sense. And in the meantime he would let the other past him, follow along behind until he was far enough from the camp so that his friends could not interfere--then, they would have a meeting!
Rynch's fingers balled into fists. He would find out what was real, what was a dream in this crazy, mixed up mind of his! That other would know, and would tell him the truth!
Alert as he was, he lost sight of the stranger who melted into the dusky cover of the shadows. Then came a quiet ripple of water close to his own hiding place. The man from the spacer camp was using the stream as his road.
In spite of his caution Rynch was close to betrayal as he edged around a clump of vegetation growing half in, half out of the stream. Only a timely rustle told him that the other had sat down on a drift log.
Waiting for him? Rynch froze, so startled that he could not think clearly for a second. Then he noted that the outline of the other's body was visible, growing brighter by the moment.
Minute particles of pale-greenish radiance were gathering about the other. The dark shadow of an arm flapped, the radiance swirled, broke again into pinpoint sparks.
Rynch glanced down at his own body--the same sparks were drifting in about him, edging his arms, thighs, chest. He pushed back into the bushes while the sparks still flitted, but they no longer gathered in strength enough to light his presence. Now he could see they drifted about the vegetation, about the log where the man sat, about rocks and reeds. Only they were thicker about the stranger as if his body were a magnet. He continued to keep them whirling by means of waving hand and arm, but there was enough light to show Rynch the fingers of his other hand, busy on the front panel of the box he wore.
That fingering stopped, then Rynch's head came up as he heard a very faint sound. Not a beast's cry--or was it?
Again those fingers moved on the panel. Was the other sending a message by that means? Rynch watched him check the webbing, count the equipment at his belt, settle the needler in the crook of his arm. Then the stranger left the stream, headed towards the woods.
Rynch jumped to his feet, a cry of warning shaping, but not to be uttered. He padded after the other. There was plenty of time to stop the man before he reached the danger which might lurk under the trees.
However the other was as wary of that dark as if he suspected what might lie in wait there. He angled along northward, avoiding clumps of scattered brush, keeping in the open where Rynch dared not tail him too closely.
Their course, parallel to the woods, brought them at last to a second stream, the size of a river, into which the first creek emptied. Here the other settled down between two rocks with every indication of remaining there for a period.
Thankfully Rynch found his own lurking place from which he could keep the other in sight. The light points gathered, hung in a small luminous cloud over the rocks. But Rynch had prudently withdrawn under a bush, and the scent of its aromatic leaves must have discouraged the sparks, for no such crown came to his sentry post.
Drugged with fatigue, the younger man slept, awaking to full day, a fog of bewilderment and disorientation. To open his eyes to this blue-green pocket instead of to four dirty walls, was wrong.
Remembering, he started up and slunk down the slope, angry at his failure. He found the other's track, not turning back as he had half feared, cleanly printed on level spots of wet earth--eastward now. What was the purpose of the other's expedition? Was he going to use the open cut through which the river ran as a way of penetrating the wooded country?
Now Rynch considered the problem from his own angle. The man from the spacer had made no effort to conceal his trail, in fact it would almost seem that he had deliberately gone out of his way to leave boot prints on favorable stretches of ground. Did he guess that Rynch lurked behind, was now leading him on for some purpose of his own? Or were those traces left to guide another party from the camp?
To advance openly up the stream bed was to invite discovery. Rynch surveyed the nearer bank. Clumps of small trees and high growing bushes dotted that expanse, an ideal cover.
He was hardly out of sight of the bush which had sheltered him when he heard the coughing roar of a water-cat. And the feline was attacking an enemy, enraged to the pitch of vocal frenzy. Rynch ran a zigzag course from one clump of bush to the next. That sound of snarling, spitting hate ended in mid-cry as Rynch crawled to the river bank.
The man from the spacer camp had been the focus of a three-prong attack from a female and her cubs. Three red bodies were flat and still on the gravel as the off-worlder leaned back against a rock breathing heavily. As Rynch sighted him, he stooped to recover the needler he had dropped, lurched away from the rock towards the water, and so blundered straight into another Jumalan trap.
His unsteady foot advancing for another step came down on a slippery surface, and he fell forward as his legs were engulfed in the trap burrow of a strong-jaws. With a startled cry the man dropped the needler again, clawed at the ground about him. Already he was buried to his knees, then his mid-thighs, in the artificial quicksand. But he had not lost his head and was jerking from side to side in an effort to pull free.
Rynch got to his feet, walked with slow deliberation down to the river's brink. The trapped prisoner had shied halfway around, stretching out his arms to find a firmer grip on some rock large and heavy enough to anchor him. After his first startled cry he had made no sound, but now, as he sighted Rynch, his eyes widened and his lips parted.
The box on his chest caught on a stone he had dragged to him in a desperate try for support. There was a spitting of sparks and the stranger worked frantically at the buckle of the webbing harness to loosen it and toss the whole thing from him. The box struck one of the dead water-cats, flashed as fur and flesh were singed.
Rynch watched dispassionately before he caught the needler, jerking it away from the prisoner. The man eyed him steadily, and his expression did not alter even when Rynch swung the off-world weapon to center its sights on the late owner.
"Suppose," Rynch's voice was rusty sounding in his own ears, "we talk now."
The man nodded. "As you wish, Brodie."
6
"Brodie?" Rynch squatted on his heels.
Those gray eyes, so light in the other's deeply tanned face, narrowed the smallest fraction, Rynch noted with an inner surge of triumph.
"Were you looking for me?" he added.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"We found an L-B--we wondered if there were survivors."
Slowly Rynch shook his head. "No--you knew I was here. Because you brought me!" He fashioned his suspicions into one quick thrust.
This time there was not the slightest hint of self-betrayal from the other.
"You see," Rynch leaned forward, but still well out of reach from the captive, "I remember!"
Now there was a faint flicker of answer in the man's eyes. He asked quietly:
"What do you remember, Brodie?"
"Enough to know that I am not Brodie. That I did not get here on the L-B, did not build that camp."
He ran one hand over the stock of the needler. Whatever motive lay behind this weird game into which he had been unwillingly introduced, he was now sure that it was serious enough to be dangerous.
"You have no cup this time."
"So you do remember." The other accepted that calmly. "All right. That need not necessarily spoil our plans. You have nothing to return to on Nahuatl--unless you liked the Starfall." His voice was icy with contempt. "To play our roles will be for your advantage, too." He paused, his gaze centering on Rynch with the intensity of one willing the desired answer out of his inferior.
Nahuatl. Rynch caught at that. He had been on or in Nahuatl--a planet? a city? If he could make this man believe he remembered everything clearly, more than just the scattered patches that he did....
"You had me planted here, then came back to hunt me. Why? What makes Rynch Brodie so important?"
"Close to a billion credits!" The man from the spacer leaned well back in the hole, his arms spread flat out on either side to keep his body from sinking deeper. "A billion credits," he repeated softly.
Rynch laughed. "You'll have to think of a better one than that, fly-boy."
"The stakes would have to be high, wouldn't they, for us to go to all this staging? You've been conditioned, Brodie, illegally brain-channeled!"
To Rynch the words meant nothing. If they ever had, that was gone, lost in the maze of other things which had been blotted out of his mind by the Brodie past. But he would not give the other the advantage of knowing his uncertainty.
"You need a Brodie for a billion credits. But you don't have a Brodie now!"
To his surprise the prisoner in the earth trap laughed. "I'll have a Brodie when he's needed. Think about a good share of a billion credits, boy, keep thinking of that hard."
"I will."
"Thoughts alone won't work it, you know." For the first time there was a hint of some emotion in the man's voice.
"You mean I need you? I don't think so. I've stopped being a plaque for someone to play across the board." That expression brought another momentary flash of hazy memory--a smoky, crowded room where men slid counters back and forth across tables--not one of Brodie's edited recalls, but his own.
Rynch stood up, started for the rise of the slope, but before he topped that he glanced back. The damaged com box still smoked where its wearer had flung it. Now the man was already straining forward with both arms, trying to reach a rock just a finger space beyond. Lucky for him the burrow was an old one, uninhabited. In time he should be able to work his way out. Meanwhile there was the whole of a wide countryside in which Rynch could discover a hideout--no one would find him now against his will.
He tried, as he strode along, to piece together more of his memories and the scanty information he had had from the Nahuatl man. So he had been "brain-channeled," given a set of false memories to fit a Rynch Brodie whose presence on this world meant a billion credits for someone. He could not believe that this was the spaceman's game alone, for hadn't he spoken of "we"?
A billion credits! The sum was fantastic, the whole story unbelievable.
There was a hot stab of pain on his instep. Rynch cried out, stamped hard. One of the clawed scavengers was crushed. The man leaped back in time to avoid another step into a swarming mass of them at work on some unidentifiable carrion. Staring down at the welter of scaled, segmented bodies and busy claws, he gasped.
Three dead water-cats were near the man trapped in the pit. Bait to draw these voracious eaters straight to the prisoner. Rynch's empty stomach heaved. He swung around, ran across the grassy verge of the upper bank, hoping he was not too late.
As he half fell, half slid down to the water, he saw that the man had managed to hook the webbing of the smouldering box to him, was casting it out and dragging it back patiently, aiming at the nearest rock of size, fruitlessly attempting to hitch its straps over the round of stone.
Rynch dashed on, caught at that loop of webbing, and dug his heels into the loose gravel as he began a steady pull. With his aid the other crawled out, lay panting. Rynch grabbed the man's shoulder, jerked him away from the body of the female water-cat. He was sure he had seen a telltale scurrying around the smaller of the dead cubs.
The man straightened, glanced toward Rynch who was backing off, the needler up and ready between them.
"My turn to ask why?"
Then his gaze followed Rynch's. The smallest cub twitched from side to side. Not with any faint trace of life, but under the attack of the scavengers. More scuttled towards the second cub.
"Thanks!" The stranger was on his feet. "My name is Ras Hume. I don't think I told you that when we last met."
"This doesn't make any difference. I'm not your man, not Brodie!"
Hume shrugged. "You think about it, Brodie, think about it with care. Come back to camp with me and--"
"No!" Rynch interrupted. "You go your way, I go mine from here on."
Again the other laughed. "Not so simple as all that, boy. We've started something which can't just be turned off as easily as you snap down a switch." He took a step or two in Rynch's direction.
The younger man brought up the needler. "Stay right where you are! Your game, Hume? All right, you play it--but not with me."
"And what are you going to do, take to the woods?"
"What I do is my business, Hume."
"No, my business, too, very much so. I'm giving you a warning, boy, in return for your help here." He nodded at the pit. "There's something in that woods--something which didn't show up when the Guild had their survey exploration here."
"The watchers." Rynch retreated step by step, keeping the needler ready. "I saw them."
"You've seen them!" Hume was eager. "What do they look like?"
In spite of his desire to be rid of Hume, Rynch found himself answering that in detail, discovering that on demand he could recall minutely the description of the animal hiding in the tree, the one who had waited in the shelter, and those he had glimpsed drawing in about the L-B clearing.
"No intelligence." Hume turned his head to survey the distant wood. "The verifier reported no intelligence."
"These watchers--you don't know them?"
"No. Nor do I like what you've seen of them, Brodie. So I'm willing to call a truce. The Guild believed Jumala an open planet, our records accredited it so. If that is not true we may be in for bad trouble. As an Out-Hunter I am responsible for the safety of three civs back there in the safari camp."
Hume made sense, much as Rynch disliked admitting it. And the Hunter must have read something of his agreement in his face for now he nodded and added briskly:
"Best place now is the safari camp. We'll head back at once."
Only time had run out. A noise sounded with a metallic ring. Rynch whirled, needler cocked. A glittering ball about the size of his fist rolled away from contact with a boulder, came to rest in the deep depression of one of Hume's boot tracks. Then another flash through the air, a clatter as a second ball spun across a patch of gravel.
The balls seemed to appear out of the air. Displaying rainbow glints they rolled in a semicircle about the two men. Rynch stooped, then Hume's fingers latched about his wrist, dragging his hand away from the globe. It was only then that he realized that sharp action had detached his attention from that ball he had wanted to take up.
"Don't touch!" Hume barked. "And don't look at that too closely! Come along!" He pulled Rynch forward through the yet unclosed arc of the globe circle.
Hume detoured around the feasting scavengers and brought Rynch with him at a trot. They could hear behind them the plop and tinkle of more globes. Glancing back Rynch saw one fall close to the bodies of the water-cats.
"Wait a minute!" He pulled back against Hume's hold. Here was a chance to see what effect that crystal had on the clawed carrion eater.
There was a change in the crystal: Yellow now, then red--red as the few scraps of fur remaining on the rapidly disappearing body.
"Look!"
The pulsating carpet which had covered the dead feline ceased to move. But towards that spot rolled two more of the globes, approaching the scavengers. Now the clawed things were stirring, dropping away from their prey. They spread out in a patch, moved purposefully forward. Behind them, as guardians might head a flock, rolled three globes, flushing scarlet, then more.
Hume's hand came up. From the cone tip of the ray tube spat a lance of fire, to strike the middle crystal. The beam was reflected into the block of scavengers. Scaled bodies, twisted, crisped, were ash. But the crystal continued to roll at the same pace.
"Move!" Hume's other hand hit Rynch's shoulder, knocked him forward in an impetuous shove which nearly took him off his feet. Both men began to run.
"What--what are those things?" Rynch appealed between panting breaths.
"I don't know--and I don't like their looks. They're between us and the safari camp if we keep to the river--"
"Between us and the river now." Rynch saw that glittering swoop through the air, marked the landing of a ball near the water's edge.
"Might be trying to box us in. But that's not going to work. See--ahead there where that log's caught between two rocks? Run out on that when we reach there and take to the water. I don't think those things can float and if they sink to the bottom that ought to fix them as far as we are concerned."
Rynch ran, still holding the needler. He balanced along the drift log Hume had pointed out and a jump sent him floundering in the brown stream thigh deep. Hume joined him, his face grim.
"Downstream--"
Rynch looked. One shape--two--three--Clearly detailed where matching vegetation gave them no covering camouflage, the watchers had come out of the woods at last. A line of them were walking quietly and upright towards the humans, their blue-green fuzz covering like a mist under the direct rays of the sun. Quiet as they seemed at present, the things out of the Jumalan forest were a picture of sheer brute strength as they moved.
"Let's get out of here--fast!"
The men kept moving, and always after them padded that silent line of green-blue, pushing them farther and farther away from the safari camp, on towards the rising mountain peaks. Just as the globes had shaken the scavengers loose from their meal and sent them marching on, so were the humans being herded for some unknown purpose.
At least, once the march of the beasts began, they saw and heard no more of the globes. And as they reached a curve in the river, Hume stopped, swung around, stood studying the line of decorously pacing animals.
"We can pick them off with the needler or the ray."
The Hunter shook his head. "You don't kill," he recited the credo of his Guild, "not until you are sure. There is a method behind this, and method means intelligence."
Handling of X-tee creatures and peoples was a part of Guild training. In spite of his devious game here on Jumala, Hume was Guild educated and Rynch was willing to leave such decisions to him.
The other held out the ray tube. "Take this, cover me, but don't use it until I say so. Understand?"
He waited only for Rynch's nod before he started, at a deliberate pace which matched that of the beasts, back through the river shallows to meet them. But that advancing line halted, stood waiting in silence. Hume's hands went up, palm out, he spoke slowly in Basic-X-Tee clicks:
"Friend." This was all Rynch could make out of that sing-song of syllables Rynch knew to be a contact pattern.
The dark eye pits continued to stare. A light breeze ruffled the fuzz covering of wide shoulders, long muscular arms. Not a head moved, not one of those heavy, rounded jaws opened to emit any answering sound. Hume halted. The silence was threatening, a portending atmosphere spread from the alien things as might a tangible wave.
For perhaps two breaths they stood so, man facing alien. Then Hume turned, walked back, his face set. Rynch offered him the ray tube.
"Fight our way out?"
"Too late. Look!"
Moving lines of blue-green coming down to the river. Not five or six now--a dozen--twenty. There was a small trickle of moisture down the side of the Hunter's brown face.
"We're penned--except straight ahead."
"But we're going to fight!" Rynch protested.
"No. Move on!"
7
It was some time before Hume found what he wanted, an islet in midstream lacking any growth and rising to a rough pinnacle. The sides were seamed with crevices and caves which promised protection for one's back in any desperate struggle. And they had discovered it none too soon, for the late afternoon shadows were lengthening.
There had been no attack, just the trailing to herd the men to the northeast. And Rynch had lost the first tight pinch of panic, though he knew the folly of underestimating the unknown.
They climbed with unspoken consent, going clear to the top, where they huddled together on a four-foot tableland. Hume unhooked his distance lenses, but it was toward the rises of the mountains that he aimed them, not along the back trail.
Rynch wriggled about, studied the river and its banks. The beasts there were quiet, blue-green lumps, standing down on the river bank or squatting in the grass.
"Nothing." Hume lowered the lenses, held them before his broad chest as he still watched the peaks.
"What did you expect?" Rynch snapped. He was hungry, but not hungry enough to abandon the islet.
Hume laughed shortly. "I don't know. Only I'm sure they are heading us in that direction."
"Look here," Rynch rounded on him. "You know this planet, you've been here before."
"I was one of the survey team that approved it for the Guild."
"Then you must have combed it pretty thoroughly. How is it that you didn't know about them?" He gestured to their pursuers.
"That is what I would like to ask a few assorted experts right about now," Hume returned. "The verifiers registered no intelligent native life here."
"No native life." Rynch chewed that over, came up with the obvious explanation. "All right--so then maybe our blue-backed friends are imported. Suppose someone's running a private business of his own here and wants to get rid of visitors?"
Hume looked thoughtful. "No." He did not enlarge upon his negative. Sitting down he pulled a cylinder container from a belt loop and shook out four tablets, handing two to Rynch, mouthing the others.
"Vita-blocks--good for twenty-four hours sustenance."
The iron rations depended upon by all exploring services did not have the satisfying taste of real food. However Rynch swallowed them dutifully before he descended with Hume to river level. The Hunter splashed water from the stream into a depression in the rock and dropped a pinch of clarifying powder into it.
"With the dark," he announced, "we might be able to get through their lines."
"You believe that?"
Hume laughed. "No--but one doesn't overlook the factor of sheer luck. Also, I don't care to finish up at the place they may have chosen for us." He tilted his chin to study the sky. "We'll take watches and rest in turn. No use trying anything until it is dark--unless they start to move in. You take the first one?"
As Rynch nodded, Hume edged back into a crevice as a shelled creature withdrawing to natural protection, going to sleep as easily as if he could control that state by will. Rynch, watching him curiously for a second or two before climbing up to a position from which he judged he could see all sides of their refuge, determined not to be surprised.
The watchers were crouched down, waiting with that patience which had impressed him from his first sight of the camp sentries back in the forest. There was no movement, no sound. They were simply there--on guard. And Rynch did not believe that the darkness of night would bring any relaxation of that vigilance.
He leaned back, feeling the grit of the rocky surface against his bare back and shoulders. Under his hand was the most efficient and formidable weapon known to the frontier worlds, from this post he could keep the enemy under surveillance and think.
Hume had had him planted here, in the first place, provided with the memory of Rynch Brodie--the reward for him was to be a billion credits. Too much staff work had gone into his conditioning for just a small stake.
So Rynch Brodie was on Jumala, and Hume had come with witnesses to find him. Another part of his mind stood aloof now, applauding the clearness of his reasoning. Rynch Brodie was to be discovered a castaway on Jumala. Only, matters had not worked out according to Hume's plan. In the first place he was certain he had not been intended to know that he was not Rynch Brodie. For a fleeting second he wondered why that conditioning had not completely worked, then went back to the problem of his relationship with Hume.
No, the Out-Hunter had expected a castaway who would be just what he ordered. Then this affair of the watchers--creatures the Guild men had not found here a few months ago--Rynch felt a small cold chill along his spine. Hume's game was one thing, something he could understand, but the silent beasts were another and somehow far more disturbing threat.
Rynch edged forward, watching the mist on the water, his brain striving to solve this other puzzle as neatly as he thought he had discovered the reason for his scrambled memories and his being on Jumala.
The mist was an added danger. Thick enough and those watchers could move in under its curtain. A needler was efficient, yes, but it could wipe out only an enemy at which it was aimed. Blind cross sweeping with its darts would only exhaust the clip without results, save by lucky chance.
On the other hand, suppose they could turn that same gray haze to their own advantage--use it to blanket their withdrawal? He was about to go to Hume with that suggestion when he sighted the new move in their odd battle with the aliens.
A wink of light--two more--blinking, following the erratic course by the pull of the stream. All bobbing along toward the rugged coastline of the islet. Those had appeared out of nothingness as suddenly as the globes when this chase had begun.
The globes and the winking lights on the water connected in his mind, argued new danger. Rynch took careful aim, fired a dart at one which had grounded on the pointed tip of the rocks where the river current came together after its division about the island. For the first time Rynch realized those things below were moving against the current--they had come upstream as if propelled.
He had fired and the light was still there, two more coming in behind it, so that now there was an irregular cluster of them. And there was activity on the water-washed rocks before them. Just as the scavengers had moved ahead of the globes on land, so now aquatic creatures had come out of the river, were flopping higher on the islet. And those lights were changing color--from white to reddish-yellow.
Rynch scrabbled with one hand in a rock crevice, found a stone he had noted earlier. He hurled that at the cluster of lights. There was a puff of brilliant red, one was gone. Something flopping on the rocks gave a mewling cry and somersaulted back into the water. Then a finger of mist drew between Rynch and the lights which were now only faint, glowing patches. He swung down from his perch, shook Hume awake.
The Out-Hunter made that instant return to full consciousness which was another defense for the men who live long on the rim of wild worlds.
"What--?"
Rynch pulled him forward. The mist had thickened, but there were more of those ominous lights at water level, spreading down both sides of the point, forming a wall. Dark forms moved out of the water ahead of them, flopping on the rocks, pressing higher, towards the ledge where the men stood.
"Those globes--I think they're moving in the river now." Rynch found another stone, took careful aim, and smashed a second one. "The needler has no effect on them," he reported. "Stones do--but I don't know why."
They searched about them in the crevices for more ammunition, laying up a line of fist-sized rocks, while the lights gathered in, spreading farther and farther down the shores of the islet. Hume cried out suddenly, and aimed his ray tube below. The lance of its blast cut the dark as might a bolt of lightning.
With a shrill squeal, a blot shadow detached from the slope immediately below them. A vile, musky scent, now mingled with the stench of burning flesh, set them coughing.
"Water spider!" Hume identified. "If they are driving those out and up at...."
He fumbled at his equipment belt and then tossed an object downward to disintegrate in a shower of fiery sparks. Wherever those sparks touched rock or ground they flared up in tall thin columns of fire, lighting up the nightmare on the rocks and up the ledges.
Rynch fired the needler, Hume's ray tube flashed and flashed again. Things squealed, or grunted, or died silently, while clawing to reach the upper ledges. He could not be sure of the nature of some of those things. One, armed and clawed as the scavengers, was nearly as large as a water-cat. And a furry, man-legged creature, with a double-jawed head, bore also a ring of phosphorescent eyes set in a complete circle about its skull. They were alien life routed out of the water.
"The lights--smash the lights!" Hume ordered.
Rynch understood. The lights had driven these attackers out of the river. Put out the lights and the boiling broth of water dwellers might conceivably return to their homes. He dropped the needler, took up stones and set about the business of finishing off as many of the lights as he could.
Hume fired into the crawling mass, pausing only once to send another of those flame bombs crashing to illuminate the scene. The water creatures bewildered, clumsy out of their element, were so far at his mercy. But their numbers, in spite of the piling dead, were still a dangerous threat.
Rynch tore gapping holes in that line of lights. But he could see, through the mist, more floating sparks, gathering to take their places, perhaps herding before them more water things to attack. Except for those few gaps he had wrought, the islet was now completely enveloped.
"Ahhhh--" Hume's voice arose in a roar of anger and defiance. He stabbed his ray down at a spot just below their ledge. A huge segmented, taloned leg kicked, caught on the edge of the stone at the level of their feet, twisted aloft again and was gone.
"Up!" Hume ordered. "To the top!"
Rynch caught up two handsful of stones, holding them to his chest with his left arm as he made a last cast to see one light puff out in answer. Then they both scrambled on to that small platform at the top of the islet. By the aid of the burning flame-torches the Hunter had set, they could see that most of the rocky slopes below them now squirmed with a horrible mass of water life.
Where Hume had fired his ray there was fierce activity, as the living feasted on the slain and quarreled over the bounty. But from other quarters the crawling advance pressed on.
"I have only one more flame flare," Hume stated.
One more flare--then they would be in the dark with the mist hiding the forward-moving enemy.
"I wonder if they are watching out there?" Rynch scowled into the dark.
"They--or what sent them. They know what they are doing."
"You mean they must have done this before?"
"I think so. That L-B back there--it made a good landing, and there are supplies missing from its lockers."
"Which you removed--" Rynch countered.
"No. There might have been real castaways landed here. Not that we found any trace of them. Now I can guess why--"
"But you Guild men were here, and you didn't run into this!"
"I know." Hume sounded baffled. "Not a sign then."
Rynch threw the last of his stones, heard it clink harmlessly against a rock. Hume balanced an object on the palm of his hand.
"Last flare!"
"What's that? Over there?"
Rynch had sighted the flashing out of the dark from the river bank, making a pattern of flickers which bore no relation to the infernal lights at the water's edge.
Hume's ray tube pointed skyward as he answered with a series of short bursts.
"Take cover!" The call came weirdly out over the water, the tone dehumanized. Hume cupped his mouth with one hand, shouted back:
"We're on top--no cover."
"Then flatten down--we're blasting!"
They flattened, lay almost in each other's arms, curled on that narrow space. Even through his closed eyelids Rynch caught the flash of vivid, man-made lightning crashing first on one side of the islet and then on the other, and sweeping every crawling horror out of life, into odorous ash. The backlash of that blast must have caught the majority of the lights also. For when Rynch and Hume cautiously sat up, they saw only a handful of widely scattered and dulling globes below.
They choked, coughed, rubbed watering eyes as the fumes from the scorched rocks wreathed up about their perch.
"Flitter with life line--above you!"
That voice had come out of what should have been empty air over their heads. A gangling line trailed across their bodies, a line with a safety belt locked to it, and a second was uncoiling in a slow loop as they watched.
In unison they grabbed for those means of escape, buckled the belts about them.
"Haul away!" Hume called. The lines tightened, their bodies swung up clear of the blasted river island, as their unseen transport headed for the eastern shore.
8
A subdued but steady light all around him issued from stark gray walls. He lay on his back in an empty cell-room. And he'd better be on the move before Darfu comes to enforce a rising order with a powerful kick or one of these backhanded blows which the Salarkian used to reduce most humans to helpless obedience.
Vye blinked again. But this wasn't his cubby hole at the Starfall, his nose as well as his eyes told him that. There was no hint of uncleanliness or corruption here. He sat up stiffly, looked down at his own body in dull wonder. The only covering on his bare, brown self was a wide, scaled belt and a loin cloth. Clumsy sandals shod his feet, and his legs, up to thigh level, were striped with healing scratches and blotched with bruises.
Painfully, with mental processes as stiff as his arms and his legs, he tried to think back. Sluggishly, memory associated one picture with another.
Last night--or yesterday--Rynch Brodie had been locked in here. And "here" was one of the storage compartments of a spacer belonging to a man named Wass. It had been Wass' pilot in the flitter which snaked them from the river islet where the monsters had besieged them.
This was a concealed, fortified camp--Wass' hideout. And he was a prisoner with a very uncertain future, depending upon the will of the Veep and a man named Hume.
Hume, the Out-Hunter, had shown no surprise when Wass stood up in the lamplight to greet the rescued. "I see you have been hunting." His eyes had moved from Hume to Rynch and back again.
"Yes--but that does not matter!" the Hunter had returned impatiently.
"No? Then what does?"
"This is not a free world, I have to report that. Get my civs off planet before something happens to them!"
"I thought all safari worlds were certified as free," Wass countered.
"This one isn't. I don't know how or why. But that fact has to be reported and the civs lifted--"
"Not so fast." Wass' voice had been quiet, almost gentle. "Such a report would interest the Patrol, would it not?"
"Of course--" Hume began and then stopped abruptly.
Wass smiled. "You see--complications already. I do not wish to explain anything to the Patrol. Nor do you either, my young friend, not when you stop to think about what might result from such explanations."
"There wouldn't have been any trouble if you'd kept away from Jumala." Hume's control had returned; both voice and manner were under tight rein. "Weren't Rovald's reports explicit enough to satisfy you?"
"I have risked a great deal on this project," Wass replied. "Also, it is well from time to time for a Veep to check upon his field operatives. Men do not grow careless when personal supervision is ever in mind. And it is well that I did arrive here, is it not, Hunter? Or would you have preferred remaining on that island? Whether any of our project may be salvaged is a point we must consider. But for the moment we make no moves. No, Hume, your civs will have to take their chances for a time."
"And if there is trouble?" Hume challenged him. "A report of an alien attack will bring in the Patrol quickly enough."
"You forget Rovald," Wass corrected. "The chance that one of your civs can activate and transmit from the spacer is remote, and Rovald will see that it is impossible. You have picked up Brodie, I see."
"Yes."
"No!" What had possessed him at that moment to contradict? He had realized the folly of his outburst the moment Wass had looked at him.
"This becomes more interesting," the Veep had remarked with that deceptive gentleness. "You are Rynch Brodie, castaway from the Largo Drift, are you not? I trust that Out-Hunter Hume has made plain to you our concern with your welfare, Gentlehomo Brodie."
"I'm not Brodie." Having taken the leap into the dangerous truth he was stubborn enough to continue swimming.
"I find this enlightening indeed. If you are not Brodie--then who are you?"
That had been it. At that moment he couldn't have told Wass who he was, explain that his patchwork of memories had gaping holes.
"And you, Out-Hunter," Wass' reptilian regard had moved again to Hume, "perhaps you have an adequate explanation for this discovery."
"None of his doing," he burst out, "I remembered--"
Some inexplicable emotion made Rynch defend Hume then.
Hume laughed, and there was a reckless edge to that sound. "Yes, Wass, your techs are not as good as they pretend to be. He didn't follow the pattern of action they set for him."
"A pity. But there are always errors when one deals with the human factor. Peake!" One of the other three men moved towards them. "You will escort this young man to the spacer, see him safely stowed for the present. Yes, a pity. Now we must see just how much can be salvaged."
Then Vye had been brought into the shop, supplied with a ration container, and left to himself within this bare-walled cabin to meditate upon the folly of talking too freely. Why had he been so utterly stupid? Veeps of Wass' calibre did not swim through the murky channels of the Starfall, but their general breed had smaller but just as vicious representatives there, and he knew the man for what he was, ruthless, powerful and thorough.
A sound, slight, but easily heard in the silent vacuum of the storage cabin, alerted him. The crack of the sliding panel door opened and Vye crouched, his hand cupping the only possible weapon, the ration container. Hume edged through, shut the door behind him. He stood there, his head turned so his ear rested against the wall; obviously he was listening.
"You brain-smoothed idiot!" The Hunter's voice was a thread of whisper. "Why couldn't you have kept that swinging jaw of yours closed last night? Now listen and listen good. This is a slim try, but it's one we have to take."
"We?" Vye was startled into asking.
"Yes, we! By rights I ought to leave you right here to do the rest of your big, brave speechmaking for Wass' benefit. If I didn't need you, that's just what I would do! If it weren't for those civs--" His head snapped back, cheek to panel, he was listening again. After a long moment his whisper came once more. "I don't have time to repeat this. In about five minutes Peake'll be here with rations. I'll leave this door unlatched. There's another storage cabin across the corridor--see if you can hide there, then trick him into getting in here and lock him in. Got it?"
Vye nodded.
"Then--make for the exit port. Here." He snapped a packet loose from his belt. "This is a flare pak, you saw how they worked on the island. When you get on the ramp beyond the atom lamp, throw this. It should hit the camp force barrier. And the result ought to hold their attention. Then you head for the flitter. Understand?"
"Yes."
The flitter, yes, that was the perfect escape. With a camp force barrier on, any fugitive could only break out by going straight up.
Hume gazed at him soberly, listened once more, and then went. Vye counted a slow five before he followed. The cabin across the corridor was open, just as Hume had promised. He slipped inside, waited.
Peake was coming now, the metallic plates on his spaceboots clicking in regular pattern of sound. He earned another ration container and crooked it in his arm as he snapped up the lock bar on the other cabin.
There was an exclamation of surprise. Vye went into action. His hand, backed by all the strength of his thrusting arm, thumped between Peake's shoulders, sending him staggering into the prison compartment. Before the other could recover either his balance or his wits, Vye had the panel shut, the bar locked into place.
He ran down the corridor to the well ladder, swung down its rungs with an agility born of necessity. Then he was in the air lock, getting his bearings. The flitter stood to his left, the flashing atom lamp, where the men were gathered, to his right.
Vye stepped out on the ramp. He wiped his sweating hand across his thigh. There had to be no failures in the tossing of the flare pak.
Choosing a spot, not directly in line with the lamp but near enough to dazzle the men, he hurled it with all the force he could muster. Then he was running down the ramp, forward to the area of the ship.
There was a flash--shouting--Vye curbed the impulse to look back, darted for the flitter. He jerked open the cabin compartment, scrambled into the cramped space behind the pilot's seat, leaving that free for Hume's quick entrance. More shouting--now he saw the lines of fire wavering from earth to sky along the barrier.
A black shape put on a burst of speed, was silhouetted against that flaming wall, then passed the spacer, grabbed at the open cockpit, and slid in behind the controls. Hume pulled the levers with flying fingers. They arose vertically at a pace which practically slapped Vye's stomach up into the lower regions of his throat.
The searing line of at least one blaster reached after them--too slowly, too low. He heard Hume grunt, and they again leaped higher. Then the Hunter spoke:
"Half an hour at the most--"
"The safari camp?
"Yes."
They no longer climbed. The flitter was boring forwards on a projectile flight, into the dark of the night.
"What're those?" Vye suddenly leaned forward.
Had some of the stars across the space void broken free from their fixed orbits? Flecks of light, moving in an arc, headed towards the speeding flitter.
Hume hit a button. Again they arose in a violent leap above those wandering lights. But ahead on this new level more such dots flocked, moving fast to close in on the flyer.
"A straight ram course," Hume muttered, more to himself than Vye.
Again the flyer drove forward in a rising thrust of speed. Then the smooth purr of the propulsion unit faltered, broke into protesting coughs. Hume worked over the controls, beads of sweat showing on his forehead and cheek in the gleam of the cabin light.
"Deading--deading out!"
He brought the flitter around in a wide circle, the purr smoothed out once more in a steady reassuring beat.
"Out run them!"
But Vye feared they were back again on the losing side of a struggle with the unknown alien power. As they had been herded along the river, so now they were being pushed across the sky, towards the mountains. The enemy had followed them aloft!
Some core of stubborn will in Hume would not yet allow him to admit that. Time and time again he climbed higher--always to meet climbing, twisting, spurting lines of lights which reacted on the engine of the flitter and threatened it with complete failure.
Where they were now in relation to Wass' camp or that of the safari, Vye had no idea, and he guessed that Hume could not be too certain.
Hume switched on the flitter's com unit, tried a channel search until he picked up a click of signal--the automatic reply of the safari camp. His fingertip beat out in return the danger warning, then the series of code sounds to give an edited version of what must be guarded against.
"Wass has a man in your camp. His skin is in just as much danger as the rest. He may not relay it to the Patrol, but he'll keep the force barrier up and the civs inside--anything else would be malicious neglect and a murder charge when the Guild check tape goes in. This call is on the spacer tape now and will be a part of that--he can't possibly alter such a report and he knows it. This is the best we can do now--"
"We're close to the mountains, aren't we?"
"Do you know much about this part of the country?" Vye persisted. Hume's knowledge might be their only hope.
"Flew over the range twice. Nothing to see."
"But there has to be something there."
"If there is, it didn't show up during our survey." Hume's voice was dull with fatigue.
"You're a Guild man, you've dealt with alien life forms before--"
"The Guild doesn't deal with intelligent aliens. That's X-Tee Patrol business. We don't land on any planet with unknown intelligent life forms. Why should we court trouble--couldn't run a safari in under those conditions. X-Tee certified Jumala as a wild world, our survey confirmed that."
"Someone or something landed here after you left?"
"I don't believe so. This is too well organized an action. And since we have a satellite guard in space, any ship landing would be taped and recorded. No such record appeared on the Guild screens. One small spacer--such as Wass'--could slip through by knowing procedure--just as he did. But to land all those beasts and equipment they'd need a regular transport. No--this must be native." Hume leaned forward again, flipped a switch.
A small red light answered on the central board.
"Radar warn-off," he explained.
So they wouldn't end up smeared against some cliff face anyway. Which was only small comfort amid terrifying possibilities.
Hume had taken the precaution just in time. The light blinked faster, and the speed of the flyer was checked as the automatic control triggered by the warn-off came into command. Hume's hands were still on the board, but a system of relays put safety devices into action with a speed past that which a human pilot could initiate.
They were descending and had to accept that, since the warn-off, operating for the sake of the passengers, had ruled that move best. The directive would glide the flitter to the best available landing. It was only moments before the shock gear did touch surface. Then the engine was silent.
"This is it," Hume observed.
"What do we do now?" Vye wanted to know.
"Wait--"
"Wait! For what?"
Hume consulted his planet-time watch in the light of the cabin.
"We have about an hour until dawn--if dawn arrives here at the same time it does in the plains. I don't propose to go out blindly in the dark."
Which made sense. Except that to sit here, quietly, in their cramped quarters, not knowing what might be waiting outside, was an ordeal Vye found increasingly harder to bear. Maybe Hume guessed his discomfort, maybe he was following routine procedure. But he turned, thumbed open one of the side panels in Vye's compartment, and dug out the emergency supplies.
9
They sorted the crash rations into small packs. A blanket of the water-resistant, feather-heavy Ozakian spider silk was cut into a protective covering for Vye. That piece of tailoring occupied them until the graying sky permitted them a full picture of the pocket in which the flitter had landed. The dark foliage of the mountain growth was broken here by a ledge of dark-blue stone on which the flyer rested.
To the right was a sheer drop, and a land slip had cut away the ledge itself a few feet behind the flitter. There was only a steadily narrowing path ahead, slanting upward.
"Can we take off again?" Vye hoped to be reassured that such a feat was possible.
"Look up!"
Vye backed against the cliff wall, stared up at the sky. Well above them those globes still swam in unwearied circles, commanding the air lanes.
Hume had cautiously approached the outer rim of the ledge, was using his distance glasses to scan what might lie below.
"No sign yet."
Vye knew what he meant. The globes were overhead, but the blue beasts, or any other fauna those balls might summon, had not yet appeared.
Shouldering their packs they started along the ledge. Hume had his ray tube, but Vye was weaponless, unless somewhere along their route he could pick up some defensive and offensive arm. Stones had burst the lights of the islet, they might prove as effective against the blue beasts. He kept watch for any of the proper size and weight.
The ledge narrowed, one shoulder scraped the cliff now as they rounded a pinnacle to lose sight of the flitter. But the globes continued to hover over them.
"We are still traveling in the direction they want," Vye speculated.
Hume had gone to hands and knees to negotiate an ascent so steep he had to search for head and toe holds. When they were safely past that point they took a breather, and Vye glanced aloft again. Now the sky was empty.
"We may have arrived, or are about to do so," said Hume.
"Where?"
Hume shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. And both of us can be wrong."
The steep ascent did not quite reach the top of the cliff around the face of which the ledge curled. Instead their path now leveled off and began to widen out so that they could walk with more confidence. Then it threaded into a crevice between two towering rock walls and sloped downward.
A path unnaturally smooth, Vye thought, as if shaped to funnel wayfarers on. And they came out on the rim of a valley, a valley centered with a wood-encircled lake. They stepped from the rock of the passage onto a springy turf which gave elastically to their tread.
Vye's sandal struck a round stone. It started from its bed in the black-green vegetation, turned over so that round pits stared eyelessly up at him. He was faced by the fleshless grin of a human skull.
Hume went down on one knee, examined the ground growth, gingerly lifted the lace of vertebrae forming a spine. That ended in a crushed break which he studied briefly before he laid the bones gently back into the concealing cover of the mossy stuff.
"That was done by teeth!"
The cup of green valley had not changed, it was the same as it had been when they had emerged from the crevice. But now every clump of trees, every wind-rippled mound of brush promised cover.
Vye moistened his lips, diverted his eyes from the skull.
"Weathered," Hume said slowly, "must have been here for seasons, maybe planet years."
"A survivor from the L-B?" Yet this spot lay days of travel from that clearing back in the plains.
"How did he get here?"
"Probably the same way we would have, had we not holed up on that river island."
Driven! Perhaps the lone human on Jumala herded up into this dead-end valley by the globes or the blue beasts. "This process must have been in action for some time."
"Why?"
"I can give you two reasons." Hume studied the nearest trees narrowly. "First--for some purpose, whatever we are up against wants all interlopers moved out of the lowlands into this section, either to imprison them, or to keep them under surveillance. Second--" He hesitated.
Vye's own imagination supplied a second reason, a revolting one he tried to deny to himself even as he put it into words:
"That broken spine--food...." Vye wanted Hume to contradict him, but the Hunter only glanced around, his expression already sufficient answer.
"Let's get out of here!" Vye was fighting down panic with every ounce of control he could summon, trying not to bolt for the crevice. But he knew he could not force himself any farther into that sinister valley.
"If we can!" Hume's words lingered direly in his ears.
Stones had smashed the globes by the river. If they still waited out there Vye was willing to try and break them with his bare hands, should escape demand such action. Hume must have agreed with those thoughts, he was already taking long strides back to the cliff entrance.
But that door was closed. Hume's foot, raised for the last step toward the crevice corridor, struck an invisible obstruction. He reeled back, clutching at Vye's shoulder.
"Something's there!"
The younger man put out his hand questingly. What his fingers flattened against was not a tight, solid surface, but rather an unseen elastic curtain which gave a little under his prodding and then drew taut again.
Together they explored by touch what they could not see. The crevice through which they had entered was now closed with a curtain they could not pierce or break. Hume tried his ray tube. They watched thin flame run up and down that invisible barrier, but not destroy it.
Hume relooped the tube. "Their trap is sprung."
"There may be another way out!" But Vye was already despondently sure there was not. Those who had rigged this trap would leave no bolt holes. But because they were human and refused to accept the inevitable without a fight, the captives set off, not down into the curve of the cup, but along its slope.
Tongues of brush and tree clumps brought about detours which forced them slowly downward. They were well away from the crevice when Hume halted, flung up a hand in silent warning. Vye listened, trying to pick up the sound which had alarmed his companion.
It was as Vye strained to catch a betraying noise that he was first conscious of what he did not hear. In the plains there had been squeaking, humming, chitterings, the vocalizing of myriad grass dwellers. Here, except for the sighing of the wind and a few insect sounds--nothing. All inhabitants bigger than a Jumalan fly might have long ago been routed out of the land.
"To the left." Hume faced about.
There was a heavy thicket there, too stoutly grown for anything to be within its shadow. Whatever moved must be behind it.
Vye looked about him frantically for anything he could use as a weapon. Then he grabbed at the long bush knife in Hume's belt sheath. Eighteen inches of tri-fold steel gleamed wickedly, its hilt fitting neatly into his fist as he held it point up, ready.
Hume advanced on the bush in small steps, and Vye circled to his left a few paces behind. The Hunter was an expert with ray tube; that, too, was part of the necessary skill of a safari leader. But Vye could offer other help.
He shrugged out of the blanket pack he had been carrying on his back, tossed that burden ahead.
Out of cover charged a streak of red, to land on the bait. Hume blasted, was answered by a water-cat's high-pitched scream. The feline writhed out of its life in a stench of scorched fur and flesh. As Vye retrieved his clawed pack Hume stood over the dead animal.
"Odd." He reached down to grasp a still twitching foreleg, stretched the body out with a sudden jerk.
It was a giant of its species, a male, larger than any he had seen. But a second look showed him those ribs starting through mangy fur in visible hoops, the skin tight over the skull, far too tight. The water-cat had been close to death by starvation; its attack on the men probably had been sparked by sheer desperation. A starving carnivore in a land lacking the normal sounds of small birds and animal life, in a valley used as a trap.
"No way out and no food." Vye fitted one thought to another out loud.
"Yes. Pin the enemy up, let them finish off one another."
"But why?" Vye demanded.
"Least trouble that way."
"There are plenty of water-cats down on the plains. All of them couldn't be herded up here to finish each other off; it would take years--centuries."
"This one's capture may have been only incidental, or done for the purpose of keeping some type of machinery in working order," Hume replied. "I don't believe this was arranged just to dispose of water-cats."
"Suppose this was started a long time ago, and those who did it are gone, so now it goes on working without any real intelligence behind it. That could be the answer, couldn't it?"
"Some process triggers into action when a ship sets down on this portion of Jumala, maybe when one planet's under certain conditions only? Yes, that makes sense. Only why wasn't the first Patrol explorer flaming in here caught? And the survey team--we were here for months, cataloguing, mapping, not a whisper of any such trouble."
"That dead man--he's been here a long time. And when did the Largo Drift disappear?"
"Five--six years ago. But I can't give you any answers. I have none."
* * * * *
It began as a low hum, hardly to be distinguished from the distant howling of the wind. Then it slid up scale until the thin wail became an ululating scream torturing the ears, dragging out of hiding those fears of a man confronting the unknown in the dark.
Hume tugged at Vye, drew the other by force back into the brush. Scratched, laced raw by the whip of branches, they stood in a small hollow with the drift of leaves high about their ankles. And the Hunter pulled into place the portions of growth they had dislodged in their passage into the thicket's heart. Through gaps they could see the opening where lay the body of the water-cat.
The wail was cut off short, that cessation in itself a warning. Vye's body, touching earth with knee and hand as he crouched, picked up a vibration. Whatever came towards them walked heavily.
Did the smell of death draw it now? Or had it trailed them from the closed gate? Hume's breath hissed lightly between his teeth. He was sighting the ray tube through a leaf gap.
A snuffling, heavier than a man's panting. A vast blot, which was neither clearly paw nor hand, swept aside leaves and branches on the other side of the small clearing, tearing them casually from the shrubs.
What shuffled into the open might be a cousin of the blue beasts. But where they had given only an impression of brutal menace, this was savagery incarnate. Taller than Hume, but hunched forward in its neckless outline, the thing was a monster. And over the round of the lower jaw, tusks protruded in ugly promise.
Being carnivorous and hungry, it scooped up the body of the water-cat and fed without any prolonged ceremony. Vye, remembering the crushed spine of the human skeleton, was sickened.
Done, it reared on hind feet once again, the pear-shaped head swung in their direction. Vye was half certain he had seen that tube-nose expand to test the air and scent them.
Hume pressed the button of the ray tube. That soundless spear of death struck in midsection of that barrel body. The thing howled, threw itself in a mad forward rush at their bush. Hume snapped a second blast at the head, and the fuzz covering it blackened.
Missing them by a precious foot, the creature crashed straight on through the thicket, coming to its knees, writhing in a rising chorus of howls. The men broke out of cover, raced into the open where they took refuge behind a chimney of rock half detached from the parent cliff. Down the slope the bushes were still wildly agitated.
"What was that?" Vye got out between sobbing breaths.
"Maybe a guardian, or a patrol stationed to dispose of any catch. Probably not alone, either." Hume fingered his ray tube. "And I am down to one full charge--just one."
Vye turned the knife he held around in his fingers, tried to imagine how one could face up to one of those tusked monsters with only this for a weapon. But if that thing had companions, none were coming in answer to its dying wails. And after it had been quiet for a while Hume motioned them out of hiding.
"From now on we'll keep to the open, better see trouble like that before it arrives. And I want to find a place to hole up for the night."
They trailed along the steep upper slope and in time found a place where a now dried stream had once formed a falls. The empty watercourse provided an overhang, not quite a cave, but shelter. Gathering brush and stones, they made a barricade and settled behind it to eat sparingly of their rations.
"Water--a whole lake of it down there. The worst of it is that a water supply in a dry country is just where hunters congregate. That lake's entirely walled in by woodland and provides cover for a thousand ambushes."
"We might find a way out before our water bulbs fail," Vye offered.
Hume did not answer directly. "A man can live for quite a while on very thin rations, and we have tablets from the flitter emergency supplies. But he can't live long without water. We have two bulbs. With stretching that is enough for two days--maybe three."
"We ought to get completely around the cliffs in another day."
"And if we do find a way out, which I doubt, we're still going to need water for the trek out. It's right down there waiting until our need is greater than either our fear or our cunning."
Vye moved impatiently, his blanket-clad shoulders scraping the rock at their backs. "You don't think we have a chance!"
"We aren't dead. And as long as a man is breathing, and on his feet, with all his wits in his skull, he always has a chance. I've blasted off-world with odds stacked high on the other side of the board." He flexed that plasta-flesh hand which was so nearly human and yet not by the fraction which had changed the course of his life. "I've lived on the edge of the big blackout for a long time now--after a while you can get used to anything."
"One thing I would like--to get at the one who set this trap," commented Vye.
Hume laughed with dry humor. "After me, boy, after me. But I think we might have to wait a long time for that meeting."
10
Vye crawled weakly from the area of a rock outcrop. The sun, reflected from the cliff side, was a lash of fire across his emaciated body. His swollen tongue moved a pebble back and forth in his dry mouth. He stared dimly down the slope to that beckoning platter of water open under the sun, rimmed with the deadly woodland.
What had happened? They had gone to sleep that first night under the ledge of the dried waterfall. And all of the next day was only a haze to him now. They must have moved on, though he could remember nothing, save Hume's odd behavior--dull-eyed silence while stumbling on as a brainless servio-robot, incoherent speech wherein all the words came fast, running together unintelligibly. And for himself--patches of blackout.
At some time they had come to the cave and Hume had collapsed, not rousing in answer to any of Vye's struggles to awaken him. How long they had been there Vye could not tell now. He had the fear of being left alone in this place. With water perhaps Hume could be returned to consciousness, but that was all gone.
Vye believed he could scent the lake, that every breeze up slope brought its compelling enticement. Just in case Hume might awake to a state of semi-consciousness and wander off, Vye tethered him with blanket bonds.
Vye fingered Hume's knife, which had been painstakingly lashed to a trimmed shaft of wood. Since he had emerged from that clouding of mind which still gripped the Hunter, he had done what he could to prepare for another attack from any roving beast. And he also had Hume's ray tube--its single charge to be used only in dire need.
Water! His cracked lips moved, ejected the pebble. Their four empty water bulbs were in the front of his blanket tunic, pressing against his ribs. It was now--or die, because soon he would be too weak to make the attempt at all. He darted for the first stand of bush downhill.
As the brooding silence of the valley continued, he reached the edge of the wood unhindered, intent on his mission with a concentration which shut out everything save his need and the manner of satisfying it.
He squatted in the bush, eyeing the length of woodland ahead. Then he tried the only action he had been able to think out. That beast Hume had killed had been too heavy to swing up in trees. But Vye's own weight now did not prohibit that form of travel.
With spear and ray tube firmly attached to him, Vye climbed into the first tree. A slim chance--but his only defense against a possible ambush. A wild outward swing brought him, heart-thudding, to the next set of limbs. Then he had a piece of luck, a looped vine tied together a whole group of branches from one treetop to the next.
Hand grips, balance, sometimes a walk along a branch--he threaded towards the lake. Then he came to a gap. With hands laced into tendrils, Vye hunched to look down on a beaten ribbon of gray earth--a trail well used by the evidence of its pounded surface.
That area had to be crossed on foot, but his passage through the brush below would leave traces. Only--there was no other way. Vye checked the lashings of his weapons again before leaping. Almost in the same instant his sandals hit the packed earth he was running. His palms skinned raw on rough bark as he somehow scrambled aloft once more.
No more vines, but broad limbs shooting well out. He dropped from one to another-stopped for breath--listened.
The dark gloom of the wood was broken by sunlight. He was at the final ring of trees. To get to the water he must descend again. A dead trunk extended over the water. If he could run out on that and lower the bulb, it could work.
Eerie silence. No flying things, no tree dwelling reptiles or animals, no disturbance of any water creature on the unruffled surface of the lake. Yet the sensation of life, inimical life, lurking in the depths of the wood, under the water, bore in upon him.
Vye made the light leap to the bole of the dead tree, balanced out on it over the water, moving slowly as the trunk settled a little under his weight. He hunkered down, brought out the first bulb tied fast to a blanket string.
The water of the river had been brown, opaque. But here the liquid was not so cloudy. He could see snags of dead branches below its surface.
And something else!
Down in those turgid depths he made out a straight ridge running with a trueness of line which could not be nature's unassisted product. That ridge joined another in a squared corner. He leaned over, strained his eyes to follow through the murk the farther extent of those two ridges. Looked along both pointed protuberances aimed at the surfaces of the lake, like fangs in an open jaw. Down there was something--something artificially fashioned which might be the answer to all their questions. But to venture into the lake himself--he could not do it! If he could bring the Out-Hunter to his senses the other might find the solution to this puzzle.
Vye filled his bulbs, working speedily, but still studying what he could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish, allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray--perhaps even white. He lowered his last bulb.
Down in the bleached forest of dead branches, well to one side of the mysterious walls, there was movement, a slow rolling of a shadow so hidden by a stirring of bottom mud that Vye could not make out its true form. But it was rising to the bulb.
Vye hated to lose a single precious drop. Once he might have the luck to make this journey unmolested, a second time the odds could be too high.
A flash--the slowly rising shadow was transformed into a whizzing spear of attack. Vye snapped the bulb out of the water just as a nightmarish, armored head arose on a whiplash of coiled, scaled neck, and a blunt nose thudded against the tree trunk with a hollow boom. Vye clung to his perch as the thing flopped back into deeper water from a froth of beaten foam, leaving a patch of odorous scum and slime to bracelet the waterlogged wood.
He ran for the shelter of the trees to get away. This time there was no rear, no thump of feet in warning. Out of the ground itself, or so it seemed to Vye's startled terror, reared one of the tusked beasts. To reach his tree and its dubious safety he had to wind past that chimera. And the creature waited with a semblance of ease for him to come to it.
Vye brought around his spear. The length of the haft might afford him a fighting chance if he could send the point home in some vulnerable spot. Yet he knew that the beasts were hard to kill.
The mouth opened in a wide grin of menace. Vye noted a telltale tightening of shoulder muscles. It was going to rush for him now with those clawed forepaws out to rip.
To wait was to court disaster. Vye shouted, his battle cry piercing the silence of the lake and wood. He sprang, aiming the spear point at the beast's protuberant belly, and then swerved to the side as the knife bit home, raking his weapon to open a gaping wound.
The spear was jerked from Vye's hold as both those taloned paws closed on it. Then the creature pulled it free, snapped the haft in two. Vye fired a short blast from the ray tube before it could turn on him, saw fur-fuzz afire, as he ran for the tree.
Beneath its branches he looked back. The beast was pawing at the burning fur on its head, and he had perhaps a second or two. He jumped and his fingers caught on the low hanging branch, then he made a superhuman effort, was up out of the path of the thing which rushed blindly for the tree, shrieking in frenzied complaint.
The huge body crashed against the trunk with force which nearly shook Vye from his hold. As the giant forepaws belabored the wood, strove to lift the body from the ground, Vye worked his way out on another branch. In the end it was the shaking of that limb under him which aided his swing to the next tree. And from there he traveled recklessly, intent only on getting out of the woods as fast as he could.
By the noise the beast was still assaulting the tree, and Vye marveled at its vitality, for the belly wound would long ago have killed any creature he knew. Whether it could trace his flight aloft, or whether its howls would bring more of its kind, he could not guess, but every second he could gain was all important now.
At the gap over the trail he hesitated. That path ran in the direction of the open, and to go on foot meant the possibility of greater speed. Vye slipped from the bough, hit the ground, and ran. His ragged lungsful of air came in great gasps and he doubted if he could take the exertion of more tree travel now. He raced down the path.
Those mewling cries were louder, he was sure of it. Now he heard the thump of the beast's blundering pursuit behind him. But its bulk and hurts slowed it. In the open he could find cover behind a rock, use the ray again.
The trees began to thin. Vye summoned power for a last burst of speed, came out of the shadow of the wood as might a dart expelled from a needler. Before him, up slope, was the closed door of the valley. And moving in from the left was another of the blue beasts.
He could not retreat to the trees. But the newcomer was moving with the same ponderous self-confidence its fellow had shown earlier. Vye dodged right, headed for the rocks by the gap. As he pulled himself into that temporary fortification, the wounded beast dragged out of the woods below. He thought it was blind, yet some instinct drove it after him.
Shaking from fatigue, Vye steadied his forearm on the top of the rock, brought up the ray tube. Less than two yards away now was the deceptively open mouth of the gap. If he threw himself at that, would the elasticity of the unseen curtain hurl him back into the claws of the enemy?
He fired his blast at the head of the unwounded beast. It screeched, threw out its arms, and one of those paws struck against its wounded fellow. With a cry, that one flung itself at its companion in the hunt, and they tangled in a body-to-body battle terrible in its utter ferocity. Vye edged along the cliff determined to reach the cave and Hume. And the two blue things seemed intent on finishing each other off.
The one from the wood was done, the fangs of the other ripping out its throat. Tearing viciously the victor made sure of its kill, then its seared head came up, swung about to face Vye. He guessed it was aware of his movements whether it could see or not.
But he was not prepared for the speed of its attacking lunge. Heretofore the creatures had given the impression of brute strength rather than agility. And he had been almost fatally deceived. He jumped backwards, knowing he must elude that attack, for he could not survive hand-to-hand combat with the alien thing.
There was a moment of dazed disorientation, a weird sensation of falling through unstable space in which there had never been and never would be firm footing again. He was rolling across rock--outside the curtain of the gap.
He sat up, the feeling of being adrift in unmeasurable nothingness making him sick, to watch mistily as the blue beast came to a halt. Whimpering it turned, but before it reached the level of the woods, it sagged to its knees, fell face forward and was still, a destructive machine no longer controlled by life.
Vye tried to understand what had happened. He had somehow broken through that barrier which made the valley a prison. For a moment all that mattered was his freedom. Then he looked apprehensively behind him along the road to the open, more than half expecting to see a gathering of the globes, or of the less impressive lowland beasts that acted as herders. But there was nothing.
Freedom! He dragged himself to his feet. Free to go! He slipped Hume's ray tube back into his belt. Hume was still in the valley!
Vye rubbed his shaking hands across his face. Through the barrier and free--but Hume was back there, without a weapon, defenseless against any questing beast able to nose him out. Sickly, without water and protection, he was a dead man even while he still breathed.
Keeping one hand against the wall of the gap in support, Vye started to walk, not out of the gap towards the distant lowlands, but back into the valley, forcing himself to that by his will alone and screaming inside against such suicidal folly. He put out his hand tentatively when he reached the two points of rock where that curtain had hung. There was no obstruction--the barrier was down! He must get back to Hume.
Still keeping his wall hold, Vye lurched through the gate, was once more in the valley. He stood swaying, listening. But once again there was silence, not even the wind moved through trees or bushes. Placing one foot carefully before the other he went on towards Hume's cave. The haze which had clouded his thinking processes since that first morning's awakening in this bowl was gone now. Except for the physical weakness that weighted his body, he felt once more entirely alive and alert.
Wriggling in the cave's entrance was the Hunter. He had freed the bonds Vye had put on his legs, but his hands were still tied. His face, grimy, sweat-covered, was turned up to the sunlight, and his eyes were again bright with reason.
Vye found the strength to run the last few feet between them. He was fumbling with those ties about Hume's wrists as he blurted out the news. The barrier was out--they could go.
Then he was bringing one of those precious bulbs, raising it to Hume's eager mouth, squeezing a portion of its contents between the man's cracked and bleeding lips.
Somehow they made that trip back to the valley gate. When they saw their goal, Hume broke from Vye's hold, tottered forward with a cry not far removed from a sob. He rebounded to slip full length to the ground and lie there. Sobbing dryly, his gaunt face, eyes closed, turned up to the sky. The trap had snapped shut once again.
"Why--why?" Vye found he was repeating the same words over and over, his gaze blank, unfocussed, yet turned to the woods of the lake.
"Tell me what happened again."
Vye's head came around. Hume had pulled himself up so that his shoulders rested against the rock wall. His plasta-hand was out-flung, slipping up and down what seemed empty air, but which was the barrier against freedom. And now his eyes seemed entirely sane.
Slowly, hesitating between words, Vye went over the full account of his visit to the lake, his retreat before the beasts, his fortunate stumble through the gap.
"But you came back."
Vye flushed. He was not going to try to explain that. Instead he said:
"If it went away once, it can again."
Hume did not press the subject of his return. Rather he fastened upon the end of that action with the wounded beast, made Vye go through it verbally a third time.
"There is just this," he said when the other was done. "When you fell you were not thinking of the barrier at all--and your wits were working again. You had come out of the daze we both had."
Vye tried to remember, decided that the Hunter was correct. He had been trying to elude the charge of the beast, only, fear and that desperate desire had occupied his mind at that moment. But what did that signify?
To test just what he did not know, he crawled now to Hume's side, put up his own hand to the space where the plasta-flesh palm slid back and forth on nothingness. But he almost fell on his face, forward into the gap. Where he had been expecting the resistance of the unseen curtain there had been nothing at all! He turned to Hume with the expression of a man who had been stunned by an unexpected blow.
11
"It is open for you!" Hume broke the quiet first. His eyes were very bleak in his bony face.
Vye stood up, took one step and was on the other side of the curtain where Hume's hand still found substance. He came back with the same lack of hindrance. Yes, to him there was no longer a barrier. But why--why him when Hume was still a prisoner?
The Hunter raised his head so his eyes could meet Vye's with the authority of an order. "Go, get away while you can!"
Instead Vye dropped down beside the other. "Why?" he asked baldly. And then the most obvious of all answers came.
He glanced at Hume. The Hunter's head lolled back against the rock which supported him, his eyes were closed now, and he had the look of a man who had been driven to the edge of endurance and was now willing to relinquish his grip and let go.
Deliberately Vye brought up his right hand, balled his fingers into a fist. And just as deliberately he struck home, square on the point of that defenseless chin. Hume sagged, would have slipped down the surface of the rock had Vye's hands not caught in his armpits.
Since he had not the strength left to get to his feet with such a burden, Vye crawled, dragging the inert body of the Hunter with him. And this time, as he had hoped, there was no resistance at the gap. Unconscious, Hume was able to cross the barrier. Vye stretched him as comfortably flat as he could, used a portion of their water on his face until he moaned, muttered, and raised his hand feebly to his head.
Then those gray eyes opened, focussed on Vye.
"What--"
"We're both through now, both of us!" The younger man saw Hume glance around him with waking belief.
"But how--?"
"I knocked you out, that's how," Vye returned.
"Knocked me out? I crossed when I was unconscious!" Hume's voice steadied, strengthened. "Let me see!" He rolled over on his side, threw out his arm, and this time the hand found no wall. For him, too, the barrier was gone.
"Once through, you are free," he added wonderingly. "Maybe they never foresaw any escapes." He struggled up, sitting with his hands hanging loosely between his knees.
Vye turned his head, looked down the trail. The length of distance lying between them and the safari camp now faced them with a new problem. Neither of them could make that trek on foot.
"We're out, but we aren't back--yet," Hume echoed his thought.
"I was wondering, if this door is open--" Vye began.
"The flitter!" Again Hume's mind matched his. "Yes, if those globes aren't hanging around just waiting for us to try."
"They might act only to get us here, not to keep us once we're in." That might be wishful thinking, they wouldn't know until they tried to prove it.
"Give me a hand." Hume held out his own, let Vye pull him to his feet. Weak as he was, he was clear-eyed, plainly clear-headed once more. "Let's go!"
Together they went back through the gap, then tested the absence of the barrier once more, to make sure. Hume laughed. "At least the front door remains open, even if we find the back one closed."
Vye left him sitting by that entrance while he made a quick trip to the cave to pick up the small pack of supplies left them. When he returned they crammed tablets into their mouths, drank feverishly of the lake water, and, with the stimulation of the new energy, set off along the cliff face.
"This wall in the lake," Hume asked suddenly, "you are sure it is artificial?"
"Runs too straight to be anything else, and those projections are evenly spaced. I don't see how it could be natural."
"We'll have to be sure."
Vye thought of that attacking water creature. "No diving in there," he protested. Hume smiled, a stretch of skin far too tight over his jaw now.
"Not us, at least not us now," he agreed. "But the Guild will send another survey."
"What could be the reason for all this?" Vye helped his companion over the loose debris of a cliff slide.
"Information."
"What?"
"Someone--or something--picked our brains while we were out of our heads. Or--" Hume paused suddenly, looked directly at Vye. "I have a vague feeling that you were able to keep going a lot better than I was. That so?"
"Some of the time," Vye admitted.
"That checks. Part of me knew what was going on, but was helpless while that other thing," his smile of moments earlier was wiped away, there was a chill edge in his voice, "picked over my brains, sorted out what it wanted."
Vye shook his head. "I didn't feel that way. Just thick-headed--as if I were sleep walking and yet awake."
"So it took me over, but didn't go all the way with you. Why? Another question for our list."
"Maybe--maybe Wass' techs fixed it so I couldn't be brain-picked, as you call it," Vye offered.
Hume nodded. "Could be--would well be. Come on." He pressed the pace now.
Vye turned to look down the slope suspiciously. Had Hume another warning of menace out of the wood? He could sight no movement there. And from this distance the lake was a topaz sheet of calm which could hide anything. Hume was already several paces ahead, scrambling as if the valley monsters were again on their track.
"What's the matter?" Vye demanded, as he caught up.
"Night coming." Which was true. Then Hume added, "If we can reach the flitter before sunset, we'll have a chance to fly over the lake down there, to make a taping of it before we go."
The energy of the tablets strengthened them so that by the time they reached the crevice door they were moving with their former agility. For a single second Hume hesitated before that slit, almost as if he feared the test he must make. Then he stepped forward and this time into freedom.
They reached the ledge where the flitter perched just as they had seen it last. How long ago that had been they could not have told, but they suspected that days of haze hung in between. Vye searched the sky. No globes winking there--just the flyer alone.
He took his old seat behind the pilot, watched Hume test the relays and responses in the quick run down of a man who has done this chore many times before. But the other gave a little sigh of relief when he finished.
"She's all right, we can lift."
Again they both looked aloft, half fearing to see those malignant herders wink into being to forbid flight. But the sky was as serenely clear of even a drifting cloud as they could hope. Hume pressed a button and they arose vertically with an even progress totally unlike the leap which had taken them out of Wass' camp.
Well above the cliff wall they hovered, and were able to see below the round bowl of the valley prison. Hume touched controls, the flitter descended slowly just above the center of the lake. And from this position they were able to sight the other peculiarity of that body of water, that it was perfectly oval in shape, far too perfect to be an undeveloped product of nature. Hume took a round disk from his equipment belt, fitted it carefully into a slot on the control board and pressed the button below. Then he sent the flitter in a weaving zigzag course well above the surface of the water, so that eventually the flyer passed over every foot of its surface.
And from above, in spite of the turgid quality of the liquid, they could see what did rest on the bottom of that oval. The wall with its sharp corner which Vye had noted from shore level was only part of a water covered erection. It made a design when seen from overhead, a six-pointed star surrounding an oval and in the midst of that oval a black blot which they could not identify.
Hume brought the flitter over in one last sweep. "That's it. We have a full taping."
"What do you think it is?"
"A device set there by an intelligent being, and set a long time ago. This valley wasn't arranged over night, six months ago--or even a year ago. We'll have to let the experts tell us when and for what reason. Now, let's head for home!"
He brought the flitter up and over the valley wall, flying southwest so that they passed over the gap which was the main entrance to the trap. And now he tried the com unit, endeavoring to pick up a signal on which they could beam in for a safe ride.
"That's odd." Under Hume's control the direction finder passed back and forth without bringing any answering code click from the mike. "We may be too far in the mountains to pick up the beam. I wonder...." He swept the needle in another direction, slightly to the left.
A crackle spat from the mike. Vye could not read code but the very fury and intensity of that sound suggested panic--even terror.
"What's that?"
Hume spoke without looking away from the control board. "Alarm."
"From the safari?"
"No. Wass." For a long second Hume sat very still, his fingers quiet. The flitter was on the automatic course, taking them out of the mountains, and Vye thought that their air speed was such they were already well removed from that sinister valley.
Hume made a slight adjustment to a dial, and the flitter banked, coming around on another course. Once more he spun the finder of the com. This time he was answered with a series of well-spaced clicks which lacked the urgency of that other call. Hume listened until the code rattled into silence again.
"They're all right at the safari camp."
"But Wass is in trouble. So what does that matter?" Vye wanted to know.
"It matters this much." Hume spoke slowly as if he must convince himself as well as Vye. "I'm the Guild man on Jumala, and the Guild man is responsible for all civs."
"You can't call him your client!"
Hume shook his head. "No, he's no client. But he's human."
It narrowed down to that when a man was on the frontier worlds--humans stood together. Vye wanted to deny it, but his own emotions, as well as the centuries of age-old tradition, argued him down. Wass was a Veep, one of the criminal parasites dabbling in human misery along more than one solar lane. But he was also human and, as one of their own species, had his claim on them.
Vye watched Hume take over the controls, felt the flitter answer another change of course, then heard the frantic yammer of the distress call as they leveled off to ride its beam in to the hidden camp.
"Automatic." Hume had turned down the volume of the receiver so that the clicks in the mike no longer were so strident. "Set on maximum and left that way."
"They had a force barrier around the camp and they knew about the globes and the watchers." Vye tried to imagine what had happened in that woods clearing.
"The barrier might have shorted. And without the flitter they would have been pinned."
"Could have taken off in the spacer."
"Wass doesn't have the reputation of letting any project get out of his hands."
Vye remembered. "Oh--your billion credit deal."
To his surprise Hume laughed. "Seems all very far and out of orbit now, doesn't it, Lansor? Yes, our billion credit deal--but that was thought out before we knew there were more players around the table than we counted. I wonder...."
But what he wondered he did not put into words and a moment later he added over his shoulder, "Better try to get some rest, boy. We've some time to a set-down."
Vye did sleep, deeply, dreamlessly. And he roused after a gentle shaking to see a beam of light in the sky ahead, though around them was the solid darkness of night.
"That's a warning," Hume explained. "And I can't raise any reply from the camp except a repeat of the distress call. If there is anyone there now, he can't or won't answer."
Against that column of light they could make out the sky-pointed taper of the spacer and the auto-pilot landed them beside that ship in the middle of an area well lighted by the steady shaft of light from the tripod standing where the atom lamp had been on the night they had made their escape from camp.
Climbing stiffly from the small flyer they advanced with caution. A very few minutes later Hume slid his ray tube back into its belt loop.
"Unless they've holed up in the spacer--and I can't see why they'd do that--this camp's deserted. And they haven't taken any equipment with them except maybe a few items they could back-pack."
The ship proved as empty of life as the campsite. A wall seat pulled out too hastily so that it was jammed awry, the com cabin suggested that the leave-taking, when and for what reason, had been a matter of some emergency. Hume did not touch the tape set to keep on broadcasting the call for assistance.
"What now?" Vye wanted to know as they completed the search.
"The safari camp first--and a call for the Patrol."
"Look here," Vye set down the ration container he had found, was emptying it with vast satisfaction of one who had been too long on tablets, "if you beam the Patrol you'll have to talk, won't you?"
Hume went on fitting new charges into his ray tube. "The Patrol has to have a full report. There's no way of bypassing that. Yes, we'll have to give all the story. You needn't worry." He snapped closed the load chamber. "I can clear you all the way. You're the victim, remember."
"I wasn't thinking about that."
"Boy." Hume tossed the tube up in the air, caught it in his plasta-hand. "I went into this deal with my eyes wide open--why doesn't matter very much now. In fact," he stared beyond Vye out into the empty, lighted camp, "I've begun to wonder about a lot of things--maybe too late. No--we'll call the Patrol and we'll do it not because it is Wass and his men out there, but because we're human and they're human, and there's a nasty set-up here which has already sucked in other humans for its own purposes."
The skeleton in the valley! And how very close they had been themselves to joining that unknown in his permanent residence.
"So now we make time--back to the safari camp. Get our message off to the Patrol and then we'll try to trace Wass and see what we can do. Jumala is off a regular route. The Patrol won't be here tomorrow at sunrise, no matter how much we wish a scouter would planet then."
Vye was quiet as he stowed in the flitter again. As Hume had said, events moved fast. A little while ago he had wanted to settle with this Out-Hunter, wring out of him not only an explanation for his being here, but claim satisfaction for the humiliation of being moved about to suit some others' purposes. Now he was willing to defeat Wass, bring in the Patrol, go up against whatever hid in that lake up there, providing Hume was not the loser. He tried to think why that was so and could not, he only knew it was the truth.
They were both silent as they took off from Wass' deserted camp, sped away over the black blot of the woodland towards the safari headquarters on the plains. There were stars above again but no globes. Just as they had won their freedom from the valley, so they moved without escort on the plains.
But the lights were there--not impinging on the flitter, or patrolling along its line of flight. No, they hung in a glowing cluster ahead when in the dawn the flitter shot away from the woods, headed for the landmark of the safari camp. A crown of lights circled over the camp site, as if those below were in a state of siege.
Hume aimed straight for them and this time the bobbing circle split wide open, broke to left and right. Vye looked below. Though the grayness of the morning was still hardly more than dusk he could not miss those humps spaced at intervals on the land, just beyond the unseen line of the force barrier. The lights above, the beasts below, the safari camp was under guard.
12
"There is only one way they could be moving--toward the mountains." Hume stood in the open space among the bubble tents, facing him the four men of the camp, the three civs and Rovald. "You say it's been seven days, planet time, since I left here. They may have been five days on that trail. If possible we have to stop them before they reach that valley."
"A fantastic story." Chambriss wore the affronted expression of a man who expected no interference with his own concerns. Then catching Hume's eye he added, "Not that we doubt you, Hunter. We have the evidence in those dumb brutes waiting out there. However, by your own story, this Wass is an outside-the-law Veep, on this planet secretly for criminal purposes. Surely there is no reason for us to risk our safety in his behalf. Are you certain he is in any danger at all? You and this young man here have, by your testimony, been into the enemies' territory and have been able to get out again."
"Through a series of fortunate chances which might never occur again." Hume was patient, too patient, Rovald seemed to think. His hand moved, he was holding a ray tube so that a simple movement of the wrist could send a crisping blast across all the rest of the party.
"I say, stop this yapping and get out there and pick up the Veep!"
"I intend to--after I call the Patrol."
Rovald's tube was now aimed directly at Hume. "No Patrol!" he ordered.
"This wrangling has gone far enough." It was Yactisi who spoke with an authority which startled them all. And as their attention swung to him, he was already in action.
Rovald cried out, the weapon spun from his fingers, fingers which were slowly reddening. Yactisi nodded with satisfaction and he held his electo pole ready for a second attack. Vye scooped up the tube which had whirled across the ground to strike against his borrowed boot.
"I'll set the call for the Patrol, then I'll try to locate Wass," Hume stated.
"Sensible procedure," Yactisi approved in his dry voice. "You believe that you are now immune to whatever force this alien installation controls?"
"It would seem so."
"Then, of course, you must go."
"Why?" Chambriss countered for the second time. "Suppose he isn't so immune after all? Suppose he gets out there and is captured again? He's our pilot--do you want to be planet bound here?
"This man is also a pilot." Starns indicated Rovald, who was nursing his numb hand.
"Since he, too, is one of these criminals, he's not to be trusted!" Chambriss shot back. "Hunter, I demand that you take us off planet at once! And it is only fair to inform you that I also intend to prefer charges against you and against the Guild. Empty world! Just how empty have we found this world?"
"But, Gentlehomo," Starns showed no signs of any emotion but eager curiosity, "to be here at this time is a privilege we could not hope to equal except by good fortune! The T-Casts will be avid for our stories."
What had that to do with the matter, puzzled Vye. But he saw Starns' reminder produce a quick change in Chambriss.
"The T-Casts," he repeated, his expression of anger smoothing away. "Yes, of course, this is, in a manner of speaking, a truly historic occasion. We are in a unique position!"
Had Yactisi smiled? That change of lip line had been so slight Vye could not call it a smile. But Starns appeared to have found the right way to handle Chambriss. And it was the same little man who offered his services in another way when he said, diffidently to Hume:
"I have some experience with coms, Hunter. Do you wish me to send your message and take over the unit until you return? I gather," he added with a certain delicacy, "that it will not be expedient for your gearman to engage in that duty now."
So it was that Starns was installed in the com cabin of the spacer, sending out the request for Patrol aid, while Rovald was locked in the storage compartment of the same ship, pending arrival of those same authorities. As Hume sorted out supplies and Vye loaded them into the waiting flitter, Yactisi approached the Hunter.
"You have a definite plan of search?"
"Just to cast north from their camp. If they've been gone long enough to hit the foothills we may be able to sight them climbing. Otherwise, we'll go all the way up to the valley, wait for them there."
"You don't believe that they will be released after they have been--processed?"
Hume shook his head. "I don't think we would have been free, Gentlehomo, if it hadn't been for a series of fortunate accidents."
"Yes, though you didn't give us many details about that, Hunter."
Hume put down the needler he had been charging. He studied Yactisi across that weapon.
"Who are you?" His voice was soft but carried a snap.
For the first time Vye saw the tall, lean civ really smile.
"A man of many interests, Hunter--shall we let it go at that for the present? Though I assure you that Wass is not one of them in the way you might believe."
Gray eyes met brown, held so straightly. Then Hume spoke. "I believe you. But I have told you the truth."
"I have never doubted that--only the amount of it. There must be more talking later on--you understand that?"
"I never thought otherwise." Hume set the needler inside the flitter. The civ smiled again, this time including Vye in that evidence of good will before he walked away.
Hume made no comment. "That does it," he told his companion. "Still want to go?"
"If you do--and you can't do it alone." No man could take on the valley and Wass and his men.
Hume made no comment. They had rested briefly after their return to the safari camp, and Vye had been supplied with clothing from Hume's bags, so that now he wore the uniform of the Guild. He went armed, too, with the equipment belt taken from Rovald and that other's weapons, needler and tube. At least they started on their dubious rescue mission with every aid the safari camp could muster.
It was mid-afternoon when the flitter took to the air once again, scattering the hovering globes. There was no alteration in the ranks of the blue watchers waiting--for the barrier to go down, or someone in the camp to step beyond that protection?
"They're stupid," Vye said.
"Not stupid, just geared to one set of actions," Hume returned.
"Which could mean that what sends them here can't change its orders."
"Good guess. I'd say that they were governed by something akin to our tapes. No provision made for any innovations."
"So the guiding intelligence could be long gone."
"I think it has been." Hume then changed the subject sharply.
"How did you get into service at the Starfall?"
It was hard now to think back to Nahuatl--as if the Vye Lansor who had been swamper in that den of the port town was a different person altogether. In that patch of memories into which Rynch Brodie still intruded he hunted for the proper answer.
"I couldn't hold the state jobs. And once you get the habit of eating, you don't starve willingly."
"Why not the state jobs?"
"Without premium they're all low-rung tenders' places. I tried hard enough. But to sit pressing buttons when a light flashed, hour after hour--" Vye shook his head. "They said I was too erratic and gave me the shove. One more move on and it would have been compulsive conditioning. I turned port-drift instead."
"Ever thought of trying for a loan premium?"
Vye laughed shortly. "Loan premium? That's a true fantasy if you've been job hopping. None of the companies will take a chance on a man with an in and out record. Oh, I tried...." That memory arose to the surface, clear and very chilling. Yes, he had tried to break out of the net the law and custom had put around him from the day he had been made a state child. "No--it was conditioning, or port-drift."
"And you chose port-drift?"
"I was still me--as long as I stayed away from conditioning."
"Then you became Rynch Brodie in spite of your flight."
"No--well, maybe, for a while. But I'm still Vye Lansor here."
"Yes, here. And I don't think you'll have to worry about raising a premium to get a new start. You can claim victim compensation, you know."
Vye was silent, but Hume did not let him remain so.
"When the Patrol arrives, you put in your claim. I'll back you."
"You can't."
"That's where you're mistaken," Hume told him crisply. "I've already taped a full story back at the spacer--it's on record now."
Vye frowned. The Hunter seemed determined to ask for the worst the Patrol--or the planet police back on Nahuatl--could deal out. A case of illegal conditioning was about as serious as you could get.
They shot along the diagonal of the triangle made by three points, the mountain valley, Wass' camp, and the safari headquarters, heading to the slopes up which the men must be herded if the beasts were shepherding them to the mountain valley. Vye, surveying the forest thick below, began to doubt they would ever be able to pick them up before they reached the valley gate.
Hume took a weaving course, zigzagging back and forth, while they both watched intently for a glint from one of the globes, any movement which would betray that trail. And it was on one of the upper slopes that the flitter passed over two of the blue beasts lumbering along. Neither of the creatures paid any attention to the flyer, they moved with purpose on some mission of their own.
"Maybe the tail end of the hunting pack," Hume commented.
He sent the flyer hovering over a stunted line of trees and brush. Beyond that was bare rock. But though they hung for moments, nothing moved into that open.
"Wrong scent somehow." Hume brought the flitter around. He had it on manual control now, keeping it answering to the quick changes of his will.
A longer sweep supplied the answer--a vegetation roofed slit running back into the uplands, in a way resembling the crevice through which they had originally found their way into this country. Hume brought the flyer along that. But if the men they sought were pushing their way through below they could not be sighted from the air. At last, with evening drawing in, Hume was forced to admit failure.
"Wait by the gap?" Vye asked.
"Have to now." Hume glanced about. "I'd say maybe tomorrow--mid-morning before they make it that far--if they are here. We'll have plenty of time."
Time for what? To make ready for a pitched battle with Wass--or with the beasts herding him? To try in the space of hours to solve the mystery of the lake?
"Do you think we could blast that thing in the lake?" Vye asked.
"We might be able to, just might. But that must be the last resort. We want that in working order for the X-Tee men to study. No, we'd better plan to hold Wass at the gate, wait for the Patrol to come in."
Less than an hour later after a soaring approach, Hume brought the flitter down with neat skill on the top of one of the cliffs which helped to form the portal of the gap. There was no difference in the scene below, save that where the two bodies of the blue beasts had lain there were now only clean and shining bones.
Darkness spread out from the lake woods like a growing stain of evil promise as the sun fell behind the peaks. Night came earlier here than in the plains.
"Watch!" Vye had been gazing down the gap; he was the first to note that movement in the cloaking bush.
Out of the cover trotted a four-footed, antlered animal he had not seen before.
"Syken deer," Hume identified. "But why in the mountains? It's a long way from its home range."
The deer did not pause, but headed directly for the gap and, as it neared, Vye saw that its brown coat was roughed with patches of white froth, while more dripped from the pale pink tongue protruding from its open jaws, and its shrunken sides heaved.
"Driven!" Hume picked up a stone, hurled it to strike the ground ahead of the deer.
The creature did not start, nor show any sign of seeing the rock fall. It trotted on at the same wearied pace, passed the portal rocks into the valley. Then it stood still, wedge-shaped head up, black horns displayed, while the nose flaps expanded, testing the air, until it bounded toward the lake, disappearing in the woods.
Though they shared watches during the night there were no other signs of life, nor did the deer reappear from the woods. With the mid-morning there was a sudden sound to warn them--a wild cry which must have come from a human throat. Hume tossed one of the needlers to Vye, took the other, and they scrambled down to the floor of the gap passage.
Wass did not lead his men, he came behind the reeling trio as if he had joined the blasts as driver. And while his men wavered, staggered, gave the appearance of nearly complete exhaustion, he still walked with a steady tread, in command of his wits, his fears, and the company.
As the first of the men blundered on, a fresh trickle of red running down his bruised face, Hume called:
"Wass!"
The Veep stopped short. He made no move to unsling the needler he carried, its barrel pointing skyward over his shoulder, but his round head with its upstanding comb of hair swung slightly from side to side.
"Stop--Wass--this is a trap!"
His three men kept on. Vye moved, for Peake leading that wavering group, stumbled, would have fallen had not the younger man advanced from the shadows to steady him.
"Vye!" Hume made his name a warning.
He had only time to glance around. Wass, his broad face impassive except for the eyes--those burning madman's eyes--was aiming a ray tube.
Broken free of his hold, Peake fell to the right, came up against Hume. As Vye went down he saw Wass dart forward at a speed he wouldn't have believed a driven man could summon. The Veep lunged, escaping the shot the Hunter had no time to aim, rolled, and came up with the needler Vye had dropped.
Then Hume, hampered by Peake's feeble clawing, met head on the swinging barrel of that weapon. He gave a startled grunt and smashed back against the cliff, a wave of scarlet blood streaming down the side of his head.
The momentum of Wass' charge carried him on. He collided with his men, and the last thing Vye saw, was the huddle of all four of them, flailing arms and legs, spinning on through the gate into the valley with Wass' hoarse, wordless shouting, bringing echoes from the cliffs.
13
He lay against a rock, and it was quiet again, except for a small whimpering sound which hurt, joined with the eating pain in his side. Vye turned his head, smelled burned cloth and flesh. Cautiously he tried to move, bring his hand across his body to the belt at his waist. One small part of his mind was very clear--if he could get his fingers to the packet there, and the contents of that packet to his mouth, the pain would go away, and maybe he could slip back into the darkness again.
Somehow he did it, pulled the packet out of its container pouch, worked the fingers of his one usable hand until he shredded open the end of the covering. The tablets inside, spilled out. But he had three or four of them in his grasp. Laboriously he brought his hand up, mouthed them all together, chewing their bitterness, swallowing them as best he could without water.
Water--the lake! For a moment he was back in time, feeling for the water bulbs he should be carrying. Then the incautious movement of his questing fingers brought a sudden stab of raw, red agony and he moaned.
The tablets worked. But he did not slide back into unconsciousness again as the throbbing torture became something remote and untroubling. With his good arm he braced himself against the cliff, managed to sit up.
Sun flashed on the metal barrel of a needler which lay in the trampled dust between him and another figure, still very still, with a pool of blood about the head. Vye waited for a steadying breath or two, then started the infinitely long journey of several feet which separated him from Hume.
He was panting heavily when he crawled close enough to touch the Hunter. Hume's face, cheek down in the now sodden dust, was dabbled with congealing blood. As Vye turned the hunter's head, it rolled limply. The other side was a mass of blood and dust, too thick to afford Vye any idea of how serious a hurt Hume had taken. But he was still alive.
With his good hand Vye thrust his numb and useless left one into the front of his belt. Then, awkwardly he tried to tend Hume. After a close inspection he thought that the mass of blood had come from a ragged tear in the scalp above the temple and the bone beneath had escaped damage. From Hume's own first-aid pack he crushed tablets into the other's slack mouth, hoping they would dissolve if the Hunter could not swallow. Then he relaxed against the cliff to wait--for what he could not have said.
Wass' party had gone on into the valley. When Vye turned his head to look down the slope he could see nothing of them. They must have tried to push on to the lake. The flitter was at the top of the cliff, as far out of his reach now as if it were in planetary orbit. There was only the hope that a rescue party from the safari camp might come. Hume had set the directional beam on the flyer, when he had brought her down, to serve as a beacon for the Patrol, if and when Starns was lucky enough to contact a cruiser.
"Hmmm...." Hume's mouth moved, cracked the drying bloody mask on his lips and chin. His eyes blinked open and he lay staring up at the sky.
"Hume--" Vye was startled at the sound of his own voice, so thready and weak, and by the fact that he found it difficult to speak at all.
The other's head turned; now the eyes were on him and there was a spark of awareness in them.
"Wass?" The whisper was as strained as his own had been.
"In there." Vye's hand lifted from Hume's chest indicating the valley.
"Not good." Hume blinked again. "How bad?" His attention was not for his own hurt; his eyes searched Vye. And the latter glanced down at his side.
By some chance, perhaps because of his struggle with Peake, Wass' beam had not struck true, the main core of the bolt passing between his arm and his side, burning both. How deeply he could not tell, in fact he did not want to find out. It was enough that the tablets had banished the pain now.
"Seared a little," he said. "You've a bad cut on your head."
Hume frowned. "Can we make the flitter?"
Vye moved, then relaxed quickly into his former position. "Not now," he evaded, knowing that neither of them would be able to take that climb.
"Beam on?" Hume repeated Vye's thoughts of moments before. "Patrol coming?"
Yes, eventually the Patrol would come--but when? Hours--days? Time was their enemy now. He did not have to say any of that, they both knew.
"Needler--" Hume's head had turned in the other direction; now his hand pointed waveringly to the weapon in the dust.
"They won't be back," Vye stated the obvious. Those others had been caught in the trap, the odds on their return without aid were very high.
"Needler!" Hume repeated more firmly, and tried to sit up, falling back with a sharp intake of breath.
Vye edged around, stretched out his leg and scraped the toe of his boot into the loop of the carrying sling, drawing the weapon up to where he could get his hand on it. As he steadied it across his knee Hume spoke again:
"Watch for trouble!"
"They all went in," Vye protested.
But Hume's eyes had closed again. "Trouble--maybe...." His voice trailed off. Vye rested his hand on the stock of the needler.
"Hoooooo!"
That beast wail--as they had heard it in the valley! Somewhere from the wood. Vye brought the needler around, so that the sights pointed in that direction. There death might be hunting, but there was nothing he could do.
A scream, filled with all the agony of a man in torment, caught up on the echoes of that other cry. Vye sighted a wild waving of bushes. A figure, very small and far away, crawled into the open on hands and knees and then crumpled into only a shadowy blot on the moss. Again the beast's cry, and a shouting!
Vye watched a second man back out of the trees, still facing whatever pursued him. He caught the glint of sun on what must be a ray tube. Leaves crisped into a black hole, curls of smoke arose along the path of that blast.
The man kept on backing, passed the inert body of his companion, glancing now and then over his shoulder at the slope up which he was making a slow but steady way. He no longer rayed the bush, but there was the crackle of a small fire outlining the ragged hole his beam had cut.
Back two strides, three. Then he turned, made a quick dash, again facing around after he had gained some yards in the open. Vye saw now it was Wass.
Another dash and an about face. But this time to confront the enemy. There were three of them, as monstrous as those Vye and Hume had fought in the same place. And one of them was wounded, swinging a charred forepaw before it, and giving voice to a wild frenzy of roars.
Wass leveled the ray tube, centered sights on the beast nearest to him. The man hammered at the firing button with the flat of his other hand, and almost paid for that second of distraction with his life, for the creature made one of those lightning swift dashes Vye had so luckily escaped. The clawed forepaw tore a strip from the shoulder of Wass' tunic, left sprouting red furrows behind. But the man had thrown the useless tube into its face, was now running for the gap.
Vye held the needler braced against his knee to fire. He saw the dart quiver in the upper arm of the beast, and it halted to pull out that sliver of dangerously poisoned metal, crumpled it into a tight twist. Vye continued to fire, never sure of his aim, but seeing those slivers go home in thick legs, in outstretched forelimbs, in wide, pendulous bellies. Then there were three blue shapes lying on the slope behind the man running straight for the gap.
Wass hit the invisible barrier full force, was hurled back, to lie gasping on the turf, but already raising himself to crawl again to the gateway he saw and could not believe was barred. Vye closed his eyes. He was very tired now--tired and sleepy--maybe the pain pills were bringing the secondary form of relief. But he could hear, just beyond, the man who beat at that unseen curtain, first in anger and fear, and then just in fear, until the fear was a lonesome crying that went on and on until even that last feeble assault on the barrier failed.
* * * * *
"We have here the tape report of Ras Hume, Out-Hunter of the Guild."
Vye watched the officer in the black and silver of the Patrol, a black and silver modified with the small, green, eye badge of X-Tee, with level and hostile gaze.
"Then you know the story." He was going to make no additions nor explanations. Maybe Hume had cleared him. All right, that was all he would ask, to be free to go his way and forget about Jumala--and Ras Hume.
He had not seen the Hunter since they had both been loaded into the Patrol flitter in the gap. Wass had come out of the valley a witless, dazed creature, still under the mental influence of whoever, or whatever, had set that trap. As far as Vye knew the Veep had not yet recovered his full senses, he might never do so. And if Hume had not dictated that confession to damn himself before the Patrol, he might have escaped. They could suspect--but they would have had no proof.
"You continue to refuse to tape?" The officer favored him with one of the closed-jaw looks Vye had often seen on the face of authority.
"I have my rights."
"You have the right to claim victim compensation--a good compensation, Lansor."
Vye shrugged and then winced at a warning from the tender skin over ribs.
"I make no claim, and no tape," he repeated. And he intended to go on saying that as long as they asked him. This was the second visit in two days and he was getting a little tired of it all. Perhaps he should do as prudence dictated and demand to be returned to Nahuatl. Only his odd, unexplainable desire to at least see Hume kept him from making the request they would have to honor.
"You had better reconsider." Authority resumed.
"Rights of person--" Vye almost grinned as he recited that. For the first time in his pushed-around life he could use that particular phrase and make it stick. He thought there was a sour twist to the officer's mouth, but the other still retained his impersonal tone as he spoke into the intership com:
"He refused to make a tape."
Vye waited for the other's next move. This should mark the end of their interview. But instead the officer appeared to relax the restraint of his official manner. He brought a viv-root case from an inner pocket, offered a choice of contents to Vye, who gave an instant and suspicious refusal by shake of head. The officer selected one of the small tubes, snapped off the protecto-nib, and set it between his lips for a satisfying and lengthy pull. Then the panel of the cabin door pushed open, and Vye sat up with a jerk as Ras Hume, his head banded with a skin-core covering, entered.
The officer waved his hand at Vye with the air of one turning over a problem. "You were entirely right. And he's all yours, Hume."
Vye looked from one to the other. With Hume's tape in official hands why wasn't the Hunter under restraint? Unless, because they were aboard the Patrol cruiser, the officers didn't think a closer confinement was necessary. Yet the Hunter wasn't acting the role of prisoner very well. In fact he perched on a wall-flip seat with the ease of one completely at home, accepted the viv-root Vye had refused.
"So you won't make a tape," he asked cheerfully.
"You act as if you want me to!" Vye was so completely baffled by this odd turn of action that his voice came out almost plaintively.
"Seeing as how a great deal of time and effort went into placing you in the position where you could give us that tape, I must admit some disappointment."
"Give us?" Vye echoed.
The officer removed the viv-root from between his lips. "Tell him the whole sad story, Hume."
But Vye began to guess. Life in the Starfall, or as port-drift, either sharpened the wits or deadened them. Vye's had suffered the burnishing process. "A set-up?"
"A set-up," Hume agreed. Then he glanced at the Patrol officer a little defensively. "I might as well tell the whole truth--this didn't quite begin on the right side of the law. I had my reasons for wanting to make trouble for the Kogan estate, only not because of the credits involved." He moved his plasta-flesh hand. "When I found that L-B from the Largo Drift and saw the possibilities, did a little day dreaming--I worked out this scheme. But I'm a Guild man and as it happens, I want to stay one. So I reported to one of the Masters and told him the whole story--why I hadn't taped on the records my discovery on Jumala.
"When he passed along the news of the L-B to the Patrol, he also suggested that there might be room for fraud along the way I had thought it out. That started a chain reaction. It happened that the Patrol wanted Wass. But he was too big and slick to be caught in a case which couldn't be broken in court. They thought that here was just the bait he might snap at, and I was the one to offer it to him. He could check on me, learn that I had excellent reason to do what I said I was doing. So I went to him with my story and he liked it. We made the plan work just as I had outlined it. And he planted Rovald on me as a check. But I didn't know Yactisi was a plant, also."
The Patrol officer smiled. "Insurance," he waved the viv-root, "just insurance."
"What we didn't foresee was this complicating alien trouble. You were to be collected as the castaway, brought back to the Center and then, once Wass was firmly enmeshed, the Patrol would blow the thing wide open. Now we do have Wass, with your tape we'll have him for good, subject to complete reconditioning. But we also have an X-Tee puzzle which will keep the services busy for some time. And we would like your tape."
Vye watched Hume narrowly. "Then you're an agent?"
Hume shook his head. "No, just what I said I am, an Out-Hunter who happened to come into some knowledge that will assist in straightening out a few crooked quirks in several systems. I have no love for the Kogan clan, but to help bring down a Veep of Wass' measure does aid in reinstating one's self-esteem."
"This victim compensation--I could claim it, even though the deal was a set-up?"
"You'll have first call on Wass' assets. He has plenty invested in legitimate enterprises, though we'll probably never locate all his hidden funds. But everything we can get open title to will be impounded. Have something to do with your share?" inquired the officer.
"Yes."
Hume was smiling subtly. He was a different man from the one Vye had known on Jumala. "Premium for the Guild is one thousand credits down, two thousand for training and say another for about the best field outfit you can buy. That'll give you maybe another two or three thousand to save for your honorable retirement."
"How did you know?" Vye began and then had to laugh in spite of himself as Hume replied:
"I didn't. Good guess, eh? Well, zoom out your recorder, Commander. I think you are going to have some very free speech now." He got to his feet. "You know, the Guild has a stake in this alien discovery. We may just find that we haven't seen the last of that valley after all, recruit."
He was gone and Vye, eager to have the past done with, and the future beginning, reached for the dictation mike.
CONTAMINATION CREW
By Alan E. Nourse
Orders were orders! The creature had to be killed. But just how does one destroy the indestructible?
(The following is taken from the files of the Medical Disciplinary Board, Hospital Earth, from the preliminary hearings in re: The Profession vs. Samuel B. Jenkins, Physician; First Court of Medical Affairs, final action pending.)
COM COD S221VB73 VOROCHISLOV SECTOR; 4th GALACTIC PERIOD 22, 2341 GENERAL SURVEY SHIP MERCY TO HOSPITAL EARTH
VIA: FASTEST POSSIBLE ROUTING, PRIORITY UNASSIGNED
TO: Lucius Darby, Physician Grade I, Black Service Director of Galactic Periphery Services, Hospital Earth
FROM: Samuel B. Jenkins, Physician Grade VI, Red Service General Practice Patrol Ship Lancet (Attached GSS Mercy pro tem)
SIR: The following communication is directed to your attention in hopes that it may anticipate various charges which are certain to be placed against me as a Physician of the Red Service upon the return of the General Survey Ship Mercy to Hospital Earth (expected arrival four months from above date).
These charges will undoubtedly be preferred by one Turvold Neelsen, Physician Grade II of the Black Service, and Commander of the Mercy on its current survey mission into the Vorochislov Sector. Exactly what the charges will be I cannot say, since the Black Doctor in question refuses either audience or communication with me at the present time; however, it seems likely that treason, incompetence and mutinous insubordination will be among the milder complaints registered. It is possible that even Malpractice might be added, so you can readily understand the reasons for this statement--
The following will also clarify my attached request that the GSS Mercy, upon arrival in orbit around Hospital Earth, be met immediately by a decontamination ship carrying a vat of hydrochloric acid, concentration 3.7%, measuring no less than twenty by thirty by fifty feet, and that Quarantine officials be prepared to place the entire crew of the Mercy under physical and psychiatric observation for a period of no less than six weeks upon disembarkation.
The facts, in brief, are as follows:
Three months ago, as crew of the General Practice Patrol Ship Lancet, my colleague Green Doctor Wallace Stone and myself began investigating certain peculiar conditions existing on the fourth planet of Mauki, Vorochislov Sector (Class I Medical Service Contract.) The entire population of that planet was found to be suffering from a mass psychotic delusion of rather spectacular proportions: namely, that they and their entire planet were in imminent danger of being devoured, in toto, by an indestructible non-humanoid creature which they called a hlorg. The Maukivi were insistent that a hlorg had already totally consumed a non-existent outer planet in their system, and was now hard at work on neighboring Mauki V. It was their morbid fear that Mauki IV was next on its list. No amount of reassurance could convince them of the foolishness of these fears, although we exhausted our energy, our patience, and our food and medical supplies in the effort. Ultimately we referred the matter to the Grey Service, feeling confident that it was a psychiatric problem rather than medical or surgical. We applied to the GSS Mercy to take us aboard to replenish our ship's supplies, and provide us a much-needed recovery period. The Black Doctor in command approved our request and brought us aboard.
The trouble began two days later....
* * * * *
There were three classes of dirty words in use by the men who travelled the spaceways back and forth from Hospital Earth.
There were the words you seldom used in public, but which were colorful and descriptive in private use.
Then there were the words which you seldom used even in private, but which effectively relieved feelings when directed at mirrors, inanimate objects, and people who had just left the room.
Finally, there were the words that you just didn't use, period. You knew they existed; you'd heard them used at one time or another, but to hear them spoken out in plain Earth-English was enough to rock the most space-hardened of the Galactic Pill Peddlers back on his well-worn heels.
Black Doctor Turvold Neelsen's Earth-English was spotty at best, but the word came through without any possibility of misinterpretation. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins stared at the little man and felt his face turning as scarlet as the lining of his uniform cape.
"But that's ridiculous!" he finally stammered. "Quite aside from the language you use to suggest it."
"Ah! So the word still has some punch left, eh? At least you puppies bring something away from your Medical Training, even if it's only taboos." The Black Doctor scowled across the desk at Jenkins' lanky figure. "But sometimes, my good Doctor, it is better to face a fact than to wait for the fact to face you. Sometimes we have to crawl out of our ivory towers for a minute or two--you know?"
Jenkins reddened again. He had never had any great love for physicians of the Black Service--who did?--but he found himself disliking this short, blunt-spoken man even more cordially than most. "Why implicate the Lancet?" he burst out. "You've landed the Mercy on plenty of planets before we brought the Lancet aboard her--"
"But we did not have it with us before the Lancet came aboard, and we do have it now. The implication is obvious. You have brought aboard a contaminant."
He'd said it again.
Red Doctor Jenkins' face darkened. "The Green Doctor and I have maintained the Lancet in perfect conformity with the Sterility Code. We've taken every precaution on both landing and disembarking procedures. What's more, we've spent the last three months on a planet with no mutually compatible flora or fauna. From Hospital Earth viewpoint, Mauki IV is sterile. We made only the briefest check-stop on Mauki V before joining you. It was a barren rock, but we decontaminated again after leaving. If you have a--a contaminant on board your ship, sir, it didn't come from the Lancet. And I won't be held responsible."
It was strong language to use to a Black Doctor, and Sam Jenkins knew it. There were doctors of the Green and Red Services who had spent their professional lives on some god-forsaken planetoid at the edge of the Galaxy for saying less. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins was too near the end of his Internship, too nearly ready for his first Permanent Planetary Appointment with the rank, honor, and responsibility it carried to lightly risk throwing it to the wind at this stage--
But a Red Doctor does not bring a contaminant aboard a survey ship, he thought doggedly, no matter what the Black Doctor says--
Neelsen looked at the young man slowly. Then he shrugged. "Of course, I'm merely a pathologist. I realize that we know nothing of medicine, nor of disease, nor of the manner in which disease is spread. All this is beyond our scope. But perhaps you'll permit one simple question from a dull old man, just to humor him."
Jenkins looked at the floor. "I'm sorry, sir."
"Just so. You've had a very successful cruise this year with the Lancet, I understand."
Jenkins nodded.
"A most successful cruise. Four planets elevated from Class IV to Class II contracts, they tell me. Morua II elevated from Class VI to Class I, with certain special riders. A plague-panic averted on Setman I, and a very complex virus-bacteria symbiosis unravelled on Orb III. An illustrious record. You and your colleague from the Green Service are hoping for a year's exemption from training, I imagine--" The Black Doctor looked up sharply. "You searched your holds after leaving the Mauki planets, I presume?"
Jenkins blinked. "Why--no, sir. That is, we decontaminated according to--"
"I see. You didn't search your holds. I suppose you didn't notice your food supplies dwindling at an alarming rate?"
"No--" The Red Doctor hesitated. "Not really."
"Ah." The Black Doctor closed his eyes wearily and flipped an activator switch. The scanner on the far wall buzzed into activity. It focussed on the rear storage hold of the Mercy where the little Lancet was resting on its landing rack. "Look closely, Doctor."
At first Jenkins saw nothing. Then his eye caught a long, pink glistening strand lying across the floor of the hold. The scanner picked up the strand, followed it to the place where it emerged from a neat pencil-sized hole in the hull of the Lancet. The strand snaked completely across the room and disappeared through another neat hole in the wall into the next storage hold.
Jenkins shook his head as the scanner flipped back to the hole in the Lancet's hull. Even as he watched, the hole enlarged and a pink blob began to emerge. The blob kept coming and coming until it rested soggily on the edge of the hole. Then it teetered and fell splat on the floor.
"Friend of yours?" the Black Doctor asked casually.
It was a pink heap of jelly just big enough to fill a scrub bucket. It sat on the floor, quivering noxiously. Then it sent out pseudopods in several directions, probing the metal floor. After a few moments it began oozing along the strand of itself that lay on the floor, and squeezed through the hole into the next hold.
"Ugh," said Sam Jenkins, feeling suddenly sick.
"The hydroponic tanks are in there," the Black Doctor said. "You've seen one of those before?"
"Not in person." Jenkins shook his head weakly. "Only pictures. It's a hlorg. We thought it was only a Maukivi persecution fantasy."
"This thing is growing pretty fast for a persecution fantasy. We spotted it eight hours ago, demolishing what was left of your food supply. It's twice as big now as it was then."
"Well, we've got to get rid of it," said Jenkins, suddenly coming to life.
"Amen, Doctor."
"I'll get the survey crew alerted right away. We won't waste a minute. And my apologies." Jenkins was hurrying for the door. "I'll get it cleared out of here fast."
"I do hope so," said the Black Doctor. "The thing makes me ill just to think about."
"I'll give you a clean-ship report in twenty-four hours," the Red Doctor said as confidently as he could and beat a hasty retreat down the corridor. He was wishing fervently that he felt as confident as he sounded.
The Maukivi had described the hlorg in excruciating detail. He and Green Doctor Stone had listened, and smiled sadly at each other, day after day, marvelling at the fanciful delusion. Hlorgs, indeed! And such creatures to dream up--eating, growing, devouring plant, animal and mineral without discrimination--
And the Maukivi had stoutly maintained that this hlorg of theirs was indestructible--
* * * * *
Green Doctor Wally Stone, true to his surgical calling, was a man of action.
"You mean there is such a thing?" he exploded when his partner confronted him with the news. "For real? Not just somebody's pipe dream?"
"There is," said Jenkins, "and we've got it. Here. On board the Mercy. It's eating like hell-and-gone and doubling its size every eight hours."
"Well what are you waiting for? Toss it overboard!"
"Fine! And what happens to the next party it happens to land on? We're supposed to be altruists, remember? We're supposed to worry about the health of the Galaxy." Jenkins shook his head. "Whatever we do with it, we have to find out just what we're tossing before we toss."
The creature had made itself at home aboard the Mercy. In the spirit of uninvited guests since time immemorial, it had established a toehold with remarkable asperity, and now was digging in for the long winter. Drawn to the hydroponic tanks like a flea to a dog, the hlorg had settled its bulbous pink body down in their murky depths with a contented gurgle. As it grew larger the tank-levels grew lower, the broth clearer.
The fact that the twenty-five crewmen of the Mercy depended on those tanks for their food supply on the four-month run back to Hospital Earth didn't seem to bother the hlorg a bit. It just sank down wetly and began to eat.
Under Jenkins' whip hand, and with Green Doctor Stone's assistance, the Survey Crew snapped into action. Survey was the soul and lifeblood of the medical services supplied by Hospital Earth to the inhabited planets of the Galaxy. Centuries before, during the era of exploration, every Earth ship had carried a rudimentary Survey Crew--a physiologist, a biochemist, an immunologist, a physician--to determine the safety of landings on unknown planets. Other races were more advanced in technological and physical sciences, in sales or in merchandising--but in the biological sciences men of Earth stood unexcelled in the Galaxy. It was not surprising that their casual offerings of medical services wherever their ships touched had led to a growing demand for those services, until the first Medical Service Contract with Deneb III had formalized the planetary specialty. Earth had become Hospital Earth, physician to a Galaxy, surgeon to a thousand worlds, midwife to those susceptible to midwifery and psychiatrist to those whose inner lives zigged when their outer lives zagged.
In the early days it had been a haphazard arrangement; but gradually distinct Services appeared to handle problems of medicine, surgery, radiology, psychiatry and all the other functions of a well-appointed medical service. Under the direction of the Black Service of Pathology, Hospital ships and Survey ships were dispatched to serve as bases for the tiny General Practice Patrol ships that answered the calls of the planets under Contract.
But it was the Survey ships that did the basic dirty-work on any new planet taken under Contract--outlining the physiological and biochemical aspects of the races involved, studying their disease patterns, their immunological types, their susceptibility to medical, surgical, or psychiatric treatment. It was an exacting service to perform, and Survey did an exacting job.
Now, with their own home base invaded by a hungry pink jelly-blob, the Survey Crew of the Mercy dug in with all fours to find a way to exorcise it.
The early returns were not encouraging.
Bowman, the anatomist, spent six hours with the creature. He'd go after the functional anatomy first, he thought, as he approached the task with gusto. Special organs, vital organ systems--after all, every Achilles had his heel. Functional would spot it if anything would--
Six hours later he rendered a preliminary report. It consisted of a blank sheet of paper and an expression of wild frustration.
"What's this supposed to mean?" Jenkins asked.
"Just what it says."
"But it says nothing!"
"That's exactly what it means." Bowman was a thin, wistful-looking man with a hawk nose and a little brown mustache. He subbed as ship's cook when things were slow in his specialty. He wasn't a very good cook, but what could anyone do with the sludge from the harvest shelf of a hydroponic tank? Now, with the hlorg incumbent, there wasn't even any sludge.
"I drained off a tank and got a good look at it before it crawled over into the next one," Bowman said. "Ugly bastard. But from a strictly anatomical standpoint I can't help you a bit."
Green Doctor Stone glowered over Jenkins' shoulder at the man. "But surely you can give us something."
Bowman shrugged. "You want it technical?"
"Any way you like."
"Your hlorg is an ideal anamorph. A nothing. Protoplasm, just protoplasm."
Jenkins looked up sharply. "What about his cellular organization?"
"No cells," said Bowman. "Unless they're sub-microscopic, and I'd need an electron-peeker to tell you that."
"No organ systems?"
"Not even an integument. You saw how slippery he looked? That's why. There's nothing holding him in but energy."
"Now, look," said Stone. "He eats, doesn't he? He must have waste materials of some sort."
Bowman shook his head unhappily. "Sorry. No urates. No nitrates. No CO{2}. Anyway, he doesn't eat because he has nothing to eat with. He absorbs. And that includes the lining of the tanks, which he seems to like as much as the contents. He doesn't bore those holes he makes--he dissolves them."
They sent Bowman back to quarters for a hot bath and a shot of Happy-O and looked up Hrunta, the biochemist.
Hrunta was glaring at paper electrophoretic patterns and pulling out chunks of hair around his bald spot. He gave them a snarl and shoved a sheaf of papers into their hands.
"Metabolic survey?" Jenkins asked.
"Plus," said Hrunta. "You're not going to like it, either."
"Why not? If it grows, it metabolizes. If it metabolizes, we can kill it. Axiom number seventeen, paragraph number four."
"Oh, it metabolizes, all right, but you'd better find yourself another axiom, pretty quick."
"Why?"
"Because it not only metabolizes, it consumes. There's no sign of the usual protein-carbohydrate-fat metabolism going on here. This baby has an enzyme system that's straight from hell. It bypasses the usual metabolic activities that produce heat and energy and gets right down to basic-basic."
Jenkins swallowed. "What do you mean?"
"It attacks the nuclear structure of whatever matter the creature comes in contact with. There's a partial mass-energy conversion in its rawest form. The creature goes after carbon-bearing substances first, since the C seems to break down more easily than anything else--hence its preference for plant and animal material over non-C stuff. But it can use anything if it has to--"
Jenkins stared at the little biochemist, an image in his mind of the pink creature in the hold, growing larger by the minute as it ate its way through the hydroponics, through the dry stores, through--
"Is there anything it can't use?"
"If there is, I haven't found it," Hrunta said sadly. "In fact, I can't see any reason why it couldn't consume this ship and everything in it, right down to the last rivet--"
* * * * *
They walked down to the hold for another look at their uninvited guest, and almost wished they hadn't.
It had reached the size of a small hippopotamus, although the resemblance ended there. Twenty hours had elapsed since the survey had begun. The hlorg had used every minute of it, draining the tanks, engulfing dry stores, devouring walls and floors as it spread out in search of food, leaving trails of eroded metal wherever it went.
It was ugly--ugly in its pink shapelessness, ugly in its slimy half-sentient movements, in its very purposefulness. But its ugliness went even deeper, stirring primordial feelings of revulsion and loathing in their minds as they watched it oozing implacably across the hold to another dry-storage bin.
Wally Stone shuddered. "It's grown."
"Too fast. Bowman charts it as geometric progression."
Stone scratched his jaw as a lone pink pseudopod pushed out on the floor toward him. Then he leaped forward and stamped on it, severing the strand from the body.
The severed member quivered and lay still for a moment. Then it flowed back to rejoin the body with a wet gurgle.
Stone looked at his half-dissolved shoe.
"Egotropism," Jenkins said. "Bowman played around with that, too. A severed piece will rejoin if it can. If it can't it just takes up independent residence and we have two hlorgs."
"What happens to it outside the ship?" Stone wanted to know.
"It falls dormant for several hours, and then splits up into a thousand independent chunks. One of the boys spent half of yesterday out there gathering them up. I tell you, this thing is equipped to survive."
"So are we," said Green Doctor Stone grimly. "If we can't outwit this free-flowing gob of obscenity, we deserve anything we get. Let's have a conference."
They met in the pilot room. The Black Doctor was there; so were Bowman and Hrunta. Chambers, the physiologist, was glumly clasping and unclasping his hands in a corner. The geneticist, Piccione, drew symbols on a scratch pad and stared blankly at the wall.
Jenkins was saying: "Of course, these are only preliminary reports, but they serve to outline the problem. This is not just an annoyance any longer, it's a crisis. We'd all better understand that."
The Black Doctor cut him off with a wave of his hand, and glowered at the papers as he read them through minutely. As he sat hunched at the desk with the black cowl of his office hanging down from his shoulders he looked like a squat black judge, Jenkins thought, a shadow from the Inquisition, a Passer of Spells. But there was no medievalism in Black Doctor Neelsen. In fact, it was for that reason, and only that reason, that the Black Service had come to be the leaders and the whips, the executors and directors of all the manifold operations of Hospital Earth.
* * * * *
The physicians of the General Practice Patrol were fledglings, newly trained in their specialties, inexperienced in the rigorous discipline of medicine that was required of the directors of permanent Planetary Dispensaries in the heavily populated systems of the Galaxy. On outlying worlds where little was known of the ways of medicine, the temptation was great to substitute faith for knowledge, cant for investigation, nonsense rituals for hard work. But the physicians of the Black Service were always waiting to jerk wandering neophytes back to the scientific disciplines that made the service of Hospital Earth so effective. The Black Doctors would not tolerate sloppiness. "Show me the tissue, Doctor," they would say. "Prove to me that what you say is so. Prove that what you did was valid medicine...." Their laboratories were the morgues and autopsy rooms of a thousand planets, the Temples of Truth from which no physician since the days of Pasteur and Lister could escape for long and retain his position.
The Black Doctors were the pragmatists, the gadflies of Hospital Earth.
For this reason it was surprising to hear Black Doctor Neelsen saying, "Perhaps we are being too scientific, just now. When the creature has exhausted our food stores, it will look elsewhere for food. Perhaps we must cut at the tree and not at the root."
"A frontal attack?" said Jenkins.
"Just so. Its enzyme system is its vulnerability. Enzyme systems operate under specific optimum conditions, right? And every known enzyme system can be inactivated by adverse conditions of one sort or another. A physical approach may tell us how in this case. Meanwhile we will be on emergency rations, and hope that we don't starve to death finding out." The Black Doctor paused, looking at the men around him. "And in case you are thinking of enlisting help from outside, forget it. I've sent plague-warnings out for Galactic relay. We have this thing isolated, and we're going to keep it that way as long as I command this ship."
They went gloomily back to their laboratories to plan their frontal attack.
That was the night that Hrunta disappeared.
* * * * *
He was gone when they came to wake him from his sleep period. His bunk had been slept in, but he wasn't in it. In fact, he wasn't anywhere on the ship.
"But he couldn't just vanish!" the Black Doctor burst out when they told him the news. "Maybe he's hiding somewhere. Maybe this business was working on his mind."
Green Doctor Stone took a crew of men to search the ship again, even though he considered it a waste of precious time. He had his private convictions about where Hrunta had gone.
So did every other man on the ship, including Jenkins.
The hlorg had stopped eating. Huge and round and wet and ugly, it squatted in the after-hold, quivering gently, without any other sign of life.
Surfeited. Like a fat man after a turkey dinner.
Jenkins reviewed progress with the others. No stone had been left unturned. They had sliced the hlorg, and squeezed it. They had boiled it and frozen it. They had dropped chunks of it in acid vats and covered other chunks with desiccants and alkalis. Nothing seemed to bother it.
A cold environment slowed down its activity, true, but it also stimulated the process of fission. Warmed up again, the portions sucked back together again and resumed eating.
Heat was a little more effective, but not much. It stunned the creature for a brief period, but it would not burn. It hissed frightfully and gave off an overpowering stench, and curled up at the edges, but as soon as the heat was turned off it began to recover.
In Hrunta's lab chunks of the hlorg sat in a dozen vats on tables and in sinks. Some contained antibiotics, some concentrated acids, some desiccants. In each vat a blob of pink protoplasm wiggled happily, showing no sign of discomfiture. On another table were the remains of Hrunta's (unsuccessful) attempt to prepare an anti-hlorg serum.
But no Hrunta.
"He was down there with the thing all day," Bowman said sadly. "He felt it was his responsibility, really. Hrunta thought biochemistry was the answer to all things, of course. Very conscientious man."
"But he was in bed."
"He claimed he did his best thinking in bed. Maybe he had a brainstorm and went down to try it out, and--"
"Yes." Jenkins nodded sourly. "And." He walked down the row of vats. "You'd think that at least concentrated sulphuric would dessicate it a little. But it's just formed a crust of coagulated protein around itself, and sits there--"
Bowman peered over his shoulder, his mustache twitching. "But it does dessicate."
"If you use enough long enough."
"How about concentrated hydrochloric?"
"Same thing. Maybe a little more effective, but not enough to count."
"Okay. Next we try combinations. There's got to be something the wretched beast can't tolerate--"
There was, of course.
* * * * *
Green Doctor Stone brought it to Jenkins as he was getting ready to turn in for a sleep period. Jenkins had checked to make sure double guards were posted in the hlorg's vicinity, and jolted them with Sleep-Not to keep them on their toes. All the same, he tied a length of stout cord around his ankle just to make sure he didn't do any sleepwalking. He was tying it to the bunk when Stone came in with a pan in his hand and a peculiar look on his face.
"Take a look at this," he said.
Jenkins looked at the sickly brown mass in the tray, and then up at Stone. "Where did you find it?"
"Down in the hold. Our hlorg has broken precedent. It's rejected something that it ate."
"Yeah. What is it?"
"I don't know. I'm taking it to Neelsen for paraffin sections. But I know what it looks like to me."
"Mm. I know." Jenkins felt sick. Stone headed up to the path lab, leaving the Red Doctor settled in his bunk.
Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son--"
Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of hlorg wiggled slowly around the bottom.
Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam. When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly.
The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response.
With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!"
Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of hlorg was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks it. What are we waiting for?"
They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the hlorg was.
It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They whittled chunks off the hlorg, tossed them in pans of the deadly fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet, then black, as it died. The hlorg, dwindling in size, sensed the attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The hlorg quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor, but it grew smaller and weaker with every whack.
"Hrunta must have spotted it and come down here alone," Jenkins panted between slices. "Maybe he slipped, lost his footing, I don't know--"
They continued to work until the supply was exhausted. They had reduced the hlorg to a quarter its previous size. "Check the other labs, see if they have some more," said Stone.
"I already have," Bowman said. "They don't. This is it."
"But we haven't got it all killed. There's still--" He pointed to the thing quailing in the corner.
"I know. We're licked, that's all. There isn't any more of the stuff on the ship."
They stopped and looked at each other suddenly. Then Jenkins said: "Oh, yes there is."
There was silence. Bowman looked at Stone, and Stone looked at Bowman. They both looked at Jenkins. "Oh, no. Sorry. I decline." Stone shook his head slowly.
"But we have to! There's no other way. If the enzyme system is inactivated, it's just protoplasm--there's no physiological or biochemical reason--"
"You know what you can do with your physiology and biochemistry," Bowman said succinctly. "You can also count me out." He left them and the hatchway clanged after him.
"Wally?"
"Yeah."
"It'll be months before we get back to Hospital Earth. We know how we can hold it in check until we get there."
"Yeah."
"Well?"
Green Doctor Wally Stone sighed. "Greater love hath no man," he said wearily. "We'd better go tell Neelsen, I guess."
* * * * *
Black Doctor Turvold Neelsen's answer was a flat, unequivocal no. "It's monstrous and preposterous. I won't stand for it. Nobody will stand for it."
"But you have the proof in your own hands," Jenkins said. "You saw the specimen that the Green Doctor brought you."
Neelsen hunched back angrily. "I saw it."
"And your impression of it? As a pathologist?"
"I fail to see how my impression applies one way or the other--"
"Doctor, sometimes we have to face facts. Remember?"
"All right." Neelsen seemed to curl up into himself still further. "The specimen was stomach."
"Human stomach?"
"Human stomach."
"But the only human on this ship that doesn't have a stomach is Hrunta," said Jenkins.
"So the hlorg ate him."
"Most of him. Not quite all. It threw out the one part of him it couldn't eat. The part containing a substance that inactivated its enzyme system. Dilute hydrochloric acid, to be specific. We used the entire ship's supply, and cut the hlorg down to three-quarters size, but we need a continuous supply to keep it whittled down until we get home. And there's only one good, permanent, reliable source of dilute hydrochloric acid on board this ship--"
The Black Doctor's face was purple. "I said no," he choked. "My answer stands."
The Red Doctor sighed and turned to Green Doctor Stone. "All right, Wally," he said.
* * * * *
(From the files of the Medical Disciplinary Board, Hospital Earth, op. cit.)
I am certain that you can see from the foregoing that a reasonable effort was made by Green Doctor Stone and myself to put the plan in effect peaceably and with full approval of our commander. It was our conviction, however, that the emergency nature of the circumstances required that it be done with or without his approval. Our subsequent success in containing the hlorg to at least reasonable and manageable proportions should bear out the wisdom of our decision.
Actually, it has not been as bad as one might think. It has been necessary to confine the crew to their quarters, and to restrain the Black Doctor forcibly, but with liberal use of Happy-O we can occasionally convince ourselves that it is rare beefsteak, and the Green Doctor, our pro-tem cook has concocted several very tasty sauces, such as mushroom, onion, etc. We reduce the hlorg to half its size each day, and if thoroughly heated the chunks lie still on the plate for quite some time.
No physical ill effects have been noted, and the period of quarantine is recommended solely to allow the men an adequate period for psychological recovery.
I have only one further recommendation: that the work team from the Grey Service be recalled at once from their assignment on Mauki IV. The problem is decidedly not psychiatric, and it would be one of the tragedies of the ages if our excellent psychiatric service were to succeed in persuading the Maukivi out of their 'delusion'.
After all, Hospital Earth cannot afford to jeopardize a Contract--
(Signed) Samuel B. Jenkins, Physician Grade VI Red Service GPP Ship Lancet (Attached GSS Mercy pro tem)
DERELICT
By Alan E. Nourse
What was the mystery of this great ship from the dark, deep reaches of space? For, within its death-filled chambers--was the avenue of life!
John Sabo, second in command, sat bolt upright in his bunk, blinking wide-eyed at the darkness. The alarm was screaming through the Satellite Station, its harsh, nerve-jarring clang echoing and re-echoing down the metal corridors, penetrating every nook and crevice and cubicle of the lonely outpost, screaming incredibly through the dark sleeping period. Sabo shook the sleep from his eyes, and then a panic of fear burst into his mind. The alarm! Tumbling out of his bunk in the darkness, he crashed into the far bulkhead, staggering giddily in the impossible gravity as he pawed about for his magnaboots, his heart pounding fiercely in his ears. The alarm! Impossible, after so long, after these long months of bitter waiting-- In the corridor he collided with Brownie, looking like a frightened gnome, and he growled profanity as he raced down the corridor for the Central Control.
Frightened eyes turned to him as he blinked at the bright lights of the room. The voices rose in a confused, anxious babble, and he shook his head and swore, and ploughed through them toward the screen. "Kill that damned alarm!" he roared, blinking as he counted faces. "Somebody get the Skipper out of his sack, pronto, and stop that clatter! What's the trouble?"
The radioman waved feebly at the view screen, shimmering on the great side panel. "We just picked it up--"
It was a ship, moving in from beyond Saturn's rings, a huge, gray-black blob in the silvery screen, moving in toward the Station with ponderous, clumsy grace, growing larger by the second as it sped toward them. Sabo felt the fear spill over in his mind, driving out all thought, and he sank into the control chair like a well-trained automaton. His gray eyes were wide, trained for long military years to miss nothing; his fingers moved over the panel with deft skill. "Get the men to stations," he growled, "and will somebody kindly get the Skipper down here, if he can manage to take a minute."
"I'm right here." The little graying man was at his elbow, staring at the screen with angry red eyes. "Who told you to shut off the alarm?"
"Nobody told me. Everyone was here, and it was getting on my nerves."
"What a shame." Captain Loomis' voice was icy. "I give orders on this Station," he said smoothly, "and you'll remember it." He scowled at the great gray ship, looming closer and closer. "What's its course?"
"Going to miss us by several thousand kilos at least. Look at that thing! It's traveling."
"Contact it! This is what we've been waiting for." The captain's voice was hoarse.
Sabo spun a dial, and cursed. "No luck. Can't get through. It's passing us--"
"Then grapple it, stupid! You want me to wipe your nose, too?"
Sabo's face darkened angrily. With slow precision he set the servo fixes on the huge gray hulk looming up in the viewer, and then snapped the switches sharply. Two small servos shoved their blunt noses from the landing port of the Station, and slipped silently into space alongside. Then, like a pair of trained dogs, they sped on their beams straight out from the Station toward the approaching ship. The intruder was dark, moving at tremendous velocity past the Station, as though unaware of its existence. The servos moved out, and suddenly diverged and reversed, twisting in long arcs to come alongside the strange ship, finally moving in at the same velocity on either side. There was a sharp flash of contact power; then, like a mammoth slow-motion monster, the ship jerked in midspace and turned a graceful end-for-end arc as the servo-grapplers gripped it like leeches and whined, glowing ruddy with the jolting power flowing through them. Sabo watched, hardly breathing, until the great ship spun and slowed and stopped. Then it reversed direction, and the servos led it triumphantly back toward the landing port of the Station.
Sabo glanced at the radioman, a frown creasing his forehead. "Still nothing?"
"Not a peep."
He stared out at the great ship, feeling a chill of wonder and fear crawl up his spine. "So this is the mysterious puzzle of Saturn," he muttered. "This is what we've been waiting for."
There was a curious eager light in Captain Loomis' eyes as he looked up. "Oh, no. Not this."
"What?"
"Not this. The ships we've seen before were tiny, flat." His little eyes turned toward the ship, and back to Sabo's heavy face. "This is something else, something quite different." A smile curved his lips, and he rubbed his hands together. "We go out for trout and come back with a whale. This ship's from space, deep space. Not from Saturn. This one's from the stars."
* * * * *
The strange ship hung at the side of the Satellite Station, silent as a tomb, still gently rotating as the Station slowly spun in its orbit around Saturn.
In the captain's cabin the men shifted restlessly, uneasily facing the eager eyes of their captain. The old man paced the floor of the cabin, his white hair mussed, his face red with excitement. Even his carefully calm face couldn't conceal the eagerness burning in his eyes as he faced the crew. "Still no contact?" he asked Sparks.
The radioman shook his head anxiously. "Not a sign. I've tried every signal I know at every wave frequency that could possibly reach them. I've even tried a dozen frequencies that couldn't possibly reach them, and I haven't stirred them up a bit. They just aren't answering."
Captain Loomis swung on the group of men. "All right, now, I want you to get this straight. This is our catch. We don't know what's aboard it, and we don't know where it came from, but it's our prize. That means not a word goes back home about it until we've learned all there is to learn. We're going to get the honors on this one, not some eager Admiral back home--"
The men stirred uneasily, worried eyes seeking Sabo's face in alarm. "What about the law?" growled Sabo. "The law says everything must be reported within two hours."
"Then we'll break the law," the captain snapped. "I'm captain of this Station, and those are your orders. You don't need to worry about the law--I'll see that you're protected, but this is too big to fumble. This ship is from the stars. That means it must have an Interstellar drive. You know what that means. The Government will fall all over itself to reward us--"
Sabo scowled, and the worry deepened in the men's faces. It was hard to imagine the Government falling all over itself for anybody. They knew too well how the Government worked. They had heard of the swift trials, the harsh imprisonments that awaited even the petty infringers. The Military Government had no time to waste on those who stepped out of line, they had no mercy to spare. And the men knew that their captain was not in favor in top Government circles. Crack patrol commanders were not shunted into remote, lifeless Satellite Stations if their stand in the Government was high. And deep in their minds, somehow, the men knew they couldn't trust this little, sharp-eyed, white-haired man. The credit for such a discovery as this might go to him, yes--but there would be little left for them.
"The law--" Sabo repeated stubbornly.
"Damn the law! We're stationed out here in this limbo to watch Saturn and report any activity we see coming from there. There's nothing in our orders about anything else. There have been ships from there, they think, but not this ship. The Government has spent billions trying to find an Interstellar, and never gotten to first base." The captain paused, his eyes narrowing. "We'll go aboard this ship," he said softly. "We'll find out what's aboard it, and where it's from, and we'll take its drive. There's been no resistance yet, but it could be dangerous. We can't assume anything. The boarding party will report everything they find to me. One of them will have to be a drive man. That's you, Brownie."
The little man with the sharp black eyes looked up eagerly. "I don't know if I could tell anything--"
"You can tell more than anyone else here. Nobody else knows space drive. I'll count on you. If you bring back a good report, perhaps we can cancel out certain--unfortunate items in your record. But one other should board with you--" His eyes turned toward John Sabo.
"Not me. This is your goat." The mate's eyes were sullen. "This is gross breach, and you know it. They'll have you in irons when we get back. I don't want anything to do with it."
"You're under orders, Sabo. You keep forgetting."
"They're illegal orders, sir!"
"I'll take responsibility for that."
Sabo looked the old man straight in the eye. "You mean you'd sell us down a rat hole to save your skin. That's what you mean."
Captain Loomis' eyes widened incredulously. Then his face darkened, and he stepped very close to the big man. "You'll watch your tongue, I think," he gritted. "Be careful what you say to me, Sabo. Be very careful. Because if you don't, you'll be in irons, and we'll see just how long you last when you get back home. Now you've got your orders. You'll board the ship with Brownie."
The big man's fists were clenched until the knuckles were white. "You don't know what's over there!" he burst out. "We could be slaughtered."
The captain's smile was unpleasant. "That would be such a pity," he murmured. "I'd really hate to see it happen--"
* * * * *
The ship hung dark and silent, like a shadowy ghost. No flicker of light could be seen aboard it; no sound nor faintest sign of life came from the tall, dark hull plates. It hung there, huge and imponderable, and swung around with the Station in its silent orbit.
The men huddled about Sabo and Brownie, helping them into their pressure suits, checking their equipment. They had watched the little scanning beetles crawl over the surface of the great ship, examining, probing every nook and crevice, reporting crystals, and metals, and irons, while the boarding party prepared. And still the radioman waited alertly for a flicker of life from the solemn giant.
Frightened as they were of their part in the illegal secrecy, the arrival of the ship had brought a change in the crew, lighting fires of excitement in their eyes. They moved faster, their voices were lighter, more cheerful. Long months on the Station had worn on their nerves--out of contact with their homes, on a mission that was secretly jeered as utter Governmental folly. Ships had been seen, years before, disappearing into the sullen bright atmospheric crust of Saturn, but there had been no sign of anything since. And out there, on the lonely guard Station, nerves had run ragged, always waiting, always watching, wearing away even the iron discipline of their military background. They grew bitterly weary of the same faces, the same routine, the constant repetition of inactivity. And through the months they had watched with increasing anxiety the conflict growing between the captain and his bitter, sullen-eyed second-in-command, John Sabo.
And then the ship had come, incredibly, from the depths of space, and the tensions of loneliness were forgotten in the flurry of activity. The locks whined and opened as the two men moved out of the Station on the little propulsion sleds, linked to the Station with light silk guy ropes. Sabo settled himself on the sled, cursing himself for falling so foolishly into the captain's scheme, cursing his tongue for wandering. And deep within him he felt a new sensation, a vague uneasiness and insecurity that he had not felt in all his years of military life. The strange ship was a variant, an imponderable factor thrown suddenly into his small world of hatred and bitterness, forcing him into unknown territory, throwing his mind into a welter of doubts and fears. He glanced uneasily across at Brownie, vaguely wishing that someone else were with him. Brownie was a troublemaker, Brownie talked too much, Brownie philosophized in a world that ridiculed philosophy. He'd known men like Brownie before, and he knew that they couldn't be trusted.
The gray hull gleamed at them as they moved toward it, a monstrous wall of polished metal. There were no dents, no surface scars from its passage through space. They found the entrance lock without difficulty, near the top of the ship's great hull, and Brownie probed the rim of the lock with a dozen instruments, his dark eyes burning eagerly. And then, with a squeal that grated in Sabo's ears, the oval port of the ship quivered, and slowly opened.
Silently, the sleds moved into the opening. They were in a small vault, quite dark, and the sleds settled slowly onto a metal deck. Sabo eased himself from the seat, tuning up his audios to their highest sensitivity, moving over to Brownie. Momentarily they touched helmets, and Brownie's excited voice came to him, muted, but breathless. "No trouble getting it open. It worked on the same principle as ours."
"Better get to work on the inner lock."
Brownie shot him a sharp glance. "But what about--inside? I mean, we can't just walk in on them--"
"Why not? We've tried to contact them."
Reluctantly, the little engineer began probing the inner lock with trembling fingers. Minutes later they were easing themselves through, moving slowly down the dark corridor, waiting with pounding hearts for a sound, a sign. The corridor joined another, and then still another, until they reached a great oval door. And then they were inside, in the heart of the ship, and their eyes widened as they stared at the thing in the center of the great vaulted chamber.
"My God!" Brownie's voice was a hoarse whisper in the stillness. "Look at them, Johnny!"
Sabo moved slowly across the room toward the frail, crushed form lying against the great, gleaming panel. Thin, almost boneless arms were pasted against the hard metal; an oval, humanoid skull was crushed like an eggshell into the knobs and levers of the control panel. Sudden horror shot through the big man as he looked around. At the far side of the room was another of the things, and still another, mashed, like lifeless jelly, into the floors and panels. Gently he peeled a bit of jelly away from the metal, then turned with a mixture of wonder and disgust. "All dead," he muttered.
Brownie looked up at him, his hands trembling. "No wonder there was no sign." He looked about helplessly. "It's a derelict, Johnny. A wanderer. How could it have happened? How long ago?"
Sabo shook his head, bewildered. "Then it was just chance that it came to us, that we saw it--"
"No pilot, no charts. It might have wandered for centuries." Brownie stared about the room, a frightened look on his face. And then he was leaning over the control panel, probing at the array of levers, his fingers working eagerly at the wiring. Sabo nodded approvingly. "We'll have to go over it with a comb," he said. "I'll see what I can find in the rest of the ship. You go ahead on the controls and drive." Without waiting for an answer he moved swiftly from the round chamber, out into the corridor again, his stomach almost sick.
It took them many hours. They moved silently, as if even a slight sound might disturb the sleeping alien forms, smashed against the dark metal panels. In another room were the charts, great, beautiful charts, totally unfamiliar, studded with star formations he had never seen, noted with curious, meaningless symbols. As Sabo worked he heard Brownie moving down into the depths of the ship, toward the giant engine rooms. And then, some silent alarm clicked into place in Sabo's mind, tightening his stomach, screaming to be heard. Heart pounding, he dashed down the corridor like a cat, seeing again in his mind the bright, eager eyes of the engineer. Suddenly the meaning of that eagerness dawned on him. He scampered down a ladder, along a corridor, and down another ladder, down to the engine room, almost colliding with Brownie as he crossed from one of the engines to a battery of generators on the far side of the room.
"Brownie!"
"What's the trouble?"
Sabo trembled, then turned away. "Nothing," he muttered. "Just a thought." But he watched as the little man snaked into the labyrinth of dynamos and coils and wires, peering eagerly, probing, searching, making notes in the little pad in his hand.
Finally, hours later, they moved again toward the lock where they had left their sleds. Not a word passed between them. The uneasiness was strong in Sabo's mind now, growing deeper, mingling with fear and a premonition of impending evil. A dead ship, a derelict, come to them by merest chance from some unthinkably remote star. He cursed, without knowing why, and suddenly he felt he hated Brownie as much as he hated the captain waiting for them in the Station.
But as he stepped into the Station's lock, a new thought crossed his mind, almost dazzling him with its unexpectedness. He looked at the engineer's thin face, and his hands were trembling as he opened the pressure suit.
* * * * *
He deliberately took longer than was necessary to give his report to the captain, dwelling on unimportant details, watching with malicious amusement the captain's growing annoyance. Captain Loomis' eyes kept sliding to Brownie, as though trying to read the information he wanted from the engineer's face. Sabo rolled up the charts slowly, stowing them in a pile on the desk. "That's the picture, sir. Perhaps a qualified astronomer could make something of it; I haven't the knowledge or the instruments. The ship came from outside the system, beyond doubt. Probably from a planet with lighter gravity than our own, judging from the frailty of the creatures. Oxygen breathers, from the looks of their gas storage. If you ask me, I'd say--"
"All right, all right," the captain breathed impatiently. "You can write it up and hand it to me. It isn't really important where they came from, or whether they breathe oxygen or fluorine." He turned his eyes to the engineer, and lit a cigar with trembling fingers. "The important thing is how they got here. The drive, Brownie. You went over the engines carefully? What did you find?"
Brownie twitched uneasily, and looked at the floor. "Oh, yes, I examined them carefully. Wasn't too hard. I examined every piece of drive machinery on the ship, from stem to stern."
Sabo nodded, slowly, watching the little man with a carefully blank face. "That's right. You gave it a good going over."
Brownie licked his lips. "It's a derelict, like Johnny told you. They were dead. All of them. Probably had been dead for a long time. I couldn't tell, of course. Probably nobody could tell. But they must have been dead for centuries--"
The captain's eyes blinked as the implication sank in. "Wait a minute," he said. "What do you mean, centuries?"
Brownie stared at his shoes. "The atomic piles were almost dead," he muttered in an apologetic whine. "The ship wasn't going any place, captain. It was just wandering. Maybe it's wandered for thousands of years." He took a deep breath, and his eyes met the captain's for a brief agonized moment. "They don't have Interstellar, sir. Just plain, simple, slow atomics. Nothing different. They've been traveling for centuries, and it would have taken them just as long to get back."
The captain's voice was thin, choked. "Are you trying to tell me that their drive is no different from our own? That a ship has actually wandered into Interstellar space without a space drive?"
Brownie spread his hands helplessly. "Something must have gone wrong. They must have started off for another planet in their own system, and something went wrong. They broke into space, and they all died. And the ship just went on moving. They never intended an Interstellar hop. They couldn't have. They didn't have the drive for it."
The captain sat back numbly, his face pasty gray. The light had faded in his eyes now; he sat as though he'd been struck. "You--you couldn't be wrong? You couldn't have missed anything?"
Brownie's eyes shifted unhappily, and his voice was very faint. "No, sir."
The captain stared at them for a long moment, like a stricken child. Slowly he picked up one of the charts, his mouth working. Then, with a bitter roar, he threw it in Sabo's face. "Get out of here! Take this garbage and get out! And get the men to their stations. We're here to watch Saturn, and by god, we'll watch Saturn!" He turned away, a hand over his eyes, and they heard his choking breath as they left the cabin.
Slowly, Brownie walked out into the corridor, started down toward his cabin, with Sabo silent at his heels. He looked up once at the mate's heavy face, a look of pleading in his dark brown eyes, and then opened the door to his quarters. Like a cat, Sabo was in the room before him, dragging him in, slamming the door. He caught the little man by the neck with one savage hand, and shoved him unceremoniously against the door, his voice a vicious whisper. "All right, talk! Let's have it now!"
Brownie choked, his eyes bulging, his face turning gray in the dim light of the cabin. "Johnny! Let me down! What's the matter? You're choking me, Johnny--"
The mate's eyes were red, with heavy lines of disgust and bitterness running from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. "You stinking little liar! Talk, damn it! You're not messing with the captain now, you're messing with me, and I'll have the truth if I have to cave in your skull--"
"I told you the truth! I don't know what you mean--"
Sabo's palm smashed into his face, jerking his head about like an apple on a string. "That's the wrong answer," he grated. "I warn you, don't lie! The captain is an ambitious ass, he couldn't think his way through a multiplication table. He's a little child. But I'm not quite so dull." He threw the little man down in a heap, his eyes blazing. "You silly fool, your story is so full of holes you could drive a tank through it. They just up and died, did they? I'm supposed to believe that? Smashed up against the panels the way they were? Only one thing could crush them like that. Any fool could see it. Acceleration. And I don't mean atomic acceleration. Something else." He glared down at the man quivering on the floor. "They had Interstellar drive, didn't they, Brownie?"
Brownie nodded his head, weakly, almost sobbing, trying to pull himself erect. "Don't tell the captain," he sobbed. "Oh, Johnny, for god's sake, listen to me, don't let him know I lied. I was going to tell you anyway, Johnny, really I was. I've got a plan, a good plan, can't you see it?" The gleam of excitement came back into the sharp little eyes. "They had it, all right. Their trip probably took just a few months. They had a drive I've never seen before, non-atomic. I couldn't tell the principle, with the look I had, but I think I could work it." He sat up, his whole body trembling. "Don't give me away, Johnny, listen a minute--"
Sabo sat back against the bunk, staring at the little man. "You're out of your mind," he said softly. "You don't know what you're doing. What are you going to do when His Nibs goes over for a look himself? He's stupid, but not that stupid."
Brownie's voice choked, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness. "He won't get a chance to see it, Johnny. He's got to take our word until he sees it, and we can stall him--"
Sabo blinked. "A day or so--maybe. But what then? Oh, how could you be so stupid? He's on the skids, he's out of favor and fighting for his life. That drive is the break that could put him on top. Can't you see he's selfish? He has to be, in this world, to get anything. Anything or anyone who blocks him, he'll destroy, if he can. Can't you see that? When he spots this, your life won't be worth spitting at."
Brownie was trembling as he sat down opposite the big man. His voice was harsh in the little cubicle, heavy with pain and hopelessness. "That's right," he said. "My life isn't worth a nickle. Neither is yours. Neither is anybody's, here or back home. Nobody's life is worth a nickle. Something's happened to us in the past hundred years, Johnny--something horrible. I've seen it creeping and growing up around us all my life. People don't matter any more, it's the Government, what the Government thinks that matters. It's a web, a cancer that grows in its own pattern, until it goes so far it can't be stopped. Men like Loomis could see the pattern, and adapt to it, throw away all the worthwhile things, the love and beauty and peace that we once had in our lives. Those men can get somewhere, they can turn this life into a climbing game, waiting their chance to get a little farther toward the top, a little closer to some semblance of security--"
"Everybody adapts to it," Sabo snapped. "They have to. You don't see me moving for anyone else, do you? I'm for me, and believe me I know it. I don't give a hang for you, or Loomis, or anyone else alive--just me. I want to stay alive, that's all. You're a dreamer, Brownie. But until you pull something like this, you can learn to stop dreaming if you want to--"
"No, no, you're wrong--oh, you're horribly wrong, Johnny. Some of us can't adapt, we haven't got what it takes, or else we have something else in us that won't let us go along. And right there we're beat before we start. There's no place for us now, and there never will be." He looked up at the mate's impassive face. "We're in a life where we don't belong, impounded into a senseless, never-ending series of fights and skirmishes and long, lonely waits, feeding this insane urge of the Government to expand, out to the planets, to the stars, farther and farther, bigger and bigger. We've got to go, seeking newer and greater worlds to conquer, with nothing to conquer them with, and nothing to conquer them for. There's life somewhere else in our solar system, so it must be sought out and conquered, no matter what or where it is. We live in a world of iron and fear, and there was no place for me, and others like me, until this ship came--"
Sabo looked at him strangely. "So I was right. I read it on your face when we were searching the ship. I knew what you were thinking...." His face darkened angrily. "You couldn't get away with it, Brownie. Where could you go, what could you expect to find? You're talking death, Brownie. Nothing else--"
"No, no. Listen, Johnny." Brownie leaned closer, his eyes bright and intent on the man's heavy face. "The captain has to take our word for it, until he sees the ship. Even then he couldn't tell for sure--I'm the only drive engineer on the Station. We have the charts, we could work with them, try to find out where the ship came from; I already have an idea of how the drive is operated. Another look and I could make it work. Think of it, Johnny! What difference does it make where we went, or what we found? You're a misfit, too, you know that--this coarseness and bitterness is a shell, if you could only see it, a sham. You don't really believe in this world we're in--who cares where, if only we could go, get away? Oh, it's a chance, the wildest, freak chance, but we could take it--"
"If only to get away from him," said Sabo in a muted voice. "Lord, how I hate him. I've seen smallness and ambition before--pettiness and treachery, plenty of it. But that man is our whole world knotted up in one little ball. I don't think I'd get home without killing him, just to stop that voice from talking, just to see fear cross his face one time. But if we took the ship, it would break him for good." A new light appeared in the big man's eyes. "He'd be through, Brownie. Washed up."
"And we'd be free--"
Sabo's eyes were sharp. "What about the acceleration? It killed those that came in the ship."
"But they were so frail, so weak. Light brittle bones and soft jelly. Our bodies are stronger, we could stand it."
Sabo sat for a long time, staring at Brownie. His mind was suddenly confused by the scope of the idea, racing in myriad twirling fantasies, parading before his eyes the long, bitter, frustrating years, the hopelessness of his own life, the dull aching feeling he felt deep in his stomach and bones each time he set back down on Earth, to join the teeming throngs of hungry people. He thought of the rows of drab apartments, the thin faces, the hollow, hunted eyes of the people he had seen. He knew that that was why he was a soldier--because soldiers ate well, they had time to sleep, they were never allowed long hours to think, and wonder, and grow dull and empty. But he knew his life had been barren. The life of a mindless automaton, moving from place to place, never thinking, never daring to think or speak, hoping only to work without pain each day, and sleep without nightmares.
And then, he thought of the nights in his childhood, when he had lain awake, sweating with fear, as the airships screamed across the dark sky above, bound he never knew where; and then, hearing in the far distance the booming explosion, he had played that horrible little game with himself, seeing how high he could count before he heard the weary, plodding footsteps of the people on the road, moving on to another place. He had known, even as a little boy, that the only safe place was in those bombers, that the place for survival was in the striking armies, and his life had followed the hard-learned pattern, twisting him into the cynical mold of the mercenary soldier, dulling the quick and clever mind, drilling into him the ways and responses of order and obey, stripping him of his heritage of love and humanity. Others less thoughtful had been happier; they had succeeded in forgetting the life they had known before, they had been able to learn easily and well the lessons of the repudiation of the rights of men which had crept like a blight through the world. But Sabo, too, was a misfit, wrenched into a mold he could not fit. He had sensed it vaguely, never really knowing when or how he had built the shell of toughness and cynicism, but also sensing vaguely that it was built, and that in it he could hide, somehow, and laugh at himself, and his leaders, and the whole world through which he plodded. He had laughed, but there had been long nights, in the narrow darkness of spaceship bunks, when his mind pounded at the shell, screaming out in nightmare, and he had wondered if he had really lost his mind.
His gray eyes narrowed as he looked at Brownie, and he felt his heart pounding in his chest, pounding with a fury that he could no longer deny. "It would have to be fast," he said softly. "Like lightning, tonight, tomorrow--very soon."
"Oh, yes, I know that. But we can do it--"
"Yes," said Sabo, with a hard, bitter glint in his eyes. "Maybe we can."
* * * * *
The preparation was tense. For the first time in his life, Sabo knew the meaning of real fear, felt the clinging aura of sudden death in every glance, every word of the men around him. It seemed incredible that the captain didn't notice the brief exchanges with the little engineer, or his own sudden appearances and disappearances about the Station. But the captain sat in his cabin with angry eyes, snapping answers without even looking up. Still, Sabo knew that the seeds of suspicion lay planted in his mind, ready to burst forth with awful violence at any slight provocation. As he worked, the escape assumed greater and greater proportions in Sabo's mind; he knew with increasing urgency and daring that nothing must stop him. The ship was there, the only bridge away from a life he could no longer endure, and his determination blinded him to caution.
Primarily, he pondered over the charts, while Brownie, growing hourly more nervous, poured his heart into a study of his notes and sketches. A second look at the engines was essential; the excuse he concocted for returning to the ship was recklessly slender, and Sabo spent a grueling five minutes dissuading the captain from accompanying him. But the captain's eyes were dull, and he walked his cabin, sunk in a gloomy, remorseful trance.
The hours passed, and the men saw, in despair, that more precious, dangerous hours would be necessary before the flight could be attempted. And then, abruptly, Sabo got the call to the captain's cabin. He found the old man at his desk, regarding him with cold eyes, and his heart sank. The captain motioned him to a seat, and then sat back, lighting a cigar with painful slowness. "I want you to tell me," he said in a lifeless voice, "exactly what Brownie thinks he's doing."
Sabo went cold. Carefully he kept his eyes on the captain's face. "I guess he's nervous," he said. "He doesn't belong on a Satellite Station. He belongs at home. The place gets on his nerves."
"I didn't like his report."
"I know," said Sabo.
The captain's eyes narrowed. "It was hard to believe. Ships don't just happen out of space. They don't wander out interstellar by accident, either." An unpleasant smile curled his lips. "I'm not telling you anything new. I wouldn't want to accuse Brownie of lying, of course--or you either. But we'll know soon. A patrol craft will be here from the Triton supply base in an hour. I signaled as soon as I had your reports." The smile broadened maliciously. "The patrol craft will have experts aboard. Space drive experts. They'll review your report."
"An hour--"
The captain smiled. "That's what I said. In that hour, you could tell me the truth. I'm not a drive man, I'm an administrator, and organizer and director. You're the technicians. The truth now could save you much unhappiness--in the future."
Sabo stood up heavily. "You've got your information," he said with a bitter laugh. "The patrol craft will confirm it."
The captain's face went a shade grayer. "All right," he said. "Go ahead, laugh. I told you, anyway."
Sabo didn't realize how his hands were trembling until he reached the end of the corridor. In despair he saw the plan crumbling beneath his feet, and with the despair came the cold undercurrent of fear. The patrol would discover them, disclose the hoax. There was no choice left--ready or not, they'd have to leave.
Quickly he turned in to the central control room where Brownie was working. He sat down, repeating the captain's news in a soft voice.
"An hour! But how can we--"
"We've got to. We can't quit now, we're dead if we do."
Brownie's eyes were wide with fear. "But can't we stall them, somehow? Maybe if we turned on the captain--"
"The crew would back him. They wouldn't dare go along with us. We've got to run, nothing else." He took a deep breath. "Can you control the drive?"
Brownie stared at his hands. "I--I think so. I can only try."
"You've got to. It's now or never. Get down to the lock, and I'll get the charts. Get the sleds ready."
He scooped the charts from his bunk, folded them carefully and bound them swiftly with cord. Then he ran silently down the corridor to the landing port lock. Brownie was already there, in the darkness, closing the last clamps on his pressure suit. Sabo handed him the charts, and began the laborious task of climbing into his own suit, panting in the darkness.
And then the alarm was clanging in his ear, and the lock was flooded with brilliant light. Sabo stopped short, a cry on his lips, staring at the entrance to the control room.
The captain was grinning, a nasty, evil grin, his eyes hard and humorless as he stood there flanked by three crewmen. His hand gripped an ugly power gun tightly. He just stood there, grinning, and his voice was like fire in Sabo's ears. "Too bad," he said softly. "You almost made it, too. Trouble is, two can't keep a secret. Shame, Johnny, a smart fellow like you. I might have expected as much from Brownie, but I thought you had more sense--"
Something snapped in Sabo's mind, then. With a roar, he lunged at the captain's feet, screaming his bitterness and rage and frustration, catching the old man's calves with his powerful shoulders. The captain toppled, and Sabo was fighting for the power gun, straining with all his might to twist the gun from the thin hand, and he heard his voice shouting, "Run! Go, Brownie, make it go!"
The lock was open, and he saw Brownie's sled nose out into the blackness. The captain choked, his face purple. "Get him! Don't let him get away!"
The lock clanged, and the screens showed the tiny fragile sled jet out from the side of the Station, the small huddled figure clinging to it, heading straight for the open port of the gray ship. "Stop him! The guns, you fools, the guns!"
The alarm still clanged, and the control room was a flurry of activity. Three men snapped down behind the tracer-guns, firing without aiming, in a frenzied attempt to catch the fleeing sled. The sled began zig-zagging, twisting wildly as the shells popped on either side of it. The captain twisted away from Sabo's grip with a roar, and threw one of the crewmen to the deck, wrenching the gun controls from his hands. "Get the big ones on the ship! Blast it! If it gets away you'll all pay."
Suddenly the sled popped into the ship's port, and the hatch slowly closed behind it. Raving, the captain turned the gun on the sleek, polished hull plates, pressed the firing levels on the war-head servos. Three of them shot out from the Satellite, like deadly bugs, careening through the intervening space, until one of them struck the side of the gray ship, and exploded in purple fury against the impervious hull. And the others nosed into the flame, and passed on through, striking nothing.
Like the blinking of a light, the alien ship had throbbed, and jerked, and was gone.
With a roar the captain brought his fist down on the hard plastic and metal of the control panel, kicked at the sheet of knobs and levers with a heavy foot, his face purple with rage. His whole body shook as he turned on Sabo, his eyes wild. "You let him get away! It was your fault, yours! But you won't get away! I've got you, and you'll pay, do you hear that?" He pulled himself up until his face was bare inches from Sabo's, his teeth bared in a frenzy of hatred. "Now we'll see who'll laugh, my friend. You'll laugh in the death chamber, if you can still laugh by then!" He turned to the men around him. "Take him," he snarled. "Lock him in his quarters, and guard him well. And while you're doing it, take a good look at him. See how he laughs now."
They marched him down to his cabin, stunned, still wondering what had happened. Something had gone in his mind in that second, something that told him that the choice had to be made, instantly. Because he knew, with dull wonder, that in that instant when the lights went on he could have stopped Brownie, could have saved himself. He could have taken for himself a piece of the glory and promotion due to the discoverers of an Interstellar drive. But he had also known, somehow, in that short instant, that the only hope in the world lay in that one nervous, frightened man, and the ship which could take him away.
And the ship was gone. That meant the captain was through. He'd had his chance, the ship's coming had given him his chance, and he had muffed it. Now he, too, would pay. The Government would not be pleased that such a ship had leaked through his fingers. Captain Loomis was through.
And him? Somehow, it didn't seem to matter any more. He had made a stab at it, he had tried. He just hadn't had the luck. But he knew there was more to that. Something in his mind was singing, some deep feeling of happiness and hope had crept into his mind, and he couldn't worry about himself any more. There was nothing more for him; they had him cold. But deep in his mind he felt a curious satisfaction, transcending any fear and bitterness. Deep in his heart, he knew that one man had escaped.
And then he sat back and laughed.
THE END
ALL DAY WEDNESDAY
By Richard Olin
Practically everybody would agree that this is Utopia....
Ernie turned the dial on his television. The station he had selected brightened and the face of the set turned from dark to blue. Ernie sipped his can of beer. He was alone in the room, and it was night.
The picture steadied and Jory looked out of the set at him. Jory's face was tired. He looked bad.
"Hello, Ernie," Jory said.
Ernie turned the dial to the next station.
"Hello, Ernie," the face of Jory said.
At the next spot on the dial: "Hello, Ernie." The next: "Hello, Ernie."
There were five stations that Ernie's set was able to receive. When the fifth station said "Hello, Ernie," and Jory's tired face looked out at him, Ernie shrugged, took another sip from his can of beer and sat down to watch the set.
That happened Wednesday night. Wednesday morning began like this:
Ernie woke feeling bored. It seemed he was always bored these days. An empty can of beer and a crumpled pack of cigarettes rested on top of the dead television. All he did nights was watch TV.
Ernie sighed and thanked God that today was Wednesday. Tonight, when he came home from work, he would be over the hump ... only two days left and then the week end. Ernie didn't know for sure what he would do on his week end--go bowling, maybe--but whatever he did it was sure to be better than staying home every night.
Oh, he supposed he could go out, just once in a while, during the work week. Some of the guys at the plant did. But then, the guys that did go out week nights weren't as sharp at their jobs as Ernie was. Sometimes they showed up late and pulled other stuff like that. You couldn't do things like that too often, Ernie thought virtuously. Not if it was a good job, a job that you wanted to keep. You had to be sharp.
Ernie smiled. He was sharp. A growing feeling of virtue began to replace his boredom.
Ernie glanced at his watch and went sprawling out of his bed. He was late. He didn't even have time for breakfast.
His last thought, as he slammed out of his apartment, was an angry regret that he had not had time to pack a lunch. He would have to eat in the plant cafeteria again. Cafeteria lunches cost money. Money concerned Ernie. It always did. But right now he was going to need money for the week end; payday was another week away.
* * * * *
Ernie punched in twelve minutes late.
His foreman was waiting beside the time clock. He was a big man, and what was left of his red hair matched in color the skin of his neck. And the color of his face, when he grew angry.
His name was Rogers. He smiled now as Ernie nervously pushed his time card into the clock. His voice was warm and jovial as he spoke.
"Well ... good morning, Mr. Stump. And did we have a nice, late, cozy little sleep-in this morning?"
Ernie smiled uncertainly. "I'm sorry, Rogers. I know I'm late, but the time just sort of got away from me--"
Rogers laughed lightly. "Think nothing of it, Mr. Stump. These things happen, after all."
"Uh, yeah. Well, like I said, I'm sorry and--"
Rogers went on, unheeding. "Of course, complications can develop when your number three wrist-pin man decides that he just isn't feeling sharp this morning and he needs a little extra sleep to put him right. If you're the foreman for Sub-Assembly Line 3-A, for example, Mr. Stump, one wonders if the rush order that must be filled by this morning is going to be finished any time before next Christmas. One wonders where the wrist-pin man is, Mr. Stump. Does he intend to come in at all, or will he just snooze his little head off all day? One wonders what to say to the plant manager, Mr. Stump. How do you tell him that twenty men are standing idle on Sub-Assembly Line 3-A because, through a laughable oversight, there is no one to put in a wrist-pin? How do you explain it so he will understand, Mr. Stump?"
Rogers stopped and caught his breath. His face began growing red. He said slowly, "You don't, Mr. Stump. You don't explain it so he will understand. I just tried!"
Ernie swallowed. Hurriedly, he said, "Look I'm sorry. I'll get right in there--"
Rogers smiled. "That would be nice, Mr. Stump. I imagine there are quite a few Sub-Assembly 3-A's stacked up in there by now. You just trot in there and get them cleaned up."
Ernie nodded doubtfully. "You ain't mad?"
Rogers' smile grew broader. "Mad, Mr. Stump? Why, being chewed out by the manager is a trifle. It's something a foreman must expect. It happens to some of them every day--for a while. And when it does, it doesn't matter because in just a little while they are no longer foremen. Sometimes, they aren't even workmen, any more. And then they have nothing at all to worry about, so don't let it concern you, Mr. Stump. Do you take the streetcar to work?"
"Huh? Uh, yeah, I do."
"I thought so." Rogers nodded his head benignly. "Well, just as a suggestion, the next time you see you're going to be late it might be better if you saved your car-fare and used it to buy a newspaper."
Ernie smiled uncertainly. "O.K. Uh, why?"
"Because," Rogers said slowly, no longer smiling, "the next time you leave me in a crack like that, you're going to be reading the 'Help Wanted' section! Now get in there and get to work!"
Ernie did.
He worked the rest of the morning in a sullen mood. For one thing, with the extra time that Rogers had taken up, Sub-Assembly Line 3-A was a mess. Incomplete sub-assemblies were stacked on the floor all around Ernie's spot on the line. He would have to pin them and slip them into the production line as best he could.
Next to him on the line, Broncewicz said: "Ernie, we'll never get this job out. Where were you?"
And Ernie told him about the beef with Rogers. He worked as he talked, but the more he talked the angrier he got. Rogers had been unfair. He asked Broncewicz, "How can anybody do a good job with that guy all the time riding 'em?"
Broncewicz nodded. "You should take it to the union."
Ernie snorted. "That's a hot one. Rogers used to be our shop steward."
"Yeah, I forgot." Broncewicz scratched at a hairy ear. "Anyway, you should tell him off."
"Yeah, I should tell...." Ernie laid aside a wrench to phrase exactly what he wished to say to Rogers, and the next sub-assembly slipped past. Both he and Broncewicz grabbed it hastily.
Unfortunately, Rogers happened to be watching. He walked over. Broncewicz became intently interested in his work. Ernie sighed resignedly.
Rogers seemed surprisingly resigned, himself. All he said was, "I thought you got enough sleep this morning, Stump. Wake up, get on the stick." He walked off.
Broncewicz raised his head. "Hey, I thought you were going to tell him?"
"Aw, shut up."
Ernie did not like his foreman, but neither did he like the prospect of losing his job. He couldn't afford to be out of work.
The noon whistle blew as he was finishing the last of the extra assemblies. Ernie tossed his tools down and left the line.
* * * * *
The sight of the food in the cafeteria reminded him all over again that he was spending too much money. His stomach had felt queasy. It now turned sour. Without looking at them, Ernie selected a plate of frankfurters and spaghetti, picked up a carton of milk for the sake of his stomach, and sat down at the nearest table.
Jory sat down beside him. "Joe's waving at you," he said, nodding at the cashier at the end of the counter. "You forgot to pay."
"What?" Ernie stomped over to the counter, threw down the money and returned to his seat. To Jory he said: "I feel bad today."
"Uh-huh," Jory said disinterestedly. He turned a page of the book he had propped next to his plate.
"Don't be a wise guy," Ernie grunted. He turned his attention to his plate. Several mouthfuls of spaghetti convinced him that he was hungry after all. He swallowed and opened his carton of milk. He looked up at the book Jory was holding. Jory was a funny guy, always reading.
"What's the book today?" he asked.
Jory held the cover so he could see the title. "Celine's 'Journey to the End of Night.' It's French."
Ernie's interest quickened. "French, huh? Has it got any good stuff in it? You know, like Miller has?" He laughed.
"No."
"Well, what's it about?"
"About a guy who thinks he might commit suicide."
"Oh." Ernie thought about it for a minute. "Is that all it's about? Just some guy wonderin' if he should bump himself off?"
"Yes." Jory turned a page.
"Oh." Ernie thought about it again. "And he made a whole book out of it? Just that ... no sex or nothing?"
"No. No sex or nothing."
Ernie laughed. "Well, it sounds pretty stale to me."
Jory sighed and gave up reading. He put the book down. "No, it isn't stale. The book does depress me, though." He pushed it to one side.
His eyes traveled around the cafeteria; he thought for a moment then said: "Do you ever get the feeling, Ernie, that your life has gotten stuck? That you are just going round and round, caught in one single groove--that you just repeat the same scene, day after day?"
Ernie shook his head. "Nah. I never feel like that."
"I do. I get to feeling it bad, sometimes. Why do you suppose that is, Ernie?"
Ernie considered the question for a moment. "Well," he said helpfully, "it might mean you're cracking up."
Jory laughed. "Thanks. But when I need an analyst I'll go out and hire one. No, I think I feel that way because life has somehow become a lot more futile than it need be."
Ernie shrugged and let it go. He wiped the last trace of spaghetti sauce from his plate. Jory got funny moods--probably because he read so much, Ernie suspected--but he was a good man. All the guys in the plant figured Jory for a regular guy. He liked to read some pretty funny books, but so what? It was his eyesight, wasn't it?
Ernie remembered something else. "Hey," he said to Jory as he lit a cigarette, "Harrigan over in the tool room told me that you write stories. That right?"
"Yeah. But I don't have as much time for it as I once did."
"You ought to stay home nights like I do. Then you'd have time." Ernie paused and added piously, "It makes you sharper on the job, too."
Jory started to laugh but caught it in time. He worked on the line next to Ernie, and had witnessed the foul-up this morning. He said, "What do you do until bedtime? Watch TV?"
"Every night. Boxing is good on Fridays. Monday night ain't so hot. Wednesday, tonight, will be good. Lots of Westerns.
"You ought to try it. Come to think of it you look sort of tired. You shouldn't go out drinking week nights."
Jory shrugged. "Maybe I will try it. What are your favorite programs?"
Ernie told him.
"Say," Ernie asked, "do you make any money writing stories?"
"Once in awhile. If I sell the story I'm working on now, I think I'll lay off for a couple of months and get a cabin down in Mexico. The fishing will be good at Vera Cruz--" He stopped and frowned. "No. I guess I won't. I can't."
"Why can't you?"
"Something I forgot. Never mind."
"No," Ernie persisted, "you were saying--"
"Forget it."
"Oh, I get it. You're afraid to lay off because they might not hire you back?"
"Nuts. There's always some place that is hiring. You'd be surprised at some of the jobs I've had, Ernie." He grinned. "As far as that goes, I might get laid off here before I want to go."
"What makes you say that?"
"Look around you. How many men are working today?"
* * * * *
Now that his attention was called to it, Ernie glanced around the cafeteria. Normally, it was packed during the lunch hour. Today, it was less than three-quarters full.
"So? Some of the guys are out sick, that's all."
"There won't be much work this afternoon. We got most of it out this morning."
"It's some new bug. Like that flu thing last winter." But Ernie's voice, as he said it, was defensive. In Ernie's book, a layoff was a bad thing.
Inside, Ernie's mind began to calculate the possibilities. It was a thing Ernie's mind always did when it was confronted with the unexpected. His mind didn't like to work, but Ernie liked the unforeseen even less.
It was unlikely that the entire plant would be shut down. In that case what supervisors would want him to stay on? He ran through the list of his superiors and immediately came to Rogers.
Ernie winced. After this morning, Rogers would post him for the layoff for sure. He could take it to the union, but--Ernie stopped and looked suspiciously at Jory.
Did Jory know about the beef he had this morning with Rogers? Come to think of it, Ernie didn't know there was going to be a layoff. Was Jory just needling him?
He looked around the cafeteria again. The tables on the edges of the floor were deserted and empty. To Ernie's eyes it suddenly looked as if the men who were eating had purposely gathered so they could be close together. They sat with their backs hunched, turned on the empty spaces behind them.
Even the noise, compared to the usual din of the cafeteria, seemed to be different. It echoed and fell flat. Ernie didn't like it. He felt funny. The overly familiar cafeteria had suddenly become strange.
A feeling began to grow in him that, somehow, the cafeteria was wrong. "It ... looks funny," he said.
Jory became alert. "What looks funny?"
"I don't know ... the room."
"What's wrong with the room?" Jory bent over. His eyes were intent, but his voice stayed low. He spoke with great care.
"I ... don't know. It looks funny. Empty. Older. No, wait--" And the feeling was gone. Ernie shook his head. It was the old, crowded and not too clean cafeteria, again.
He turned to Jory. "Well, they better not! I was out of work six months on the last layoff." He paused and marshaled a last, telling argument: "I can't afford it!"
Jory laughed. "Take it easy. I said there might be one. Lots of things might happen. Hell, the world itself might come to an end."
Ernie said grumpily, "I don't like 'mights'. Why can't they leave a man alone and let him do his work? Why do they gotta--"
Jory stood up and grinned. "Come on, Ernie. What do you need money for? I mean, other than to keep up the payments on your TV?"
Ernie rose. "Don't be such a guy," he grumbled. "We better get back. If I come in late from lunch, I've had it."
It was a quarter of a mile across the plant yard to where they worked. They walked in silence for the first few yards. Ernie thought his own thoughts and listened to the sound of their feet on the gravel.
Presently, Jory said, "Ernie, you watch the fights. Do you remember back when they had the Rico-Marsetti bout?"
Ernie still felt irritable. "Hell, yes, I remember. It was just two weeks ago. You make it sound like it happened six months back."
"How well do you remember it?"
"Well enough. That bum Marsetti cost me ten bucks when he dived in the sixth. He was the two-to-one favorite."
"He didn't dive."
"Yeah? You ask him?"
"No. I read the papers. He was pretty scrambled up ... in the head, I mean ... for quite a while after they brought him back to his dressing room."
"Maybe he was that way all along. Maybe they just then noticed it."
Jory laughed. "Don't get cynical, Ernie. It's a sign of old age. No. Marsetti was really out of his head. He kept going through the last round ... you know, in his mind. He did it perfect, thirty or forty times, just up to the knockout." Then he stopped and went through the whole round again.
"The doctors that examined him said that it happened because he ran into something he couldn't face."
Ernie said sourly, "Yeah. Rico's left fist."
"Maybe. But it gave me an idea."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. The idea is this: Could the world get knocked out that way? Suppose it did. Suppose everybody ran into something they couldn't take. Would they just run in a closed circle? Would they take a single day, like Marsetti took the sixth round, and just repeat it over and over again?"
Ernie scowled and stopped. They were outside the plant door. "Boy," he said, "you are a bug, ain't you? What are you trying to give me?"
"Just an idea, Ernie."
The suspicion that Jory was needling him came back. "Well, I don't like it," Ernie said scornfully. "In fact, I think it's nuts." He paused to think of something else to say, then shrugged and turned. "I'll see you later. I got to get in to work."
* * * * *
And now here he was, Ernie thought, sitting in his own room with Jory's face looking at him out of the blue screen.
The whole day has been nuts, Ernie told himself.
"Hello, Ernie," Jory's voice repeated tiredly. "Hello, Ernie.... Hello, Ernie--"
Ernie threw his beer can on the floor. Foam spewed out and soaked the rug. "All right," Ernie bellowed, "All right--Hello!"
Jory stopped. He put his hand to his head and looked excited. He was wearing earphones, Ernie saw.
"Ernie!" Jory said. "Do you see me?" He looked blindly out of the screen.
In his rage, Ernie nearly kicked in the face of the set. "Yes, I see you! What are you trying to pull?"
Jory turned excitedly to someone beside him, but off the screen. "I've got him," he said quickly. "He's awake." He turned and faced Ernie.
"Look, Ernie, I can't see you but we've got a microphone in your room. I can hear every word you say. Now sit down for a minute and let me explain."
"You'd better," Ernie said ominously.
"Are you sitting?"
"Yeah, I'm sitting. Get on with it."
"I've been on your screen every night for the past week, Ernie. We took over the station. And we've been broadcasting to you on all channels for the past week."
Ernie shook his head. "You're nuts," he mumbled.
"It's true, Ernie."
"But--" A thought struck him. "Hey, are other people getting this on their sets?"
"Everyone in the city, Ernie. But they aren't seeing it. As far as we can tell they think they're watching their usual programs. Everyone is in a trance, Ernie. They just go through the same motions over and over. It was the same with the engineers here. We just pushed them aside. They're tied up now. We're keeping them under drugs. We had to do that. When they were loose they just tried to get back at the controls. But that was all, they never really saw us."
Ernie shook his head again. "Wait a minute. Let me get my head clear--O.K., now you say everybody is in some kind of trance. Why?"
"I tried to make you see it today. The world is stuck. It's stuck in this God-forsaken one day! We don't know why. Some of us--just a few--have known it all along. But even we can't remember what caused it."
"You mean it's happening everywhere?"
"Yes. Or not happening, I guess you'd say. We're not getting reports from overseas ... not any that are any different from the first Wednesday. So it must be the same over there. It's the whole world, Ernie."
"Wait a minute. Let me think." After a moment, he got up, went into the kitchen and got another beer.
"O.K., I'm ready," he said as he came back. "Now, why did you guys pick me? How many of you are there?"
"Just a handful ... no more than twenty. We're scattered all across the country. We picked you because you're a test case, Ernie. One of us is a psychologist.
"He says you're a common denominator. If we could break you out of it, then we could get through to a whole cross section of people."
Ernie grunted and sipped his beer. "A common denominator, huh? Thanks, pal. You mentioned drugs. I guess you can go anywhere? Just walk past people and never be seen?"
"That's right."
Ernie laughed scornfully. "You've got a good deal. Why louse it up? What do you stand to gain?"
Jory shook his head. "You're wrong, Ernie. For one thing, everything is slowly running down. Miners go to the same part of the mine each day and send out nothing but empty cars. The same thing is happening all across the country, in farms, in factories, in hospitals--"
Ernie got up. "Keep talking," he said.
"Hospitals are hideous these days, Ernie. Don't go near a surgeon. All he can do are the same operations he performed on the first Wednesday. If you're the wrong height, the wrong weight, or just there at the wrong time, he'll cut you to pieces.
"Homes burn to the ground. And nobody tries to get out of them. The fire department is no good. It's stuck in that first Wednesday.
"We broke off broadcasting last night. We had to fight an apartment house fire. There are only three of us here in the city. We didn't save anyone. What could we do? We were lucky that we kept it from spreading.
"We need help, Ernie. We need it badly--"
Absently, Ernie said, "Yeah, I see that all right." He kept pacing.
"I don't know if I can make you understand how important you are right now, Ernie. With you helping, we can isolate the thing that triggered you out of this. We can use it as a technique on whole groups of people. The world will begin moving again. At last, things will begin to change."
"Yeah--" Ernie stopped and looked at the rug beside his dresser. He had found what he had been looking for. He picked the microphone up.
And pulled loose the wires.
From the television, Jory screamed. "Ernie, listen to me--"
Ernie turned off the set.
He sat on his bed and continued to think while he finished the can of beer. When he had it all thought out he smiled. He felt very happy. He could stop being afraid. Afraid of anything. His foreman, his job. All of it.
He wasn't interested in walking into banks and carrying off sackfuls of money. What was the sense to that? He couldn't spend it anyway.
Besides, he had something that was better.
All his life there had been too many bright guys with too many bright ideas. And the bright ideas got put into practice and then things changed. They could never leave a guy alone and just let him do his job. They always had to throw in the unexpected.
But this time, nothing was going to change.
Ever.
He chuckled and turned out the light.
THE HAPPY MAN
By Gerald W. Page
More's "Utopia" was isolated-- cut off--from the dreary world outside. All Utopias are....
Nelson saw the girl at the same time she saw him. He had just rounded an outcropping of rock about ten miles from the East Coast Mausoleum. They were facing each other, poised defensively, eyes alertly on each other, about twenty feet apart. She was blond and lean with the conditioning of outdoor life, almost to the point of thinness. And although not really beautiful, she was attractive and young, probably not yet twenty. Her features were even and smooth, her hair wild about her face. She wore a light blouse and faded brown shorts made from a coarse homespun material. Nelson had not expected to run into anyone and apparently, neither had she. They stood staring at each other for a long time; how long, Nelson was unable to decide, later.
A little foolishly, Nelson realized that something would have to be done by one of them. "I'm Hal Nelson," he said. It had been a long time since he had last spoken; his voice sounded strange in the wilderness. The girl moved tensely, but did not come any closer to him. Her eyes stayed fixed on him and he knew that her ears were straining for any sound that might warn her of a trap.
Nelson started to take a step, then checked himself, cursing himself for his eager blundering. The girl stepped back once, quickly, like an animal uncertain if it had been threatened. Nelson stepped back, slowly, and spoke again. "I'm a waker, like you. You can tell by my rags." It was true enough, but the girl only frowned. Her alertness did not relax.
"I've been one for ten or twelve years. I escaped from a Commune in Tannerville when I was in my senior year. They never even got me into one of the coffins. As I said, I'm a waker." He spoke slowly, gently and he hoped soothingly. "You don't have to be afraid of me. Now tell me who you are."
The girl pushed a lock of almost yellow hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, but it was her only show of carelessness. She was strong and light. She was considerably smaller than he and could probably handle herself as well as he in this country. The landscape was thick with bushes, conifers and rocks. She would have no trouble in getting away from him if he scared her; and he would scare her with almost any sudden movement. It had been too long for Nelson to keep track of when he had been accompanied by others and he hungered for companionship; especially for a woman. The patrol that had captured Sammy and Jeanne and the old man, Gardner, had also gotten Edna and almost had gotten him. The fact that the girl was alone now more than likely meant that she had no one either. They needed each other. Nelson did not want to scare her off.
So he sat down on the ground with his back to a large rock and rummaged in his pack to find a can.
"You hungry?" he asked looking up at her. He couldn't be sure at the distance, but he thought that her eyes were brown. Brown, and huge; like a colt's. He held the can out where she could see it. She repeated the gesture of a while ago to brush back that same lock of almost yellow hair, but there was a change in her face which he could see even twenty feet away, and another, more subtle change about her which he had to sense. "You're hungry, all right, aren't you?" he said. He almost tossed her the can, but realized in time that she would run. He considered for a moment and then held it out to her. She focused her eyes on the can and for a moment Nelson might have been able to reach her before she turned and ran; but he had better sense than to try.
Instead, he watched the play of conflicting desires about the girl's face and body. He could see the uncertainty and indecision in the girl's nearly imperceptible movement. But she did not come.
Well, at least she didn't run, either; and Nelson could claim to having broken ahead some in stirring up any indecision at all. He found the can's release and pressed it with his thumb. There was a hiss as the seal came loose and an odor of cooked food as the contents sizzled with warmth. Nelson looked up at the girl and smiled.
It could have been wishful thinking, but it seemed to him that she was a step or two closer than she had been before he had taken his eyes off her to open the can. He couldn't be sure. He smelled the food for her benefit and told her, "It's pork and beans." He held it out to her again. "I stole it from a patrol warehouse a few weeks back. It sure does smell good, doesn't it? You like the smell of that, don't you?" But she still wasn't convinced that this wasn't a patrol stunt to get hands on her and haul her back to a mausoleum. He couldn't blame her. He slowly pushed himself to his feet and walked to a spot about ten feet from where he had been, and still about twenty feet from her, and put the can carefully on the ground. He went back and seated himself against the same rock to wait for her to make up her mind.
* * * * *
It didn't take long. Without taking her eyes from him, she moved like an animal to the food and stooped slowly, keeping alert for any sudden move on his part, and picked up the food. She stood up, and stepped back a couple of steps.
She ate with her fingers, dipping them in and extracting hot food, with no apparent concern for the heat. She pushed the food into her mouth and licked her fingers carefully of clinging food. She ate rapidly, as if for the first time in weeks. And she kept her eyes, all the time, on Nelson.
Nelson didn't care, now; he wouldn't have jumped her, or done anything to scare her at all, even if her guard were to be let down for a moment.
He let her finish her meal, then smiled at her when she looked at him. She still held the empty can, and she was wiping her mouth with her free hand. She stared at him for almost half a minute before he said slowly, "You like that food. Don't you?" She said nothing. She looked at him and at the can she held. He knew what was going on in her mind and he believed that he was winning. "You know we'll both be needing someone out here, don't you?" But her answer was an uncertain expression on her face as she stared at him.
"Loners don't last too long out here. Being alone gets to you sooner or later," he said. "You go mad or you get careless and the patrol gets you."
The girl opened her mouth and glanced around quickly, then back at Nelson. She bent over, still watching Nelson all the time, and put the can down. Then she stepped backwards, toward the edge of the clearing, feeling the way with her feet and a hand held back to tell her if she were backing into a tree or rock. When she was almost to the edge of the clearing, almost to the trees, she stopped and stared at him. There were shadows now; it was almost night, and night came quickly in this country. Nelson could not see her face as she looked at him. She turned suddenly and ran into the trees. He made no effort to stop her or call her back; any such effort would have been futile and for his purposes, disastrous. No such effort was necessary.
He spent the night sheltered between some boulders and awoke the next morning rested by an undisturbed sleep.
He found a small creek near by and washed his face to awaken himself. It was a clear morning, with a warm sun and a cool wafting breeze. He felt good; he felt alive and ready for whatever the day had to offer. And he felt ready for breakfast.
He found another can of pork and beans in his pack and opened it. It was, he noted, almost the last. His supplies were getting low. He considered the situation as he slowly ate his breakfast.
Of course there was only one thing to do. He supposed that he could have gotten by simply by hunting his food, but hunting was at best seasonal and required that he keep more or less to a specific area; agriculture was about the same, only worse. A farm meant a smaller area than a hunting preserve and it also meant sticking to it more. It meant buildings to store food against winter. It meant inevitable--and almost certainly prompt--capture by a patrol. No, all things considered, there was only one answer and he knew the answer from long experience. Find a patrol warehouse and steal your food there.
The question of course, was where and when. There was a patrol station near where Nelson now was, and that was the natural target. He had a few furnace beam guns--three, to be exact--and since the patrol could detect the residue from a furnace beamer a mile away even at low force, the only safe thing to use one on was the patrol. And to be frank, he rather enjoyed his brushes with the patrol. Like him, they were wakers--people who had never known the electronic dreams which were fed to all but a few of Earth's peoples. People who had never lain asleep in nutrient baths from their seventeenth birthday living an unreal world built to their own standards. Of the billions on earth, only a few hundred were wakers. Most of those were patrol, of course, but a few were rebels.
That was he, and also the girl he had seen yesterday. And it had been Edna and Sammy and Jeanne and Gardner; and maybe a dozen other people he had known since he had escaped from the Commune, when he had been just a kid--but when he had seen the danger.
For the past two and a half centuries or so, almost everyone raised on Earth had been raised in a commune, never knowing his or her parents. They had been raised, they had been indoctrinated and they had mated in the communes--and then gone into Sleep. More than likely, Nelson's parents were there still, dreaming in their trance, having long ago forgotten each other and their son, for those were things of a harsher world over which one could have no control. In Sleep one dreamed of a world that suited the dreamer. It was artificial. Oh, yes, it was a highly personalized utopia--one that ironed out the conflicts by simply not allowing them. But it was artificial. And Nelson knew that as long as the universe itself was not artificial nothing artificial could long stand against it. That was why he had escaped the commune without letting them get him into the nutrient bath in which the dreamers lived out their useless lives. His existence gave the lie to the pseudo-utopia he was dedicated to overthrowing. The called it individualism, but Nelson called it spineless.
* * * * *
Above him was sky stretching light blue to the horizons--and beyond the blueness of stars. He felt a pang of longing as he looked up trying to see stars in the day sky. That was where he should be, out there with the pioneers, the men who were carving out the universe to make room for a dynamic mankind that had long ago forgotten the Sleepers of the home world. But no, he decided. Out there he would not be giving so much to mankind as he was here and now. However decadent these people were, he knew that they were men. Nelson knew that somehow he had to overthrow the Sleepers.
Before something happened while they lay helpless in their coffins, dreaming dreams that would go on and on until reality became harsh enough to put them down.
What if the spacefarers should return? What if some alien life form should grow up around some other solar type star, develop space travel, go searching for inhabitable worlds--solar type worlds--and discover Earth with it's sleeping, unaware populace? could dreams defend against that?
Nelson shuddered with the knowledge that he had his work cut out for him, and awoke to his own hunger. He fished out a can and started to open it before he remembered, and fished out another can as well. He pressed the release on both and the tops flew off, releasing the odor of cooking food.
He leaned over and set one can on a flat rock that was just inside his reach, then scooted back about a foot and using his fingers, scooped up a mouthful of his own breakfast. Half turning his head, he caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, about fifteen feet away, tense and expectant but ready to spring away if she thought it was necessary. He turned back and concentrated on eating his own breakfast.
"This sure is good after all night," he said, after a few minutes, making a show of gulping down a chunk of stew beef, and sucking the gravy from his fingers. He did not look back.
"My name is Glynnis," he heard abruptly. He sensed the uncertainty in her voice, and the--distant--hint of belligerence, but even so he could tell it was a soft voice, musical and clear--if he could judge after not having heard a woman's voice in so long.
"Glynnis," he said slowly. "That's a pretty name. Mine's Hal Nelson. Like I told you last night."
"I haven't forgotten. Is that for me?" She meant the food, of course. Hal Nelson looked around. She was still standing by the tree. She was trying to seem at ease and making an awkward show of it.
"Yes," he told her. She took a step closer and stopped, looking at him. He turned back to his own eating. "No need to be scared, Glynnis, I won't hurt you." He became uncomfortably aware that she had not spoken his name yet and he wanted her to very much.
"No." Then a brief pause before she said, "I'm not used to anybody."
"It isn't good to be alone out here with the animals and food so hard to come by--and the patrol searching for wakers. You ever have any brush with the patrol?"
She had come up and was eating now; her answer came between eager mouthfuls. "I seen them once. They didn't know I saw them--or they would have caught me and taken me back with them."
"Where're you from? What are you doing out here?"
For a moment he thought she had not heard him. She was busy eating, apparently having classified him as a friend. Finally, she said, "My folks were out here. They were farmers for a while. I was born out here and we moved around a lot until my daddy got tired of moving. So we built a farm. He built it in a place in a valley off there"--She vaguely indicated south--"And they planted some grain and potatoes and tried to round up some kind of livestock. We had mostly goats. But the patrol found us."
Nelson nodded, bitterly, he knew what had happened. Her father had gone on as long as he could until at last, broken and uncaring he had made one last ditch stand. More than likely he had half wanted to give up anyway, and had not only because of the conflict of his family and saving face. "You were the only one who got away?" he asked.
"Uh-huh. They took the others." She spoke without emotion, peering into her food can to see if there was any left. "I was out in the field but I saw them coming. I hid down low behind some tall grain and got to the forest before they could find me." She examined the can again, then decided it was empty and put it down.
"Do you know what they do to people they take?" Nelson asked.
"Yes."
"Your daddy tell you? What did he say?"
"He said they take you back to the Mausoleum and put you to sleep in a coffin." She looked up at him, her face open, as if that was all there was to it. Nelson decided that she was as guileless as he had expected her to be, and reflected absently on that factor for a moment.
A light breeze was up and the air was full of the scents of the forest. Nelson liked the pungent smell of the pines and rich odor of chokeberries and bushes; and the mustiness that could be found in thickly overgrown places where the ground had become covered with a brown carpet of fallen pine needles. Some days he would search places in the forest until he found one or another brush or tree whose leaves or berries he would crush in his fingers simply so that he could savor the fragrance of them. But not this morning.
He rose to his feet and reached over to pick up Glynnis' discarded food container. She drew away from him, bracing herself as if to leap and run. He stopped himself and froze where he stood for a moment, then drew back.
"I didn't mean to scare you," he said. "We can't stay here, because if you stay somewhere they find you. We can't leave the containers here, either, because if they find them it might give them a clue in tracking us."
She looked ashamed, so he reached over, ready to draw back his hand if she acted as if she were scared. She tugged at her lower lip with her teeth and stared at him with eyes that were wide but she did not spring to her feet. Somehow Nelson knew that the girl was acutely aware of how much she needed help out here. Suddenly, her right hand darted out and for a split second Nelson feared he had lost after all. But she reached over for the discarded can, picked it up and handed it to him. He reacted a little slowly, but he smiled and took the container. Their hands touched briefly and the girl drew hers away, immediately looking ashamed for so doing. Nelson continued to smile at her, and rather stiffly, she answered with a smile of her own. He put the container into the knapsack with the others and then slipped into the armstraps. Glynnis helped him.
* * * * *
They walked for an hour, that first day together, neither speaking. Glynnis stayed close by his side and Nelson could feel her proximity to him. He felt good in a way he had not felt in along time. When the silence was finally broken, it was Nelson who broke it. They were topping a small hill in a section of wilderness that was not as heavily wooded as most and the sunlight was warm against Nelson's face. He had been thinking the matter over off and on all morning, and now he asked, "Have you ever raided a patrol depot?"
"No," she answered, a trace of apprehension in her voice.
They topped the hill and began moving down the other side. "Sometimes it's a pushover, when nobody is there. Other times it's mortal hell. The patrol is always anxious to get their hands on wakers, so they try to keep an eye out for them at the depots. That means a fight unless we're very lucky. If the depot we pick is too heavily manned--"
"What do you mean, 'Depot we pick'?"
"We need more food. We either shoot some, raise some, or steal some."
"Oh," she said, but there was apprehension in her voice.
"We don't have any choice. We'll wait until almost dark. If the depot is guarded by too many men, or for some reason an extra number is there for the night, then we're in trouble unless we play our cards just right. You just do as I tell you and we'll be all right." He reached back and fumbled with the side pouch on his pack. "You know how to use one of these? Here, catch." He tossed her in his spare furnace beamer.
She almost missed it. She caught it awkwardly and held it gingerly with both hands, looking first at the gun and then him. Then, still gingerly, but with a certain willingness, she took the gun by the grip and pointed it to the ground, her eyes shut hard. Then, suddenly, her expression changed and she glanced up at him, worriedly.
"Oh, you said they could tell if we fired one of these."
"Don't worry," Nelson said. "The safety is on. Let me show you." He took the gun and explained to her how to use it. "Now then," he concluded. "When we get to the depot you stay outside the alarm system. I'll go in, leaving you to guard. Try not to use this unless you have to, but if it is necessary, don't hesitate. If you fire it, I'll know. My job will be to slip past the alarm and get inside to the food. If you fire, that'll be a signal that you've been discovered by the guards and we have to get out of there."
"Won't this give us away the same as shooting game?"
"Sure, but we get more food this way and maybe some other stuff. Especially reloads for the furnace guns. And, if we're lucky, we can ground the patrol. One more thing, Glynnis," he added. "Are you sure you can kill a man?"
"Is it hard?" she asked innocently. Nelson was rattled only for a second.
"No, it isn't hard, except that he'll probably be trying to kill you, too."
"I've hunted some game with this." She held up her hunting knife so that the blade caught the sunlight. She had kept it clean and sharp. Nelson could see, but there were places where the blade had been chipped.
"Well, maybe there won't be any need to kill anyone at all," he said, a little more hastily than he intended. "I guess you'll do fine, Glynnis, I'll feel a lot safer knowing you're out there." He would feel as he had felt when Edna had gone with him on raids.
* * * * *
Toward evening they came to the depot Nelson had picked out. They were on a high although gently sloping hill, among the trees that crested it, looking down at the depot about a quarter of a mile away. There was still enough light to see by, but the sky was darkening for night. For the past two or three hours, Nelson had been repeatedly drilling Glynnis over her part. It was simple, really, and she knew it backwards, but she patiently recited her role when he asked her, whether out of regard for his leadership or an instinctive realization of his pre-raid state of nerves, he did not know. He made her recite it again, one last time. She spoke in low tones, just above a whisper. Around them the gathering of dusk had quieted the world. He waited for it to get a little darker, then he touched her shoulder and clasped it for a second before beginning his way to the depot.
He kept close to the bushes as far down as he could and crouched low over the ground the rest of the way even though he knew it was too dark for ordinary optics to pick him up. He had an absorber in his pack that would take care of most of the various radiations and detectors he would come into contact with, and for the most part, unless the alarms were being intently watched, he didn't expect to be noticed on the control board. And you couldn't watch a board like that day after day with maximum efficiency. Not when the alarms were set off only by an occasional animal or falling tree limb. Mostly he had to keep watch for direct contact alarms and traps; he was an accomplished thief and an experienced burglar. At last he found himself at the fence surrounding the depot.
In a clump of bushes a few feet from the fence he hid the containers; it saved him the job of having to bury them, and they would be deadweight now, anyway. Then he turned his attention on the fence.
He took a small plastic box out of his pack and pressed a panel in its center with his thumb. Silently, smoothly, two long thin rods shot out from each end of the box until they were each about a foot long. There was a groove on the box and Nelson fitted it to the lower strand of the fence wire. He let go of the gadget and it balanced of its own accord, its antenna vibrating until they blurred, then ceasing to vibrate as the gadget balanced. Nelson went down on his back and pulled on gloves. He grabbed the fence wire and lifted it so that he could slide under. When he was inside he picked the gadget off the wire by one antenna and shut it off. The antennae pulled back inside. Gardner had made this gadget; Gardner had been handy with things like this. And there would be no other when Nelson lost this. He didn't want to leave it where it could be found or where he might have to abandon it to save his neck in an emergency.
He turned to the problem of getting across the open field. He had little fear of being picked up by radiation detectors, thanks to his absorber. But direct contact could give him away. But most of those had to be buried. That meant that he could keep close to the bushes and not have to worry. The roots of the bushes fouled up the detection instruments if they got to them. He made his way, judging each step before he took it and at last stood by the door.
It was dark by then. He could see the stars in the clear darkness of the sky. They seemed somehow brighter than they had before. Nelson fished through his pack until he felt the familiar shape of the gadget he wanted. It was smaller, more compact than the one he had used to get over the fence; but it was more complex. He felt along the door frame for the alarm trip and found it. He placed the gadget there and switched it on. There was a short, low, buzzing sound as the gadget did its job and Nelson glanced around nervously, in fear it had been heard. The door's lock clunked back and Nelson released air from his lungs. He pushed the door open and found himself in darkness.
He was in a corridor with doors facing off from it. He could see light coming under two of the doors, meaning patrolmen behind them. He moved cautiously by the two doors, almost opposite each other, to a door at the end of the corridor. He grasped the handle and opened the door, realizing too late that the door should have been locked.
But by that time the door was open. His hand darted to his holstered furnace beamer and unlocked the safety. It was almost pitch dark in the room but he heard the room's occupant turning over on the bunk and mumble low, incoherently, in his sleep. Nelson waited a minute but the man didn't wake up.
Nelson closed the door.
He tried another door; this time, one that was locked. He had no trouble forcing the lock pattern; less than a minute later he was inside, with the door shut behind him. He took out a flashlight.
This was the storeroom, all right. It was piled with boxes mostly unopened. Nelson read the labels on the boxes and opened those which contained food he needed and supplies. He found another pack in an opened box in one corner and began outfitting it like his own. Or as nearly like his own as possible; he know that he could never duplicate or replace the gadgets Gardner had designed, and in a way he was bitter about it. He found the ammunition stores and took as many capsules for the furnace beamers as he could carry. He went to the door but slipped the furnace beamer out of his holster before opening the door.
The corridor was still dark. He stepped into it, alert for any sound or movement that might mean danger or herald discovery. His nervousness had given way to cool, detached determination. He almost made it to the door before he heard the footsteps.
* * * * *
His reaction was unconscious and reflexive. He turned, leveling his gun. He had passed the two doors light had shown under. One of them was opening and Nelson saw the shadow of the man who had opened it; then the man. The man saw Nelson at about the same time and stood gaping at him. Without realizing that he had fired, Nelson felt the recoil of the gun; the roar of the beam against the close walls hurt his ears, parts of the wall blistered and buckled, other parts of it charred black, some parts vaporizing in thin patches. The patrolman had flared instantly, never really knowing what had hit him. Smoke and heavy odors filled the corridor as Nelson slid out into the open. The patrol depots were fireproof, but the area Nelson had blasted would be far to hot to pass through for the rest of the night.
Nelson toned down the volume of his beamer and fired at a fence post. The tough plastic burst into splinters with a sudden explosion. A snapping wire whipped to within inches of Nelson's face but he didn't have to think about it. He was running up the hillside a short while later--he had lost track of time as such--hoping that Glynnis would use her gun if any patrolmen were following him.
He reached the hilltop in darkness, afraid to use his flashlight. Suddenly, he stumbled; was falling over something soft, like an animal or a man. Cursing low and involuntarily, he managed to roll over so that he fell on his back. He saw the form, a patch of irregular blackness in the darkness around him and knew it for a body. He got to his feet glancing around, not knowing what this meant. He bent over the form, keeping the furnace beam's muzzle only a few inches from it, but too far back to be grabbed suddenly. He couldn't see the man's clothing very plainly but he could tell it was a patrolman's uniform. Nelson reached down to feel for a heartbeat and drew his hand away sticky with what he knew must be blood. Nelson was shaken for a moment; but he put aside the strange kinship he so often felt for patrolmen because they were also wakers and drew back, peering round into the darkness, pretty certain that he knew what had happened to this patrolman.
He pushed himself erect and turned to see Glynnis, a dark figure but obviously her, standing near a clump of trees a few feet off.
"You move quiet as a cat," he said. "You do this?"
"Uh-huh." She came forward and stared down at the corpse. Nelson was glad he couldn't see her face in the darkness. "There were two of them. They split up and I followed after this one and came up behind him. I slit his throat. Then I went and got the other one the same way."
And it had been so simple, thought Nelson. He handed Glynnis the extra pack. "Take this." She accepted it wordlessly and slipped her arms into the straps. "Oh," he added, as an afterthought. "Let me show you something." He reached into the pack and drew out a knife. A good one with a long plasteel blade that would not chip or corrode like hers. He handed it to her and imagined her smiling face in the darkness.
"It doesn't feel like metal," she said, after she had taken the knife from its scabbard.
"It isn't. It's a kind of plastic, stronger than most metals. Do you like it?" He was wasting time, he knew, and he cursed himself for it. But it didn't matter.
"It's real nice," she answered.
"I'm glad you like it," he said, taking her elbow in his hand. "We'd better go now. They'll be after us."
They ran most of the night, although it wasn't always running. Nelson picked a lot of terrain that was too uneven or too thickly covered with growth for running. They kept to rocks and creekbeds as much as they could, and they stopped only a few hours before dawn to get a few hours sleep they were too exhausted to postpone any longer.
When Nelson awoke the sun was a little higher than he had wanted it to be. He got to his feet and scanned the morning sky but saw nothing to indicate sky patrol robots. He felt uneasy about not having made more territory; but the way had been erratic and uneven. A thorough search pattern could find him easily; the further away he got from the depot the better chance he stood of not being discovered by a robot. He wondered, briefly, just how many would be called out, but there was no reason to wonder. Three patrolmen dead meant a lot of searching to find the killers. He and Glynnis couldn't waste much time.
He nudged the still sleeping girl with his foot to wake her. She awoke suddenly, her hand darting toward her new knife and a low but startled cry came from her.
"Quiet." He had dug two cans out of his pack and handed one to her. "We overslept. Eat in a hurry."
She opened her breakfast. "We'll be traveling most of the day?" she asked. When he nodded, "yes," she said, "I can take it."
"I know you can; but they'll have a search out for us by now and a thorough one. If we hadn't met when we had they'd have picked you up for sure after I raided that depot--if I could have pulled it off alone."
She smiled.
"You ever see an air robot?" he asked.
"No."
"I hope you never do. They'll fly out a search pattern, and they have equipment that can detect a human being. They can send back signals to tell where we are if they spot us. Our only hope is to get away before the search pattern gets this far. If we can get far enough away, we stand a better chance, because they'll have to spread out more thinly. We'll have to run for a long time, but eventually they'll give up. Until then--Well--" He let it hang. But Glynnis caught on.
* * * * *
The rest of the day they traveled, stopping only briefly to eat and once during the afternoon when they came to a small river. Nelson's admiration for Glynnis increased. She responded intelligently to his commands, and learned quickly. She was strong and athletic, with the reflexes of an animal.
They made good time. When darkness came Nelson estimated they had made almost fifty miles since the raid, even over rough terrain. He hoped that that would be enough. He was tired, and though the girl attempted to hide her own fatigue, her attempts were becoming more and more exaggerated. He searched out a camp site.
He found one on a hill, overlooking a river. There was protection from the wind. The moon was up and there was plenty of light from it; but Nelson didn't think the searchers would be out at night.
After they had eaten, Nelson leaned back against the thick bole of a tree and found himself studying the girl. Her features were even enough, but she was not a classically beautiful girl. Nor an unattractive one. It was her eyes, he decided. She was staring off into the sky and forest. Her eyes were large, dark, enigmatic eyes that expressed much; expressed it eloquently. But he had the feeling there was much in the girl that those eyes hid. Her body was lean, but whether from exercise or undernourishment he couldn't be sure. Her figure was full, for all the leanness, and ample. She was strong, though she hardly looked muscular. She had been toughened by her environment. Edna had not been as tough as Glynnis.
With sudden embarrassment, he realized he had been comparing Glynnis and Edna frequently. He didn't want to do that--but he couldn't help himself.
"Something wrong?" Glynnis asked anxiously.
She was returning his stare. "No," he said. "I was ... looking at you." For a long moment, neither spoke. Then he said, "We'll be together for a long time."
"I know. We'll have to be."
"I'm glad I found you. I lost my wife to the patrol some time back."
"I've never been anyone's wife before. There was Frank, but I was never really what you could call his wife, exactly."
"Many people ever stay with your folks?"
"Not many. Frank only stayed a few days. I liked him. I wanted to go with him."
"Why didn't you?"
She broke off a blade of grass and slowly began tearing it into strips, intently gazing at it. "He just left suddenly without taking me. I guess he thought I was just a stupid brat. That was maybe two or three years ago." Her voice sounded as if she were smiling a little. Nelson thought that strange.
"You ever think much about the sleepers?" he asked suddenly.
"Sometimes. I wonder what it's like in their dreams."
"They like it in their dreams. Those dreams are built for them. They get along happily in their world, grateful for it. That's the word, grateful." He listened for a moment to nightsounds. "But they're helpless. If anything happens, they're asleep and unable to act. If they wake up, they're in a world they don't know how to live in."
"If you were a sleeper, what kind of world would you want to dream about?"
"I don't want to be a sleeper."
"Yes, but if you were. Would you live in a castle?"
He thought on it for the first time. "I don't know," he said finally. "I don't think so. I think I'd travel. Go out to the stars. There's a whole universe out there. Men went out there; they're still out there. I guess they've forgotten us."
"You think they'll ever come back?"
"Some day I think somebody from out there will come back and land on Earth to see what it's like. Maybe they'll try to invade us. We'd be pretty helpless with most of us asleep in our pipe-dream utopias."
"I wouldn't like to be caught and put in a dream," she said. "But I'd like to live in a castle." Nelson gazed at her. She had never known a commune, he realized. If she had, she would have bred when told to and then docilely filed away to her coffin. But she had never been indoctrinated. If she went into the dreams, it would be against her will. But he had to admit that he had some reservations....
He moved close to her.
"Maybe some day we can live in a castle. Or go into space to some planet where men live in castles." He stared at the stars. "Out there they must be like gods," he said and his voice sounded strange, even to him.
He looked down at Glynnis. The moonlight was full on her face; she looked fit to be a goddess to those gods, he thought. She was staring off and around at the wilderness; she was saying, "Out here there's trees. And air. I like to look at the trees." He reached over and pulled her face around to him and kissed her. She was startled, but returned the kiss warmly.
She pulled away just far enough to look into his face. She was smiling. "I think I like you better than I did Frank," she said.
* * * * *
Nelson lay awake for a few moments, trying to identify the noise. It was a low humming sound off in the distance. He could feel Glynnis, breathing evenly with sleep beside him. The sky was just beginning to color with sunrise in the east. As quietly as possible, Nelson eased himself erect, still trying to place the noise. He placed it, and realized that he had not really wanted to identify it.
"Quiet," he said as he roused the girl. She opened her eyes wide, and stared at him, confused and uncomprehending.
"What's wrong?"
"Hear that noise?"
"Yes," she said after a second.
"One of their search machines. Probably they've adopted a loose search pattern, or maybe we left some kind of sign somewhere. It's not coming closer, but we'd better get out of here."
They ate hastily, in the awakening light of sunrise. They ran away from the sound of the machine, and it lessened in the distance.
It was the middle of the morning when they heard it again. Nelson judged it to be roughly a mile away and to the west. He waited a minute, listening. It seemed to be describing a search pattern curve that swung in front of their path. He decided to double back and around to miss it.
The undergrowth was thick in this part of the forest. They made their way through the bushes and waist-high grasses, being as careful as possible not to leave too many signs of their passing. Glynnis' shorts and thin blouse weren't much protection against the thorns or the recoiling limbs of bushes but she didn't complain. Gradually the forest became mostly trees again. They found a path some animal had made and followed it.
When they came to the clearing, Nelson almost didn't see the thing in the air. He heard Glynnis gasp behind him, and with a start, glanced around. She was staring at something in front of them, and in the air. He looked where she was staring and saw the air robot hovering near the edge of the clearing. It was about two feet long, slender, metallic and smooth. Nelson knew though that it was alert and that receptors built into its skin were registering their presence. It hovered about ten feet above the ground, some twenty feet from them, making no noise. Sky robots made noise only when they were moving at a fairly good speed. They had fled the noise of one only to be trapped in the silence of another.
Suddenly, Glynnis was shouting, "It's one of them!" Nelson turned to see her level her gun, and before he could stop her a white hot streamer lashed out at the robot and engulfed it.
"No," he shouted, too late. The machine took the blast turning cherry red and bobbing lightly in the air for a moment before energy compensators and stabilizers adjusted to the effects of the blast. The machine turned back to its lustrous silver color and there was a low hum as it righted itself gracefully then swung around, into the center of the clearing to get a better focus on them.
"It doesn't even have a mark on it," Glynnis said, in a low tone, moving closer to Nelson and laying one hand on his shoulder.
"No. But don't worry; it can't hurt us. We've got to figure some way to get out of here and leave it behind." He turned and gently guided her toward the trees. When they were in the dubious shelter of the trees, Nelson stopped and tried to figure a way out. He could see the machine hanging in the center of the clearing on invisible lines of force, turning slightly to find them in the dense growth, then, with one end pointed at them, bobbing slightly with the low breeze.
"What's it doing?" Glynnis asked. There was superstitious awe in her voice that annoyed Nelson.
"Sending a signal to the patrol. We don't have much time before they get here."
"But if the machine can't be shot down what can we do?"
"Hand me your gun." He took her gun and pointed to a vernier control set into the side of the weapon. "This is the intensity control; it's on low." He turned it up. "Now it's on full."
"Will that stop the machine?"
"Not by itself. But if we both move in, blasting together, again and again we might do it some damage."
"All right," she said, taking the gun.
Nelson led the way into the clearing. The machine moved back a little and bobbed to keep them in alignment. Nelson felt the dryness of his throat as he raised his gun to aim at the incurious machine. "All set?" he asked. From the corner of his eye he could see that Glynnis had raised her gun and was sighting.
"All set," she answered.
"O.K." Nelson fired. His blast hit the robot head on. It was absorbed, but almost as soon as it had died down, Glynnis fired. Nelson fired again, catching the machine in an almost steady stream of white hot energy. The machine suddenly caught on to what they were doing. It tried to escape their range by going up, but they followed it. By this time the compensators were already beginning to fail. Haywire instruments jerked the machine back down and then side to side, then into a tree trunk, blindly. It rebounded and dipped low, almost touching the ground before it curved back up. Some of Glynnis' shots were missing, but Nelson made every shot count, even while the robot was darting about wildly.
The machine was glowing cherry red, now, some twelve feet off the ground, unable to rise further, one end pointed sharply upward. Something inside it began screaming, loudly, shrilly, with a vibration that hurt Nelson's teeth. Nelson was firing mechanically. The machine's loud screaming stopped suddenly. Nelson checked his fire. Glynnis fired once more, missing as the machine suddenly dropped about a foot. For perhaps a second the machine remained motionless. Then it died without sound, and fell to the ground, landing with a dull noise and setting fire to the grass under and around it.
For that matter, they had started a major forest fire with their blastings. The trees across the clearing from them were already roaring with flames. Nelson didn't wait to check on the machine. He grabbed Glynnis and pulled her around toward the way they had come. She stumbled, staring back at the machine.
"Come on!" he said, in agitation. She came to life, mechanically, and let him propel her along. The wind was away from them, but the fire growing. They ran madly until they had to stop and fall exhausted to the ground. When he could breathe again without torturing his lungs, Nelson looked back and saw the smoke from the fire in the distance behind them. They were safe from the fire, but their escape was cut off by it. It would, he knew with dull certainty, attract attention.
When he had rested as long as he dared, he said, "We'd better get going."
"I'm not sure I can," she said.
"Well, you've got to. If we stay here, we'll be caught."
* * * * *
They did not pause to eat. It was about midday when they encountered the robot and they walked well into the afternoon, their only purpose being to put as much distance between them and the place where they had shot the robot down as possible. Nelson found himself moving numbly, blindly uncaring of anything by making progress forward. He listened to the humming of an approaching robot for a long while before it registered on his consciousness.
He whirled, drawing his gun, momentarily giving way to the panic that had been threatening to engulf him all afternoon. He saw the machine, high above the trees behind them, safely out of range, he knew. Bitterly, he fought down the urge to fire the gun anyway. It took a tremendous exertion of will to make his arm return the gun to its holster.
"What can we do?" asked Glynnis, a slight quaver in her voice.
"Not a thing," said Nelson; then, almost in a rage he cried it. "Not one damned thing!"
They both turned back the way they had been going and ran, hoping to find some cover with which to duck the machine. Nelson converted his rage and fear into a strength he had never known he could call upon. He ran on, and Glynnis behind him. And he knew that she, like he, ran despite the rawness in her throat and lungs and cramping of her legs. The only thing he could think of was that he wanted to enter a mausoleum not as a prisoner, but as the head of an army.
He ran blindly, hearing nothing but the machine and his own rasping breath. Then suddenly, he was stumbling over the edge of an embankment, flailing his arms and twisting himself around so that he managed to land on his back. It hurt and the wind went out of him. He was sliding and rolling. Somehow he managed to stop himself. He lay painfully coughing and trying to get his breath. Below him he could see the wild rushing of a river at the base of the sheer embankment. He looked back up. Glynnis had one leg over the edge but had not fallen. Nelson crawled his way back up the slope.
They were trapped by the river. It must be another part of the same river they had spent the night by, thought Nelson. But where it had been calm and shallow, it was now a raging torrential river where brown, churning waters ran between high, difficult to climb cliffs.
There was no need for either of them to speak. They began looking for a place to cross the river. All the time they searched they could hear the machine behind them, above them, humming safely out of their range.
The sun was low in the sky when they heard the second humming. The humming grew until it was a throbbing that covered the weaker sound of the robot and chilled Nelson.
"The patrol," he said, pushing the girl toward the forest. "Back into the trees. We're going to have to fight it out with them."
They ran into the trees. The throbbing stopped and behind them, Nelson could hear the sounds made by men thrashing through the undergrowth. His palms were wet; he wiped them on his shirt front. The impending contact with the patrol gave him a calmness as always, and he picked out a thicket where he believed he could make some sort of stand.
He reached the thicket with Glynnis behind him. Her gun was out. He signed to her to lower the intensity of the gun; she caught on. He watched her face. It was like a mask.
Nelson listened to the sounds of the approaching patrolmen. Five or six, he decided. Plus a guard back at the flier. He'd figure on eight, in all, he decided. Then the first one showed behind some bushes.
Nelson touched Glynnis' arm in a signal to wait. The patrolman looked around, searching too intensely to find anything. He was young. Nelson didn't think he would uncover their whereabouts and for a moment debated letting him pass.
But he didn't want to be surrounded. He pulled his gun up and sighted carefully before squeezing the trigger. In the tenth of a second before the patrolman burst into flames, the blast produced a blast circle that grew to the size of a basketball in his midsection. The patrolman fell without screaming.
The others were there now. Most of them were young and two rushed forward at the sight of their companion's death, to die like heroes. The others wisely sought cover. Nelson decided that the thicket wasn't as safe as he'd hoped. One of the patrolmen was doing a good job with an energizer, coming closer with each shot, before Nelson finally saw where he was, and fired at him. Nelson saw the trunk of a large fallen tree and pointed to it for Glynnis' benefit. She nodded.
There was cover most of the way. Nelson went first, crouching low to the ground and running with the ease of a cat. He made the log and began firing to cover Glynnis. He saw her coming, out of the corner of his eye, then concentrated on covering her with firepower. Suddenly the girl let out a startled yell and he saw her sprawl to the ground, tripping over a root. He called her name and without thinking leaped to his feet to run to help her. He was halfway there when the patrolman came into range. Nelson realized what he had done. Glynnis was already on her feet and running. Cursing himself, Nelson jerked his gun around, but it was too late. An energizer blast exploded the ground beneath him and he felt himself hurtling over backwards. He could only see blackness and the bright, quick, flashing of pin-point light in it. Then, he was falling, spinning....
* * * * *
Patrol Cadet Wallace Sherman watched the man on the table with mixed feelings; on the one hand, there was pity for a man whose condition was hopeless, and on the other there were the misgivings that come with guarding a criminal. Perhaps it was Sherman's youth that caused him to emphasize those misgivings and move his hand toward his sidearm when the man stirred.
But the man on the table only stirred a little and groaned. Sherman was not sure whether or not the man was coming to. He shouldn't be, Sherman knew. He took a couple of steps forward and starred at the man's face.
The man was breathing normally. His head moved slightly but his eyes were still closed. His face was the palest, softest looking face Sherman had ever seen. It was the face of a man who had never known sunlight, Sherman thought somberly; or at least had not known it in many years. He wondered, vaguely just what kind of life the man dreamed he had. As he was watching the man's face, Sherman saw his lips move and heard him utter something he could not make out. He bent closer to hear better.
"Glynnis"--the man on the table was saying.
"Is he waking up?" Sherman heard a voice asking.
A little embarrassed, Sherman turned around and saw Blomgard standing in the doorway, "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. No. At least I don't think so. He said something; a word. Glynnis, I think. Sounds like a girl's name."
Dr. Blomgard came into the room and walked over to the table on which his patient was stretched out. He removed the clipboard from its hook and looked through the sheaf of papers fastened to it. After a few seconds, he said, "Ah, yes. Glynnis. Part of his dream."
"Doctor--," Sherman heard himself saying, then caught himself.
"What, cadet," Blomgard asked, turning around. He was a big man, gray-haired, his hair an unruly mop. His eyes were dark and piercing, but they were softened by the thickness of the white brows over them.
"Nothing, sir--"
"I assure you, that no question will be considered out of place, if that's what is worrying you."
"Well, doctor," Sherman said with some difficulty, "I was wondering if all this is worth it. I mean a special reserve with the artificial life-dreams for these people. Is it worth the expense and effort?"
Blomgard regarded the question a moment before answering. "Well, that depends on things. We have a fairly dynamic, expanding civilization. This man was born out of step; a natural born rebel. We've reached the stage where, with a little effort on their own part, most people can sooner or later find exactly what they want. There are, of course, exceptions. They can't help being the way they are, but they are that way. It isn't his fault that he would think nothing of blowing up any civilization he found himself living in. This is the solution."
"A drug-induced dream state? Is that a solution?"
"It's a pretty good one. We provide him with a completely fictitious, a totally unreal world in which he will be happy."
"How can anyone be happy like that? I prefer reality."
Blomgard smiled. "Yes, to a larger extent than he does, you do. Or you like what you think of as reality." He picked up the clipboard again and studied the papers on it. "His dream world is one that is designed for his happiness. In it, he sees everyone else as inhabiting the dream-coffin. And he pictures himself as a rugged individualist, going about trying to destroy such a civilization. And of course, he is practically a lone wolf. Not completely, for he would not be happy that way. The man is an underdog."
"I guess it's best," Sherman said.
"It is," the doctor replied, seriously. "We have no right to take his life; nor do have the right to destroy his personality, however much that personality may be offensive to us. And since most inhabitable planets are, unfortunately, inhabited before we ever get to them, we have more urgent colonies to establish where we can find room. No, this is best. We give him a dream based exactly on his psychological needs; a compensation, so to speak, for the real life we take away from him. For most people only have the right to pursue happiness. In return for a normal life, we've given him a guaranteed happiness."
The doctor let that sink in for a while; but Sherman still had a strong wish that he had pulled some other duty. Perhaps on one of the new outposts, like Deneb.
The doctor glanced at his watch. "Well, the repairs are done with and they should have the nutrient refreshed by now. Let's wheel him on back."
A little gratefully, Sherman moved over to the table.
"You'll be all right, soon enough," the doctor said to the unconscious man on the table. "This interruption will be neatly explained away and remain as merely a memory of a slightly unpleasant moment after things get back to normal. That'll convince you of the reality of your world--if you ever need convincing."
Sherman saw the sleeping man stir slightly and heard him utter sounds again.
"Wheel him out," Blomgard said.
Gratefully, Sherman turned the table around and wheeled it out the door.
* * * * *
From far off, Nelson heard Glynnis calling to him. "Are you all right, Hal?" he heard. "Can you hear me, Hal?"
"I can hear you," he managed to say. He opened his eyes. He saw his gun a few dozen feet away on the ground.
"I thought they had you, sure," Glynnis said quietly. "I got the two of them. Don't ask me how I did it, but I got them."
He sat up, feeling dizzy from having hit the ground with such force. "I don't guess I was much help," he said weakly. "You sure did a fine job." His head ached, but the remembered the fight and being thrown by the impact of the blast. And something else--something distant and alien, like a dream, from the deepest part of his mind. It pestered him a moment, just out of reach of his consciousness, then he shrugged it off as unimportant. He looked around and saw the charred bodies of the patrolmen. "You did a fine job," he told Glynnis, meaning it.
"Can you fly a patrol ship?"
"Huh?"
"We've got one now," Glynnis said. "I shot the guard they left with it, too. Had to."
"I see," he said, marveling at the girl. "I can fly one. I haven't since I was in the commune, though. As long as it's in good condition."
"I guess it is. I didn't hit it with any shots."
"We can go anywhere in the world with that ship," he said getting to his feet. "It doesn't need fuel; it can fly forever. You know what that means Glynnis? We can raise an army, if we want to."
"And we can get into the mausoleums and wake everybody up?"
"Yes. Come on," he said and started toward the flier. But Glynnis grabbed his arm and stopped him. "What is it?" he asked.
"What's it like to live in a world where everyone's awake?" she asked him.
"Why ... I don't know, I've never lived in one."
"Then why do you want to wake everyone up?"
"It's wrong the way they are now."
Glynnis scowled and Nelson could tell that she was struggling with strange concepts. He felt sympathy for her, knowing how she felt.
"What I mean," she asked finally, "is why is it wrong? What's the reason?"
"Because they can do better. We can save them and show them that; I can lead them back where they belong."
"I see," Glynnis said gravely accepting his words. "All right."
Nelson smiled at her. She looked up at him and smiled back. The patrol ship was waiting for them, not far off.
Together, they marched off to save the world.
OOMPHEL IN THE SKY
By H. Beam Piper
Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else...?
Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by that time Beta, the planet's G-class primary, would be at its midafternoon hottest. He glanced at his watch. It was 1005, but that was Galactic Standard Time, and had no relevance to anything that was happening in the local sky. It did mean, though, that it was five minutes short of two hours to 'cast-time.
He snapped on the communication screen in front of him, and Harry Walsh, the news editor, looked out of it at him from the office in Bluelake, halfway across the continent. He wanted to know how things were going.
"Just about finished. I'm going to look in at a couple more native villages, and then I'm going to Sanders' plantation to see Gonzales. I hope I'll have a personal statement from him, and the final situation-progress map, in time for the 'cast. I take it Maith's still agreeable to releasing the story at twelve-hundred?"
"Sure; he was always agreeable. The Army wants publicity; it was Government House that wanted to sit on it, and they've given that up now. The story's all over the place here, native city and all."
"What's the situation in town, now?"
"Oh, it's still going on. Some disorders, mostly just unrest. Lot of street meetings that could have turned into frenzies if the police hadn't broken them up in time. A couple of shootings, some sleep-gassing, and a lot of arrests. Nothing to worry about--at least, not immediately."
That was about what he thought. "Maybe it's not bad to have a little trouble in Bluelake," he considered. "What happens out here in the plantation country the Government House crowd can't see, and it doesn't worry them. Well, I'll call you from Sanders'."
He blanked the screen. In the seat in front, the native pilot said: "Some contragravity up ahead, boss." It sounded like two voices speaking in unison, which was just what it was. "I'll have a look."
The pilot's hand, long and thin, like a squirrel's, reached up and pulled down the fifty-power binoculars on their swinging arm. Miles looked at the screen-map and saw a native village just ahead of the dot of light that marked the position of the aircar. He spoke the native name of the village aloud, and added:
"Let down there, Heshto. I'll see what's going on."
The native, still looking through the glasses, said, "Right, boss." Then he turned.
His skin was blue-gray and looked like sponge rubber. He was humanoid, to the extent of being an upright biped, with two arms, a head on top of shoulders, and a torso that housed, among other oddities, four lungs. His face wasn't even vaguely human. He had two eyes in front, close enough for stereoscopic vision, but that was a common characteristic of sapient life forms everywhere. His mouth was strictly for eating; he breathed through separate intakes and outlets, one of each on either side of his neck; he talked through the outlets and had his scent and hearing organs in the intakes. The car was air-conditioned, which was a mercy; an overheated Kwann exhaled through his skin, and surrounded himself with stenches like an organic chemistry lab. But then, Kwanns didn't come any closer to him than they could help when he was hot and sweated, which, lately, had been most of the time.
"A V and a half of air cavalry, circling around," Heshto said. "Making sure nobody got away. And a combat car at a couple of hundred feet and another one just at treetop level."
He rose and went to the seat next to the pilot, pulling down the binoculars that were focused for his own eyes. With them, he could see the air cavalry--egg-shaped things just big enough for a seated man, with jets and contragravity field generators below and a bristle of machine gun muzzles in front. A couple of them jetted up for a look at him and then went slanting down again, having recognized the Kwannon Planetwide News Service car.
The village was typical enough to have been an illustration in a sociography textbook--fields in a belt for a couple of hundred yards around it, dome-thatched mud-and-wattle huts inside a pole stockade with log storehouses built against it, their flat roofs high enough to provide platforms for defending archers, the open oval gathering-place in the middle. There was a big hut at one end of this, the khamdoo, the sanctum of the adult males, off limits for women and children. A small crowd was gathered in front of it; fifteen or twenty Terran air cavalrymen, a couple of enlisted men from the Second Kwannon Native Infantry, a Terran second lieutenant, and half a dozen natives. The rest of the village population, about two hundred, of both sexes and all ages, were lined up on the shadier side of the gathering-place, most of them looking up apprehensively at the two combat cars which were covering them with their guns.
Miles got to his feet as the car lurched off contragravity and the springs of the landing-feet took up the weight. A blast of furnacelike air struck him when he opened the door; he got out quickly and closed it behind him. The second lieutenant had come over to meet him; he extended his hand.
"Good day, Mr. Gilbert. We all owe you our thanks for the warning. This would have been a real baddie if we hadn't caught it when we did."
He didn't even try to make any modest disclaimer; that was nothing more than the exact truth.
"Well, lieutenant, I see you have things in hand here." He glanced at the line-up along the side of the oval plaza, and then at the selected group in front of the khamdoo. The patriarchal village chieftain in a loose slashed shirt; the shoonoo, wearing a multiplicity of amulets and nothing else; four or five of the village elders. "I take it the word of the swarming didn't get this far?"
"No, this crowd still don't know what the flap's about, and I couldn't think of anything to tell them that wouldn't be worse than no explanation at all."
He had noticed hoes and spades flying in the fields, and the cylindrical plastic containers the natives bought from traders, dropped when the troops had surprised the women at work. And the shoonoo didn't have a fire-dance cloak or any other special regalia on. If he'd heard about the swarming, he'd have been dressed to make magic for it.
"What time did you get here, lieutenant?"
"Oh-nine-forty. I just called in and reported the village occupied, and they told me I was the last one in, so the operation's finished."
That had been smart work. He got the lieutenant's name and unit and mentioned it into his memophone. That had been a little under five hours since he had convinced General Maith, in Bluelake, that the mass labor-desertion from the Sanders plantation had been the beginning of a swarming. Some division commanders wouldn't have been able to get a brigade off the ground in that time, let alone landed on objective. He said as much to the young officer.
"The way the Army responded, today, can make the people of the Colony feel a lot more comfortable for the future."
"Why, thank you, Mr. Gilbert." The Army, on Kwannon, was rather more used to obloquy than praise. "How did you spot what was going on so quickly?"
This was the hundredth time, at least, that he had been asked that today.
"Well, Paul Sanders' labor all comes from neighboring villages. If they'd just wanted to go home and spend the end of the world with their families, they'd have been dribbling away in small batches for the last couple of hundred hours. Instead, they all bugged out in a bunch, they took all the food they could carry and nothing else, and they didn't make any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they'd been building fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting around them for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strength for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probably the lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose."
"You mean, like this fellow here?" the lieutenant asked. "What are they, Mr. Gilbert; priests?"
He looked quickly at the lieutenant's collar-badges. Yellow trefoil for Third Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment, with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon for the last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him better than that.
He shook his head. "No, they're magicians. Everything these Kwanns do involves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a native runs into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can't cope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works all the magic for the community as a whole--rain-magic, protective magic for the village and the fields, that sort of thing."
The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. "They'll have to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round up all the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake."
"Yes." That hadn't been General Maith's idea; the governor had insisted on that. "I hope it doesn't make more trouble than it prevents."
The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across the gathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.
"How much worse do you think this is going to get?" he asked.
"The heat, or the native troubles?"
"I was thinking about the heat, but both."
"Well, it'll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expect storms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any idea how bad they'll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we've only been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memory from the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty bad storms right after transit a year ago; they'll be much worse this time. Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and then heats up again in double-sun daylight."
It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.
"How about the natives?" the lieutenant asked. "If they can get any crazier than they are now--"
"They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of the world. The Last Hot Time." He used the native expression, and then translated it into Lingua Terra. "The Sky Fire--that's Alpha--will burn up the whole world."
"But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way at periastron?"
He shook his head. "Race would have exterminated itself long ago if they had. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was a sign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a sign that the Last Hot Time is at hand."
"What the devil is oomphel?" The lieutenant was mopping the back of his neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loose from his body with the other. "I hear that word all the time."
"Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to mean trade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology, from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it's ... well, not exactly supernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea. Terrans are natural; they're just a different kind of people. But oomphel isn't; it isn't subject to any of the laws of nature at all. They're all positive that we don't make it. Some of them even think it makes us."
When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling in his seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of the gathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated at one of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded with Kwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. He was a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. He knew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system, 23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22.8 Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around Gettler Beta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsating variable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Beta orbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn't believe there was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was.
He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as Miles was in his seat. "Where now, boss?" he asked.
"Qualpha's Village. We won't let down; just circle low over it. I want some views of the ruins. Then to Sanders' plantation."
"O.K., boss; hold tight."
He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map direction of Qualpha's Village, he let go with everything he had--hot jets, rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of the horizon toward them.
Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-out from Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and it had been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of the plantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they had found the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had to sleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been the villages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone; from every one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The Gone Ones are returning; all the People go to greet them at the Deesha-Phoo. Burn your villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone Ones return!"
Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners, with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and there had been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity began landing at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by foot messengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in this area. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess.
The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thin smoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot and pulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of the village. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finder and began transmitting in the view.
It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattle huts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond. Heshto brought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting in on momentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few sections of the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't fallen, but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul, human or parahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small black-and-gray quadruped investigating some bundles that had been dropped in the fields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view of that--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he was swinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of every hut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or a nuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knew how dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they had destroyed them grieved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the whole world would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones would return.
So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had been lucky; his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gotten along well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally a castle and he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters who had made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their native labor and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around, any more, and their plantations were gutted ruins.
And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the klooba plants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon them. They thought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make magic. Not too far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals had opened a major breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated half a dozen technologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the south, where the spongy and resinous trees were drying in the heat, they were starting forest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And to the north, they were swarming into the mountains; building great fires there, too, and attacking the Terran radar and radio beacons.
Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happen without magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time was People.
Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the lucky ones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment when the Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward apastron. The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was for sure. The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one really bad mistake before he is done to some unpleasantly ingenious death by his clientry, and this was going to turn out to be the biggest magico-prophetic blooper in all the long unrecorded history of Kwannon.
A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, he could see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fields and buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity was grounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumatic balloon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineering equipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about three hundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and getting out the biocrystals. Three of the plantation airjeeps, each with a pair of machine guns, were guarding them, but they didn't seem to be having any trouble. He saw Sanders in another jeep, and had Heshto put the car alongside.
"How's it going, Paul?" he asked over his radio. "I see you have some help, now."
"Everybody's from Qualpha's, and from Darshat's," Sanders replied. "The Army had no place to put them, after they burned themselves out." He laughed happily. "Miles, I'm going to save my whole crop! I thought I was wiped out, this morning."
He would have been, if Gonzales hadn't brought those Kwanns in. The klooba was beginning to wither; if left unharvested, the biocrystals would die along with their hosts and crack into worthlessness. Like all the other planters, Sanders had started no new crystals since the hot weather, and would start none until the worst of the heat was over. He'd need every crystal he could sell to tide him over.
"The Welfarers'll make a big forced-labor scandal out of this," he predicted.
"Why, such an idea." Sanders was scandalized. "I'm not forcing them to eat."
"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. They think everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it or not, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty of economic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want them to work for you, you're an exploiter and you ought to be eliminated as a class. Haven't you been trying to run a plantation on this planet, under this Colonial Government, long enough to have found that out, Paul?"
Brigadier General Ramón Gonzales had taken over the first--counting down from the landing-stage--floor of the plantation house for his headquarters. His headquarters company had pulled out removable partitions and turned four rooms into one, and moved in enough screens and teleprinters and photoprint machines and computers to have outfitted the main newsroom of Planetwide News. The place had the feel of a newsroom--a newsroom after a big story has broken and the 'cast has gone on the air and everybody--in this case about twenty Terran officers and non-coms, half women--standing about watching screens and smoking and thinking about getting a follow-up ready.
Gonzales himself was relaxing in Sanders' business-room, with his belt off and his tunic open. He had black eyes and black hair and mustache, and a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanish name. There was another officer with him, considerably younger--Captain Foxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.
"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked, after they had exchanged greetings and sat down.
"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you be willing to make a statement on audio-visual." He looked at his watch. "We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast."
"You have a map," Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe from one word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of the moment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may have crept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier phases of the operation. I teleprinted a copy to Planetwide along with the one I sent to Division Headquarters."
He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his tunic and putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the brigadier general spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visual appearance and statement. He called the recording studio at Planetwide while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to get set for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speaking without notes, gave a brief description of the operation.
"At present," he concluded, "we have every native village and every plantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sanders plantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitely stopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the next hundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in the occupied villages are being put to work building shelters for themselves against the anticipated storms."
"I hadn't heard about that," Miles said, as the general returned to his chair and picked up his drink again.
"Yes. They'll need something better than these thatched huts when the storms start, and working on them will keep them out of mischief. Standard megaton-kilometer field shelters, earth and log construction. I think they'll be adequate for anything that happens at periastron."
Anything designed to resist the heat, blast and radiation effects of a megaton thermonuclear bomb at a kilometer ought to stand up under what was coming. At least, the periastron effects; there was another angle to it.
"The Native Welfare Commission isn't going to take kindly to that. That's supposed to be their job."
"Then why the devil haven't they done it?" Gonzales demanded angrily. "I've viewed every native village in this area by screen, and I haven't seen one that's equipped with anything better than those log storage-bins against the stockades."
"There was a project to provide shelters for the periastron storms set up ten years ago. They spent one year arguing about how the natives survived storms prior to the Terrans' arrival here. According to the older natives, they got into those log storage-houses you were mentioning; only about one out of three in any village survived. I could have told them that. Did tell them, repeatedly, on the air. Then, after they decided that shelters were needed, they spent another year hassling over who would be responsible for designing them. Your predecessor here, General Nokami, offered the services of his engineer officers. He was frostily informed that this was a humanitarian and not a military project."
Ramón Gonzales began swearing, then apologized for the interruption. "Then what?" he asked.
"Apology unnecessary. Then they did get a shelter designed, and started teaching some of the students at the native schools how to build them, and then the meteorologists told them it was no good. It was a dugout shelter; the weathermen said there'd be rainfall measured in meters instead of inches and anybody who got caught in one of those dugouts would be drowned like a rat."
"Ha, I thought of that one." Gonzales said. "My shelters are going to be mounded up eight feet above the ground."
"What did they do then?" Foxx Travis wanted to know.
"There the matter rested. As far as I know, nothing has been done on it since."
"And you think, with a disgraceful record of non-accomplishment like that, that they'll protest General Gonzales' action on purely jurisdictional grounds?" Travis demanded.
"Not jurisdictional grounds, Foxx. The general's going at this the wrong way. He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he's going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that's undemocratic. And what's worse, he's making the natives build them themselves, whether they want to or not, and that's forced labor. That reminds me; has anybody started raising the devil about those Kwanns from Qualpha's and Darshat's you brought here and Paul put to work?"
Gonzales looked at Travis and then said: "Not with me. Not yet, anyhow."
"They've been at General Maith," Travis said shortly. After a moment, he added: "General Maith supports General Gonzales completely; that's for publication. I'm authorized to say so. What else was there to do? They'd burned their villages and all their food stores. They had to be placed somewhere. And why in the name of reason should they sit around in the shade eating Government native-type rations while Paul Sanders has fifty to a hundred thousand sols' worth of crystals dying on him?"
"Yes; that's another thing they'll scream about. Paul's making a profit out of it."
"Of course he's making a profit," Gonzales said. "Why else is he running a plantation? If planters didn't make profits, who'd grow biocrystals?"
"The Colonial Government. The same way they built those storm-shelters. But that would be in the public interest, and if the Kwanns weren't public-spirited enough to do the work, they'd be made to--at about half what planters like Sanders are paying them now. But don't you realize that profit is sordid and dishonest and selfish? Not at all like drawing a salary-cum-expense-account from the Government."
"You're right, it isn't," Gonzales agreed. "People like Paul Sanders have ability. If they don't, they don't stay in business. You have ability and people who don't never forgive you for it. Your very existence is a constant reproach to them."
"That's right. And they can't admit your ability without admitting their own inferiority, so it isn't ability at all. It's just dirty underhanded trickery and selfish ruthlessness." He thought for a moment. "How did Government House find out about these Kwanns here?"
"The Welfare Commission had people out while I was still setting up headquarters," Gonzales said. "That was about oh-seven-hundred."
"This isn't for publication?" Travis asked. "Well, they know, but they can't prove, that our given reason for moving in here in force is false. Of course, we can't change our story now; that's why the situation-progress map that was prepared for publication is incorrect as to the earlier phases. They do not know that it was you who gave us our first warning; they ascribe that to Sanders. And they are claiming that there never was any swarming; according to them, Sanders' natives are striking for better pay and conditions, and Sanders got General Maith to use troops to break the strike. I wish we could give you credit for putting us onto this, but it's too late now."
He nodded. The story was that a battalion of infantry had been sent in to rescue a small detail under attack by natives, and that more troops had been sent in to re-enforce them, until the whole of Gonzales' brigade had been committed.
"That wasted an hour, at the start," Gonzales said. "We lost two native villages burned, and about two dozen casualties, because we couldn't get our full strength in soon enough."
"You'd have lost more than that if Maith had told the governor general the truth and requested orders to act. There'd be a hundred villages and a dozen plantations and trading posts burning, now, and Lord knows how many dead, and the governor general would still be arguing about whether he was justified in ordering troop-action." He mentioned several other occasions when something like that had happened. "You can't tell that kind of people the truth. They won't believe it. It doesn't agree with their preconceptions."
Foxx Travis nodded. "I take it we are still talking for nonpublication?" When Miles nodded, he continued: "This whole situation is baffling, Miles. It seems that the government here knew all about the weather conditions they could expect at periastron, and had made plans for them. Some of them excellent plans, too, but all based on the presumption that the natives would co-operate or at least not obstruct. You see what the situation actually is. It should be obvious to everybody that the behavior of these natives is nullifying everything the civil government is trying to do to ensure the survival of the Terran colonists, the production of Terran-type food without which we would all starve, the biocrystal plantations without which the Colony would perish, and even the natives themselves. Yet the Civil Government will not act to stop these native frenzies and swarmings which endanger everything and everybody here, and when the Army attempts to act, we must use every sort of shabby subterfuge and deceit or the Civil Government will prevent us. What ails these people?"
"You have the whole history of the Colony against you, Foxx," he said. "You know, there never was any Chartered Kwannon Company set up to exploit the resources of the planet. At first, nobody realized that there were any resources worth exploiting. This planet was just a scientific curiosity; it was and is still the only planet of a binary system with a native population of sapient beings. The first people who came here were scientists, mostly sociographers and para-anthropologists. And most of them came from the University of Adelaide."
Travis nodded. Adelaide had a Federation-wide reputation for left-wing neo-Marxist "liberalism."
"Well, that established the political and social orientation of the Colonial Government, right at the start, when study of the natives was the only business of the Colony. You know how these ideological cliques form in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are always chosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and the extremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out. Well, the Native Affairs Administration became the tail that wagged the Government dog, and the Native Welfare Commission is the big muscle in the tail."
His parents hadn't been of the left-wing Adelaide clique. His mother had been a biochemist; his father a roving news correspondent who had drifted into trading with the natives and made a fortune in keffa-gum before the chemists on Terra had found out how to synthesize hopkinsine.
"When the biocrystals were discovered and the plantations started, the Government attitude was set. Biocrystal culture is just sordid money grubbing. The real business of the Colony is to promote the betterment of the natives, as defined in University of Adelaide terms. That's to say, convert them into ersatz Terrans. You know why General Maith ordered these shoonoon rounded up?"
Travis made a face. "Governor general Kovac insisted on it; General Maith thought that a few minor concessions would help him on his main objective, which was keeping a swarming from starting out here."
"Yes. The Commissioner of Native Welfare wanted that done, mainly at the urging of the Director of Economic, Educational and Technical Assistance. The EETA crowd don't like shoonoon. They have been trying, ever since their agency was set up, to undermine and destroy their influence with the natives. This looked like a good chance to get rid of some of them."
Travis nodded. "Yes. And as soon as the disturbances in Bluelake started, the Constabulary started rounding them up there, too, and at the evacuee cantonments. They got about fifty of them, mostly from the cantonments east of the city--the natives brought in from the flooded tidewater area. They just dumped the lot of them onto us. We have them penned up in a lorry-hangar on the military reservation now." He turned to Gonzales. "How many do you think you'll gather up out here, general?" he asked.
"I'd say about a hundred and fifty, when we have them all."
Travis groaned. "We can't keep all of them in that hangar, and we don't have anywhere else--"
Sometimes a new idea sneaked up on Miles, rubbing against him and purring like a cat. Sometimes one hit him like a sledgehammer. This one just seemed to grow inside him.
"Foxx, you know I have the top three floors of the Suzikami Building; about five hundred hours ago, I leased the fourth and fifth floors, directly below. I haven't done anything with them, yet; they're just as they were when Trans-Space Imports moved out. There are ample water, light, power, air-conditioning and toilet facilities, and they can be sealed off completely from the rest of the building. If General Maith's agreeable, I'll take his shoonoon off his hands."
"What in blazes will you do with them?"
"Try a little experiment in psychological warfare. At minimum, we may get a little better insight into why these natives think the Last Hot Time is coming. At best, we may be able to stop the whole thing and get them quieted down again."
"Even the minimum's worth trying for," Travis said. "What do you have in mind, Miles? I mean, what procedure?"
"Well, I'm not quite sure, yet." That was a lie; he was very sure. He didn't think it was quite time to be specific, though. "I'll have to size up my material a little, before I decide on what to do with it. Whatever happens, it won't hurt the shoonoon, and it won't make any more trouble than arresting them has made already. I'm sure we can learn something from them, at least."
Travis nodded. "General Maith is very much impressed with your grasp of native psychology," he said. "What happened out here this morning was exactly as you predicted. Whatever my recommendation's worth, you have it. Can you trust your native driver to take your car back to Bluelake alone?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then suppose you ride in with me in my car. We'll talk about it on the way in, and go see General Maith at once."
Bluelake was peaceful as they flew in over it, but it was an uneasy peace. They began running into military contragravity twenty miles beyond the open farmlands--they were the chlorophyll green of Terran vegetation--and the natives at work in the fields were being watched by more military and police vehicles. The carniculture plants, where Terran-type animal tissue was grown in nutrient-vats, were even more heavily guarded, and the native city was being patroled from above and the streets were empty, even of the hordes of native children who usually played in them.
The Terran city had no streets. Its dwellers moved about on contragravity, and tall buildings rose, singly or in clumps, among the landing-staged residences and the green transplanted trees. There was a triple wire fence around it, the inner one masked by vines and the middle one electrified, with warning lights on. Even a government dedicated to the betterment of the natives and unwilling to order military action against them was, it appeared, unwilling to take too many chances.
Major General Denis Maith, the Federation Army commander on Kwannon, was considerably more than willing to find a temporary home for his witch doctors, now numbering close to two hundred. He did insist that they be kept under military guard, and on assigning his aide, Captain Travis, to co-operate on the project. Beyond that, he gave Miles a free hand.
Miles and Travis got very little rest in the next ten hours. A half-company of engineer troops was also kept busy, as were a number of Kwannon Planetwide News technicians and some Terran and native mechanics borrowed from different private business concerns in the city. Even the most guarded hints of what he had in mind were enough to get this last co-operation; he had been running a news-service in Bluelake long enough to have the confidence of the business people.
He tried, as far as possible, to keep any intimation of what was going on from Government House. That, unfortunately, hadn't been far enough. He found that out when General Maith was on his screen, in the middle of the work on the fourth and fifth floors of the Suzikami Building.
"The governor general just screened me," Maith said. "He's in a tizzy about our shoonoon. Claims that keeping them in the Suzikami Building will endanger the whole Terran city."
"Is that the best he can do? Well, that's rubbish, and he knows it. There are less than two hundred of them, I have them on the fifth floor, twenty stories above the ground, and the floor's completely sealed off from the floor below. They can't get out, and I have tanks of sleep-gas all over the place which can be opened either individually or all together from a switch on the fourth floor, where your sepoys are quartered."
"I know, Mr. Gilbert; I screen-viewed the whole installation. I've seen regular maximum-security prisons that would be easier to get out of."
"Governor general Kovac is not objecting personally. He has been pressured into it by this Native Welfare government-within-the-Government. They don't know what I'm doing with those shoonoon, but whatever it is, they're afraid of it."
"Well, for the present," Maith said, "I think I'm holding them off. The Civil Government doesn't want the responsibility of keeping them in custody, I refused to assume responsibility for them if they were kept anywhere else, and Kovac simply won't consider releasing them, so that leaves things as they are. I did have to make one compromise, though." That didn't sound good. It sounded less so when Maith continued: "They insisted on having one of their people at the Suzikami Building as an observer. I had to grant that."
"That's going to mean trouble."
"Oh, I shouldn't think so. This observer will observe, and nothing else. She will take no part in anything you're doing, will voice no objections, and will not interrupt anything you are saying to the shoonoon. I was quite firm on that, and the governor general agreed completely."
"She?"
"Yes. A Miss Edith Shaw; do you know anything about her?"
"I've met her a few times; cocktail parties and so on." She was young enough, and new enough to Kwannon, not to have a completely indurated mind. On the other hand, she was EETA which was bad, and had a master's in sociography from Adelaide, which was worse. "When can I look for her?"
"Well, the governor general's going to screen me and find out when you'll have the shoonoon on hand."
Doesn't want to talk to me at all, Miles thought. Afraid he might say something and get quoted.
"For your information, they'll be here inside an hour. They will have to eat, and they're all tired and sleepy. I should say 'bout oh-eight-hundred. Oh, and will you tell the governor general to tell Miss Shaw to bring an overnight kit with her. She's going to need it."
He was up at 0400, just a little after Beta-rise. He might be a civilian big-wheel in an Army psychological warfare project, but he still had four newscasts a day to produce. He spent a couple of hours checking the 0600 'cast and briefing Harry Walsh for the indeterminate period in which he would be acting chief editor and producer. At 0700, Foxx Travis put in an appearance. They went down to the fourth floor, to the little room they had fitted out as command-post, control room and office for Operation Shoonoo.
There was a rectangular black traveling-case, initialed E. S., beside the open office door. Travis nodded at it, and they grinned at one another; she'd come early, possibly hoping to catch them hiding something they didn't want her to see. Entering the office quietly, they found her seated facing the big viewscreen, smoking and watching a couple of enlisted men of the First Kwannon Native Infantry at work in another room where the pickup was. There were close to a dozen lipstick-tinted cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her. Her private face wasn't particularly happy. Maybe she was being earnest and concerned about the betterment of the underpriviledged, or the satanic maneuvers of the selfish planters.
Then she realized that somebody had entered; with a slight start, she turned, then rose. She was about the height of Foxx Travis, a few inches shorter than Miles, and slender. Light blond; green suit costume. She ditched her private face and got on her public one, a pleasant and deferential smile, with a trace of uncertainty behind it. Miles introduced Travis, and they sat down again facing the screen.
It gave a view, from one of the long sides and near the ceiling, of a big room. In the center, a number of seats--the drum-shaped cushions the natives had adopted in place of the seats carved from sections of tree trunk that they had been using when the Terrans had come to Kwannon--were arranged in a semicircle, one in the middle slightly in advance of the others. Facing them were three armchairs, a remote-control box beside one and another Kwann cushion behind and between the other two. There was a large globe of Kwannon, and on the wall behind the chairs an array of viewscreens.
"There'll be an interpreter, a native Army sergeant, between you and Captain Travis," he said. "I don't know how good you are with native languages, Miss Shaw; the captain is not very fluent."
"Cushions for them, I see, and chairs for the lordly Terrans," she commented. "Never miss a chance to rub our superiority in, do you?"
"I never deliberately force them to adopt our ways," he replied. "Our chairs are as uncomfortable for them as their low seats are for us. Difference, you know, doesn't mean inferiority or superiority. It just means difference."
"Well, what are you trying to do, here?"
"I'm trying to find out a little more about the psychology back of these frenzies and swarmings."
"It hasn't occurred to you to look for them in the economic wrongs these people are suffering at the hands of the planters and traders, I suppose."
"So they're committing suicide, and that's all you can call these swarmings, and the fire-frenzies in the south, from economic motives," Travis said. "How does one better oneself economically by dying?"
She ignored the question, which was easier than trying to answer it.
"And why are you bothering to talk to these witch doctors? They aren't representative of the native people. They're a lot of cynical charlatans, with a vested interest in ignorance and superstition--"
"Miss Shaw, for the past eight centuries, earnest souls have been bewailing the fact that progress in the social sciences has always lagged behind progress in the physical sciences. I would suggest that the explanation might be in difference of approach. The physical scientist works with physical forces, even when he is trying, as in the case of contragravity, to nullify them. The social scientist works against social forces."
"And the result's usually a miserable failure, even on the physical-accomplishment level," Foxx Travis added. "This storm shelter project that was set up ten years ago and got nowhere, for instance. Ramón Gonzales set up a shelter project of his own seventy-five hours ago, and he's half through with it now."
"Yes, by forced labor!"
"Field surgery's brutal, too, especially when the anaesthetics run out. It's better than letting your wounded die, though."
"Well, we were talking about these shoonoon. They are a force among the natives; that can't be denied. So, since we want to influence the natives, why not use them?"
"Mr. Gilbert, these shoonoon are blocking everything we are trying to do for the natives. If you use them for propaganda work in the villages, you will only increase their prestige and make it that much harder for us to better the natives' condition, both economically and culturally--"
"That's it, Miles," Travis said. "She isn't interested in facts about specific humanoid people on Kwannon. She has a lot of high-order abstractions she got in a classroom at Adelaide on Terra."
"No. Her idea of bettering the natives' condition is to rope in a lot of young Kwanns, put them in Government schools, overload them with information they aren't prepared to digest, teach them to despise their own people, and then send them out to the villages, where they behave with such insufferable arrogance that the wonder is that so few of them stop an arrow or a charge of buckshot, instead of so many. And when that happens, as it does occasionally, Welfare says they're murdered at the instigation of the shoonoon."
"You know, Miss Shaw, this isn't just the roughneck's scorn for the egghead," Travis said. "Miles went to school on Terra, and majored in extraterrestrial sociography, and got a master's, just like you did. At Montevideo," he added. "And he spent two more years traveling on a Paula von Schlicten Fellowship."
Edith Shaw didn't say anything. She even tried desperately not to look impressed. It occurred to him that he'd never mentioned that fellowship to Travis. Army Intelligence must have a pretty good dossier on him. Before anybody could say anything further, a Terran captain and a native sergeant of the First K.N.I. came in. In the screen, the four sepoys who had been fussing around straightening things picked up auto-carbines and posted themselves two on either side of a door across from the pickup, taking positions that would permit them to fire into whatever came through without hitting each other.
What came through was one hundred and eighty-four shoonoon. Some wore robes of loose gauze strips, and some wore fire-dance cloaks of red and yellow and orange ribbons. Many were almost completely naked, but they were all amulet-ed to the teeth. There must have been a couple of miles of brass and bright-alloy wire among them, and half a ton of bright scrap-metal, and the skulls, bones, claws, teeth, tails and other components of most of the native fauna. They debouched into the big room, stopped, and stood looking around them. A native sergeant and a couple more sepoys followed. They got the shoonoon over to the semicircle of cushions, having to chase a couple of them away from the single seat at front and center, and induced them to sit down.
The native sergeant in the little room said something under his breath; the captain laughed. Edith Shaw gaped for an instant and said, "Muggawsh!" Travis simply remarked that he'd be damned.
"They do look kind of unusual, don't they?" Miles said. "I wouldn't doubt that this is the biggest assemblage of shoonoon in history. They aren't exactly a gregarious lot."
"Maybe this is the beginning of a new era. First meeting of the Kwannon Thaumaturgical Society."
A couple more K.N.I. privates came in with serving-tables on contragravity floats and began passing bowls of a frozen native-food delicacy of which all Kwanns had become passionately fond since its introduction by the Terrans. He let them finish, and then, after they had been relieved of the empty bowls, he nodded to the K.N.I. sergeant, who opened a door on the left. They all went through into the room they had been seeing in the screen. There was a stir when the shoonoon saw him, and he heard his name, in its usual native mispronunciation, repeated back and forth.
"You all know me," he said, after they were seated. "Have I ever been an enemy to you or to the People?"
"No," one of them said. "He speaks for us to the other Terrans. When we are wronged, he tries to get the wrongs righted. In times of famine he has spoken of our troubles, and gifts of food have come while the Government argued about what to do."
He wished he could see Edith Shaw's face.
"There was a sickness in our village, and my magic could not cure it," another said. "Mailsh Heelbare gave me oomphel to cure it, and told me how to use it. He did this privately, so that I would not be made to look small to the people of the village."
And that had infuriated EETA; it was a question whether unofficial help to the natives or support of the prestige of a shoonoo had angered them more.
"His father was a trader; he gave good oomphel, and did not cheat. Mailsh Heelbare grew up among us; he took the Manhood Test with the boys of the village," another oldster said. "He listened with respect to the grandfather-stories. No, Mailsh Heelbare is not our enemy. He is our friend."
"And so I will prove myself now," he told them. "The Government is angry with the People, but I will try to take their anger away, and in the meantime I am permitted to come here and talk with you. Here is a chief of soldiers, and one of the Government people, and your words will be heard by the oomphel machine that remembers and repeats, for the Governor and the Great Soldier Chief."
They all brightened. To make a voice recording was a wonderful honor. Then one of them said:
"But what good will that do now? The Last Hot Time is here. Let us be permitted to return to our villages, where our people need us."
"It is of that that I wish to speak. But first of all, I must hear your words, and know what is in your minds. Who is the eldest among you? Let him come forth and sit in the front, where I may speak with him."
Then he relaxed while they argued in respectfully subdued voices. Finally one decrepit oldster, wearing a cloak of yellow ribbons and carrying a highly obscene and ineffably sacred wooden image, was brought forward and installed on the front-and-center cushion. He'd come from some village to the west that hadn't gotten the word of the swarming; Gonzales' men had snagged him while he was making crop-fertility magic.
Miles showed him the respect due his advanced age and obviously great magical powers, displaying, as he did, an understanding of the regalia.
"I have indeed lived long," the old shoonoo replied. "I saw the Hot Time before; I was a child of so high." He measured about two and a half feet off the floor; that would make him ninety-five or thereabouts. "I remember it."
"Speak to us, then. Tell us of the Gone Ones, and of the Sky Fire, and of the Last Hot Time. Speak as though you alone knew these things, and as though you were teaching me."
Delighted, the oldster whooshed a couple of times to clear his outlets and began:
"In the long-ago time, there was only the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit made the World, and he made the People. In that time, there were no more People in the World than would be in one village, now. The Gone Ones dwelt among them, and spoke to them as I speak to you. Then, as more People were born, and died and went to join the Gone Ones, the Gone Ones became many, and they went away and build a place for themselves, and built the Sky Fire around it, and in the Place of the Gone Ones, at the middle of the Sky Fire, it is cool. From their place in the Sky Fire, the Gone Ones send wisdom to the people in dreams.
"The Sky Fire passes across the sky, from east to west, as the Always-Same does, but it is farther away than the Always-Same, because sometimes the Always Same passes in front of it, but the Sky Fire never passes in front of the Always-Same. None of the grandfather-stories, not even the oldest, tell of a time when this happened.
"Sometimes the Sky Fire is big and bright; that is when the Gone Ones feast and dance. Sometimes it is smaller and dimmer; then the Gone Ones rest and sleep. Sometimes it is close, and there is a Hot Time; sometimes it goes far away, and then there is a Cool Time.
"Now, the Last Hot Time has come. The Sky Fire will come closer and closer, and it will pass the Always-Same, and then it will burn up the World. Then will be a new World, and the Gone Ones will return, and the People will be given new bodies. When this happens, the Sky Fire will go out, and the Gone Ones will live in the World again with the People; the Gone Ones will make great magic and teach wisdom as I teach to you, and will no longer have to send dreams. In that time the crops will grow without planting or tending or the work of women; in that time, the game will come into the villages to be killed in the gathering-places. There will be no more hunger and no more hard work, and no more of the People will die or be slain. And that time is now here," he finished. "All the People know this."
"Tell me, Grandfather; how is this known? There have been many Hot Times before. Why should this one be the Last Hot Time?"
"The Terrans have come, and brought oomphel into the World," the old shoonoo said. "It is a sign."
"It was not prophesied beforetime. None of the People had prophesies of the coming of the Terrans. I ask you, who were the father of children and the grandfather of children's children when the Terrans came; was there any such prophesy?"
The old shoonoo was silent, turning his pornographic ikon in his hands and looked at it.
"No," he admitted, at length. "Before the Terrans came, there were no prophesies among the People of their coming. Afterward, of course, there were many such prophesies, but there were none before."
"That is strange. When a happening is a sign of something to come, it is prophesied beforetime." He left that seed of doubt alone to grow, and continued: "Now, Grandfather, speak to us about what the People believe concerning the Terrans."
"The Terrans came to the World when my eldest daughter bore her first child," the old shoonoo said. "They came in great round ships, such as come often now, but which had never before been seen. They said that they came from another world like the World of People, but so far away that even the Sky Fire could not be seen from it. They still say this, and many of the People believe it, but it is not real.
"At first, it was thought that the Terrans were great shoonoon who made powerful magic, but this is not real either. The Terrans have no magic and no wisdom of their own. All they have is the oomphel, and the oomphel works magic for them and teaches them their wisdom. Even in the schools which the Terrans have made for the People, it is the oomphel which teaches." He went on to describe, not too incorrectly, the reading-screens and viewscreens and audio-visual equipment. "Nor do the Terrans make the oomphel, as they say. The oomphel makes more oomphel for them."
"Then where did the Terrans get the first oomphel?"
"They stole it from the Gone Ones," the old shoonoo replied. "The Gone Ones make it in their place in the middle of the Sky Fire, for themselves and to give to the People when they return. The Terrans stole it from them. For this reason, there is much hatred of the Terrans among the People. The Terrans live in the Dark Place, under the World, where the Sky Fire and the Always-Same go when they are not in the sky. It is there that the Terrans get the oomphel from the Gone Ones, and now they have come to the World, and they are using oomphel to hold back the Sky-Fire and keep it beyond the Always-Same so that the Last Hot Time will not come and the Gone Ones will not return. For this reason, too, there is much hatred of the Terrans among the People."
"Grandfather, if this were real there would be good reason for such hatred, and I would be ashamed for what my people had done and were doing. But it is not real." He had to rise and hold up his hands to quell the indignant outcry "Have any of you known me to tell not-real things and try to make the People act as though they were real? Then trust me in this. I will show you real things, which you will all see, and I will give you great secrets, which it is now time for you to have and use for the good of the People. Even the greatest secret," he added.
There was a pause of a few seconds. Then they burst out, in a hundred and eighty-four--no, three hundred and sixty eight--voices:
"The Oomphel Secret, Mailsh Heelbare?"
He nodded slowly. "Yes. The Oomphel Secret will be given."
He leaned back and relaxed again while they were getting over the excitement. Foxx Travis looked at him apprehensively.
"Rushing things, aren't you? What are you going to tell them?"
"Oh, a big pack of lies, I suppose," Edith Shaw said scornfully.
Behind her and Travis, the native noncom interpreter was muttering something in his own language that translated roughly as: "This better be good!"
The shoonoon had quieted, now, and were waiting breathlessly.
"But if the Oomphel Secret is given, what will become of the shoonoon?" he asked. "You, yourselves, say that we Terrans have no need for magic, because the oomphel works magic for us. This is real. If the People get the Oomphel Secret, how much need will they have for you shoonoon?"
Evidently that hadn't occurred to them before. There was a brief flurry of whispered--whooshed, rather--conversation, and then they were silent again. The eldest shoonoo said:
"We trust you, Mailsh Heelbare. You will do what is best for the People, and you will not let us be thrown out like broken pots, either."
"No, I will not," he promised. "The Oomphel Secret will be given to you shoonoon." He thought for a moment of Foxx Travis' joking remark about the Kwannon Thaumaturgical Society. "You have been jealous of one another, each keeping his own secrets," he said. "This must be put away. You will all receive the Oomphel Secret equally, for the good of all the People. You must all swear brotherhood, one with another, and later if any other shoonoo comes to you for the secret, you must swear brotherhood with him and teach it to him. Do you agree to this?"
The eldest shoonoo rose to his feet, begged leave, and then led the others to the rear of the room, where they went into a huddle. They didn't stay huddled long; inside of ten minutes they came back and took their seats.
"We are agreed, Mailsh Heelbare," the spokesman said.
Edith Shaw was impressed, more than by anything else she had seen. "Well, that was a quick decision!" she whispered.
"You have done well, Grandfathers. You will not be thrown out by the People like broken pots; you will be greater among them than ever. I will show you how this will be.
"But first, I must speak around the Oomphel Secret." He groped briefly for a comprehensible analogy, and thought of a native vegetable, layered like an onion, with a hard kernel in the middle. "The Oomphel Secret is like a fooshkoot. There are many lesser secrets around it, each of which must be peeled off like the skins of a fooshkoot and eaten. Then you will find the nut in the middle."
"But the nut of the fooshkoot is bitter," somebody said.
He nodded, slowly and solemnly. "The nut of the fooshkoot is bitter," he agreed.
They looked at one another, disquieted by his words. Before anybody could comment, he was continuing:
"Before this secret is given, there are things to be learned. You would not understand it if I gave it to you now. You believe many not-real things which must be chased out of your minds, otherwise they would spoil your understanding."
That was verbatim what they told adolescents before giving them the Manhood Secret. Some of them huffed a little; most of them laughed. Then one called out: "Speak on, Grandfather of Grandfathers," and they all laughed. That was fine, it had been about time for teacher to crack his little joke. Now he became serious again.
"The first of these not-real things you must chase from your mind is this which you believe about the home of the Terrans. It is not real that they come from the Dark Place under the World. There is no Dark Place under the World."
Bedlam for a few seconds; that was a pretty stiff jolt. No Dark Place; who ever heard of such a thing? The eldest shoonoo rose, cradling his graven image in his arms, and the noise quieted.
"Mailsh Heelbare, if there is no Dark Place where do the Sky Fire and the Always-Same go when they are not in the sky?"
"They never leave the sky; the World is round, and there is sky everywhere around it."
They knew that, or had at least heard it, since the Terrans had come. They just couldn't believe it. It was against common sense. The oldest shoonoo said as much, and more:
"These young ones who have gone to the Terran schools have come to the villages with such tales, but who listens to them? They show disrespect for the chiefs and the elders, and even for the shoonoon. They mock at the Grandfather-stories. They say men should do women's work and women do no work at all. They break taboos, and cause trouble. They are fools."
"Am I a fool, Grandfather? Do I mock at the old stories, or show disrespect to elders and shoonoon? Yet I, Mailsh Heelbare, tell you this. The World is indeed round, and I will show you."
The shoonoo looked contemptuously at the globe. "I have seen those things," he said. "That is not the World; that is only a make-like." He held up his phallic wood-carving. "I could say that this is a make-like of the World, but that would not make it so."
"I will show you for real. We will all go in a ship." He looked at his watch. "The Sky Fire is about to set. We will follow it all around the world to the west, and come back here from the east, and the Sky Fire will still be setting when we return. If I show you that, will you believe me?"
"If you show us for real, and it is not a trick, we will have to believe you."
When they emerged from the escalators, Alpha was just touching the western horizon, and Beta was a little past zenith. The ship was moored on contragravity beside the landing stage, her gangplank run out. The shoonoon, who had gone up ahead, had all stopped short and were staring at her; then they began gabbling among themselves, overcome by the wonder of being about to board such a monster and ride on her. She was the biggest ship any of them had ever seen. Maybe a few of them had been on small freighters; many of them had never been off the ground. They didn't look or act like cynical charlatans or implacable enemies of progress and enlightenment. They were more like a lot of schoolboys whose teacher is taking them on a surprise outing.
"Bet this'll be the biggest day in their lives," Travis said.
"Oh, sure. This'll be a grandfather-story ten generations from now."
"I can't get over the way they made up their minds, down there," Edith Shaw was saying. "Why, they just went and talked for a few minutes and came back with a decision."
They hadn't any organization, or any place to maintain on an organizational pecking-order. Nobody was obliged to attack anybody else's proposition in order to keep up his own status. He thought of the Colonial Government taking ten years not to build those storm-shelters.
Foxx Travis was commenting on the ship, now:
"I never saw that ship before; didn't know there was anything like that on the planet. Why, you could lift a whole regiment, with supplies and equipment--"
"She's been laid up for the last five years, since the heat and the native troubles stopped the tourist business here. She's the old Hesperus. Excursion craft. This sun-chasing trip we're going to make used to be a must for tourists here."
"I thought she was something like that, with all the glassed observation deck forward. Who's the owner?"
"Kwannon Air Transport, Ltd. I told them what I needed her for, and they made her available and furnished officers and crew and provisions for the trip. They were working to put her in commission while we were fitting up the fourth and fifth floors, downstairs."
"You just asked for that ship, and they just let you have it?" Edith Shaw was incredulous and shocked. They wouldn't have done that for the Government.
"They want to see these native troubles stopped, too. Bad for business. You know; selfish profit-move. That's another social force it's a good idea to work with instead of against."
The shoonoon were getting aboard, now, shepherded by the K.N.I. officer and a couple of his men and some of the ship's crew. A couple of sepoys were lugging the big globe that had been brought up from below after them. Everybody assembled on the forward top observation deck, and Miles called for attention and, finally, got it. He pointed out the three viewscreens mounted below the bridge, amidships. One on the left, was tuned to a pickup on the top of the Air Terminal tower, where the Terran city, the military reservation and the spaceport met. It showed the view to the west, with Alpha on the horizon. The one on the right, from the same point, gave a view in the opposite direction, to the east. The middle screen presented a magnified view of the navigational globe on the bridge.
Viewscreens were no novelty to the shoonoon. They were a very familiar type of oomphel. He didn't even need to do more than tell them that the little spot of light on the globe would show the position of the ship. When he was sure that they understood that they could see what was happening in Bluelake while they were away, he called the bridge and ordered Up Ship, telling the officer on duty to hold her at five thousand feet.
The ship rose slowly, turning toward the setting M-giant. Somebody called attention that the views in the screens weren't changing. Somebody else said:
"Of course not. What we see for real changes because the ship is moving. What we see in the screens is what the oomphel on the big building sees, and it does not move. That is for real as the oomphel sees it."
"Nice going," Edith said. "Your class has just discovered relativity." Travis was looking at the eastward viewscreen. He stepped over beside Miles and lowered his voice.
"Trouble over there to the east of town. Big swarm of combat contragravity working on something on the ground. And something's on fire, too."
"I see it."
"That's where those evacuees are camped. Why in blazes they had to bring them here to Bluelake--"
That had been EETA, too. When the solar tides had gotten high enough to flood the coastal area, the natives who had been evacuated from the district had been brought here because the Native Education people wanted them exposed to urban influences. About half of the shoonoon who had been rounded up locally had come in from the tide-inundated area.
"Parked right in the middle of the Terran-type food production area," Travis was continuing.
That was worrying him. Maybe he wasn't used to planets where the biochemistry wasn't Terra-type and a Terran would be poisoned or, at best, starve to death, on the local food; maybe, as a soldier he knew how fragile even the best logistics system can be. It was something to worry about. Travis excused himself and went off in the direction of the bridge. Going to call HQ and find out what was happening.
Excitement among the shoonoon; they had spotted the ship on which they were riding in the westward screen. They watched it until it had vanished from "sight of the seeing-oomphel," and by then were over the upland forests from whence they had been brought to Bluelake. Now and then one of them would identify his own village, and that would start more excitement.
Three infantry troop-carriers and a squadron of air cavalry were rushing past the eastward pickup in the right hand screen; another fire had started in the trouble area.
The crowd that had gathered around the globe that had been brought aboard began calling for Mailsh Heelbare to show them how they would go around the world and what countries they would pass over. Edith accompanied him and listened while he talked to them. She was bubbling with happy excitement, now. It had just dawned on her that shoonoon were fun.
None of them had ever seen the mountains along the western side of the continent except from a great distance. Now they were passing over them; the ship had to gain altitude and even then make a detour around one snow-capped peak. The whole hundred and eighty-four rushed to the starboard side to watch it as they passed. The ocean, half an hour later, started a rush forward. The score or so of them from the Tidewater knew what an ocean was, but none of them had known that there was another one to the west. Miles' view of the education program of the EETA, never bright at best, became even dimmer. The young men who have gone to the Terran schools ... who listens to them? They are fools.
There were a few islands off the coast; the shoonoon identified them on the screen globe, and on the one on deck. Some of them wanted to know why there wasn't a spot of light on this globe, too. It didn't have the oomphel inside to do that; that was a satisfactory explanation. Edith started to explain about the orbital beacon-stations off-planet and the radio beams, and then stopped.
"I'm sorry; I'm not supposed to say anything to them," she apologized.
"Oh, that's all right. I wouldn't go into all that, though. We don't want to overload them."
She asked permission, a little later, to explain why the triangle tip of the arctic continent, which had begun to edge into sight on the screen globe, couldn't be seen from the ship. When he told her to go ahead, she got a platinum half-sol piece from her purse, held it on the globe from the classroom and explained about the curvature and told them they could see nothing farther away than the circle the coin covered. It was beginning to look as though the psychological-warfare experiment might show another, unexpected, success.
There was nothing, after the islands passed, but a lot of empty water. The shoonoon were getting hungry, but they refused to go below to eat. They were afraid they might miss something. So their dinner was brought up on deck for them. Miles and Travis and Edith went to the officers' dining room back of the bridge. Edith, by now, was even more excited than the shoonoon.
"They're so anxious to learn!" She was having trouble adjusting to that; that was dead against EETA doctrine. "But why wouldn't they listen to the teachers we sent to the villages?"
"You heard old Shatresh--the fellow with the pornographic sculpture and the yellow robe. These young twerps act like fools, and sensible people don't pay any attention to fools. What's more, they've been sent out indoctrinated with the idea that shoonoon are a lot of lying old fakes, and the shoonoon resent that. You know, they're not lying old fakes. Within their limitations, they are honest and ethical professional people."
"Oh, come, now! I know, I think they're sort of wonderful, but let's don't give them too much credit."
"I'm not. You're doing that."
"Huh?" She looked at him in amazement. "Me?"
"Yes, you. You know better than to believe in magic, so you expect them to know better, too. Well, they don't. You know that under the macroscopic world-of-the senses there exists a complex of biological, chemical and physical phenomena down to the subnucleonic level. They realize that there must be something beyond what they can see and handle, but they think it's magic. Well, as a race, so did we until only a few centuries pre-atomic. These people are still lower Neolithic, a hunting people who have just learned agriculture. Where we were twenty thousand years ago.
"You think any glib-talking Kwann can hang a lot of rags, bones and old iron onto himself, go through some impromptu mummery, and set up as shoonoo? Well, he can't. The shoonoon are a hereditary caste. A shoonoo father will begin teaching his son as soon as he can walk and talk, and he keeps on teaching him till he's the age-equivalent of a graduate M.D. or a science Ph. D."
"Well, what all is there to learn--?"
"The theoretical basis and practical applications of sympathetic magic. Action-at-a-distance by one object upon another. Homeopathic magic: the principle that things which resemble one another will interact. For instance, there's an animal the natives call a shynph. It has an excrescence of horn on its brow like an arrowhead, and it arches its back like a bow when it jumps. Therefore, a shynph is equal to a bow and arrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out of shynph-gut. Now they use tensilon because it won't break as easily or get wet and stretch. So they have to turn the tensilon into shynph-gut. They used to do that by drawing a picture of a shynph on the spool, and then the traders began labeling the spools with pictures of shynph. I think my father was one of the first to do that.
"Then, there's contagious magic. Anything that's been part of anything else or come in contact with it will interact permanently with it. I wish I had a sol for every time I've seen a Kwann pull the wad out of a shot-shell, pick up a pinch of dirt from the footprint of some animal he's tracking, put it in among the buckshot, and then crimp the wad in again.
"Everything a Kwann does has some sort of magical implications. It's the shoonoo's business to know all this; to be able to tell just what magical influences have to be produced, and what influences must be avoided. And there are circumstances in which magic simply will not work, even in theory. The reason is that there is some powerful counter-influence at work. He has to know when he can't use magic, and he has to be able to explain why. And when he's theoretically able to do something by magic, he has to have a plausible explanation why it won't produce results--just as any highly civilized and ethical Terran M.D. has to be able to explain his failures to the satisfaction of his late patient's relatives. Only a shoonoo doesn't get sued for malpractice; he gets a spear stuck in him. Under those circumstances, a caste of hereditary magicians is literally bred for quick thinking. These old gaffers we have aboard are the intellectual top crust among the natives. Any of them can think rings around your Government school products. As for preying on the ignorance and credulity of the other natives, they're only infinitesimally less ignorant and credulous themselves. But they want to learn--from anybody who can gain their respect by respecting them."
Edith Shaw didn't say anything in reply. She was thoughtful during the rest of the meal, and when they were back on the observation deck he noticed that she seemed to be looking at the shoonoon with new eyes.
In the screen-views of Bluelake, Beta had already set, and the sky was fading; stars had begun to twinkle. There were more fires--one, close to the city in the east, a regular conflagration--and fighting had broken out in the native city itself. He was wishing now, that he hadn't thought it necessary to use those screens. The shoonoon were noticing what was going on in them, and talking among themselves. Travis, after one look at the situation, hurried back to the bridge to make a screen-call. After a while, he returned, almost crackling with suppressed excitement.
"Well, it's finally happened! Maith's forced Kovac to declare martial rule!" he said in an exultant undertone.
"Forced him?" Edith was puzzled. "The Army can't force the Civil Government--"
"He threatened to do it himself. Intervene and suspend civil rule."
"But I thought only the Navy could do that."
"Any planetary commander of Armed Forces can, in a state of extreme emergency. I think you'll both agree that this emergency is about as extreme as they come. Kovac knew that Maith was unwilling to do it--he'd have to stand court-martial to justify his action--but he also knew that a governor general who has his Colony taken away from him by the Armed Forces never gets it back; he's finished. So it was just a case of the weaker man in the weaker position yielding."
"Where does this put us?"
"We are a civilian scientific project. You are under orders of General Maith. I am under your orders. I don't know about Edith."
"Can I draft her, or do I have to get you to get General Maith to do it?"
"Listen, don't do that," Edith protested. "I still have to work for Government House, and this martial rule won't last forever. They'll all be prejudiced against me--"
"You can shove your Government job on the air lock," Miles told her. "You'll have a better one with Planetwide News, at half again as much pay. And after the shakeup at Government House, about a year from now, you may be going back as director of EETA. When they find out on Terra just how badly this Government has been mismanaging things there'll be a lot of vacancies."
The shoonoon had been watching the fighting in the viewscreens. Then somebody noticed that the spot of light on the navigational globe was approaching a coastline, and they all rushed forward for a look.
Travis and Edith slept for a while; when they returned to relieve him, Alpha was rising to the east of Bluelake, and the fighting in the city was still going on. The shoonoon were still wakeful and interested; Kwanns could go without sleep for much longer periods than Terrans. The lack of any fixed cycle of daylight and darkness on their planet had left them unconditioned to any regular sleeping-and-waking rhythm.
"I just called in," Travis said. "Things aren't good, at all. Most of the natives in the evacuee cantonments have gotten into the native city, now, and they've gotten hold of a lot of firearms somehow. And they're getting nasty in the west, beyond where Gonzales is occupying, and in the northeast, and we only have about half enough troops to cope with everything. The general wants to know how you're making out with the shoonoon."
"I'll call him before I get in the sack."
He went up on the bridge and made the call. General Maith looked as sleepy as he felt; they both yawned as they greeted each other. There wasn't much he could tell the general, and it sounded like the glib reassurances one gets from a hospital about a friend's condition.
"We'll check in with you as soon as we get back and get our shoonoon put away. We understand what's motivating these frenzies, now, and in about twenty-five to thirty hours we'll be able to start doing something about it."
The general, in the screen, grimaced.
"That's a long time, Mr. Gilbert. Longer than we can afford to take, I'm afraid. You're not cruising at full speed now, are you?"
"Oh, no, general. We're just trying to keep Alpha level on the horizon." He thought for a moment. "We don't need to keep down to that. It may make an even bigger impression if we speed up."
He went back to the observation deck, picked up the PA-phone, and called for attention.
"You have seen, now, that we can travel around the world, so fast that we keep up with the Sky Fire and it is not seen to set. Now we will travel even faster, and I will show you a new wonder. I will show you the Sky Fire rising in the west; it and the Always-Same will seem to go backward in the sky. This will not be for real; it will only be seen so because we will be traveling faster. Watch, now, and see." He called the bridge for full speed, and then told them to look at the Sky-Fire and then see in the screens where it stood over Bluelake.
That was even better; now they were racing with the Sky-Fire and catching up to it. After half an hour he left them still excited and whooping gleefully over the steady gain. Five hours later, when he came back after a nap and a hasty breakfast, they were still whooping. Edith Shaw was excited, too; the shoonoon were trying to estimate how soon they would be back to Bluelake by comparing the position of the Sky Fire with its position in the screen.
General Maith received them in his private office at Army HQ; Foxx Travis mixed drinks for the four of them while the general checked the microphones to make sure they had privacy.
"I blame myself for not having forced martial rule on them hundreds of hours ago," he said. "I have three brigades; the one General Gonzales had here originally, and the two I brought with me when I took over here. We have to keep at least half a brigade in the south, to keep the tribes there from starting any more forest fires. I can't hold Bluelake with anything less than half a brigade. Gonzales has his hands full in his area. He had a nasty business while you were off on that world cruise--natives in one village caught the men stationed there off guard and wiped them out, and then started another frenzy. It spread to two other villages before he got it stopped. And we need the Third Brigade in the northeast; there are three quarters of a million natives up there, inhabiting close to a million square miles. And if anything really breaks loose here, and what's been going on in the last few days is nothing even approaching what a real outbreak could be like, we'll have to pull in troops from everywhere. We must save the Terran-type crops and the carniculture plants. If we don't, we all starve."
Miles nodded. There wasn't anything he could think of saying to that.
"How soon can you begin to show results with those shoonoon, Mr. Gilbert?" the general asked. "You said from twenty-five to thirty hours. Can you cut that any? In twenty-five hours, all hell could be loose all over the continent."
Miles shook his head. "So far, I haven't accomplished anything positive," he said. "All I did with this trip around the world was convince them that I was telling the truth when I told them there was no Dark Place under the World, where Alpha and Beta go at night." He hastened, as the general began swearing, to add: "I know, that doesn't sound like much. But it was necessary. I have to convince them that there will be no Last Hot Time, and then--"
The shoonoon, on their drum-shaped cushions, stared at him in silence, aghast. All the happiness over the wonderful trip in the ship, when they had chased the Sky Fire around the World and caught it over Bluelake, and even their pleasure in the frozen delicacies they had just eaten, was gone.
"No--Last--Hot--Time?"
"Mailsh Heelbare, this is not real! It cannot be!"
"The Gone Ones--"
"The Always-Cool Time, when there will be no more hunger or hard work or death; it cannot be real that this will never come!"
He rose, holding up his hands; his action stopped the clamor.
"Why should the Gone Ones want to return to this poor world that they have gladly left?" he asked. "Have they not a better place in the middle of the Sky Fire, where it is always cool? And why should you want them to come back to this world? Will not each one of you pass, sooner or later, to the middle of the Sky Fire; will you not there be given new bodies and join the Gone Ones? There is the Always-Cool; there the crops grow without planting and without the work of women; there the game come into the villages to be killed in the gathering-places, without hunting. There you will talk with the other Gone Ones, your fathers and your fathers' fathers, as I talk with you. Why do you think this must come to the World of People? Can you not wait to join the Gone Ones in the Sky Fire?"
Then he sat down and folded his arms. They were looking at him in amazement; evidently they all saw the logic, but none of them had ever thought of it before. Now they would have to turn it over in their minds and accustom themselves to the new viewpoint. They began whooshing among themselves. At length, old Shatresh, who had seen the Hot Time before, spoke:
"Mailsh Heelbare, we trust you," he said. "You have told us of wonders, and you have shown us that they were real. But do you know this for real?"
"Do you tell me that you do not?" he demanded in surprise. "You have had fathers, and fathers' fathers. They have gone to join the Gone Ones. Why should you not, also? And why should the Gone Ones come back and destroy the World of People? Then your children will have no more children, and your children's children will never be. It is in the World of People that the People are born; it is in the World that they grow and gain wisdom to fit themselves to live in the Place of the Gone Ones when they are through with the bodies they use in the World. You should be happy that there will be no Last Hot Time, and that the line of your begettings will go on and not be cut short."
There were murmurs of agreement with this. Most of them were beginning to be relieved that there wouldn't be a Last Hot Time, after all. Then one of the class asked:
"Do the Terrans also go to the Place of the Gone Ones, or have they a place of their own?"
He was silent for a long time, looking down at the floor. Then he raised his head.
"I had hoped that I would not have to speak of this," he said. "But, since you have asked, it is right that I should tell you." He hesitated again, until the Kwanns in front of him had begun to fidget. Then he asked old Shatresh: "Speak of the beliefs of the People about how the World was made."
"The great Spirit made the world." He held up his carven obscenity. "He made the World out of himself. This is a make-like to show it."
"The Great Spirit made many worlds. The stars which you see in dark-time are all worlds, each with many smaller worlds around it. The Great Spirit made them all at one time, and made people on many of them. The Great Spirit made the World of People, and made the Always-Same and the Sky Fire, and inside the Sky Fire he made the Place of the Gone Ones. And when he made the Place of the Gone Ones, he put an Oomphel-Mother inside it, to bring forth oomphel."
This created a brief sensation. An Oomphel-Mother was something they had never thought of before, but now they were wondering why they hadn't. Of course there'd be an Oomphel-Mother; how else would there be oomphel?
"The World of the Terrans is far away from the World of People, as we have always told you. When the Great Spirit made it He gave it only an Always-Same, and no Sky Fire. Since there was no Sky Fire, there was no place to put a Place of the Gone Ones, so the Great Spirit made the Terrans so that they would not die, but live forever in their own bodies. The Oomphel-Mother for the World of the Terrans the Great Spirit hid in a cave under a great mountain.
"The Terrans whom the Great Spirit made lived for a long time, and then, one day, a man and a woman found a crack in a rock, and went inside, and they found the cave of the Oomphel-Mother, and the Oomphel-Mother in it. So they called all the other Terrans, and they brought the Oomphel-Mother out, and the Oomphel-Mother began to bring forth Oomphel. The Oomphel-Mother brought forth metal, and cloth, and glass, and plastic; knives, and axes and guns and clothing--" He went on, cataloguing the products of human technology, the shoonoon staring more and more wide-eyed at him. "And oomphel to make oomphel, and oomphel to teach wisdom," he finished. "They became very wise and very rich.
"Then the Great Spirit saw what the Terrans had done, and became angry, for it was not meant for the Terrans to do this, and the Great Spirit cursed the Terrans with a curse of death. It was not death as you know it. Because the Terrans had sinned by laying hands on the Oomphel-Mother, not only their bodies must die, but their spirits also. A Terran has a short life in the body, after that no life."
"This, then, is the Oomphel Secret. The last skin of the fooshkoot has been peeled away; behold the bitter nut, upon which we Terrans have chewed for more time than anybody can count. Happy people! When you die or are slain, you go to the Place of the Gone Ones, to join your fathers and your fathers' fathers and to await your children and children's children. When we die or are slain, that is the end of us."
"But you have brought your oomphel into this world; have you not brought the curse with it?" somebody asked, frightened.
"No. The People did not sin against the Great Spirit; they have not laid hands on an Oomphel-Mother as we did. The oomphel we bring you will do no harm; do you think we would be so wicked as to bring the curse upon you? It will be good for you to learn about oomphel here; in your Place of the Gone Ones there is much oomphel."
"Why did your people come to this world, Mailsh Heelbare?" old Shatresh asked. "Was it to try to hide from the curse?"
"There is no hiding from the curse of the Great Spirit, but we Terrans are not a people who submit without strife to any fate. From the time of the Curse of Death on, we have been trying to make spirits for ourselves."
"But how can you do that?"
"We do not know. The oomphel will not teach us that, though it teaches everything else. We have only learned many ways in which it cannot be done. It cannot be done with oomphel, or with anything that is in our own world. But the Oomphel-Mother made us ships to go to other worlds, and we have gone to many of them, this one among them, seeking things from which we try to make spirits. We are trying to make spirits for ourselves from the crystals that grow in the klooba plants; we may fail with them, too. But I say this; I may die, and all the other Terrans now living may die, and be as though they had never been, but someday we will not fail. Someday our children, or our children's children, will make spirits for themselves and live forever, as you do."
"Why were we not told this before, Mailsh Heelbare?"
"We were ashamed to have you know it. We are ashamed to be people without spirits."
"Can we help you and your people? Maybe our magic might help."
"It well might. It would be worth trying. But first, you must help yourselves. You and your people are sinning against the Great Spirit as grievously as did the Terrans of old. Be warned in time, lest you answer it as grievously."
"What do you mean, Mailsh Heelbare?" Old Shatresh was frightened.
"You are making magic to bring the Sky Fire to the World. Do you know what will happen? The World of People will pass whole into the place of the Gone Ones, and both will be destroyed. The World of People is a world of death; everything that lives on it must die. The Place of the Gone Ones is a world of life; everything in it lives forever. The two will strive against each other, and will destroy one another, and there will be nothing in the Sky Fire or the World but fire. This is wisdom which our oomphel teaches us. We know this secret, and with it we make weapons of great destruction." He looked over the seated shoonoon, picking out those who wore the flame-colored cloaks of the fire-dance. "You--and you--and you," he said. "You have been making this dreadful magic, and leading your people in it. And which among the rest of you have not been guilty?"
"We did not know," one of them said. "Mailsh Heelbare, have we yet time to keep this from happening?"
"Yes. There is only a little time, but there is time. You have until the Always-Same passes across the face of the Sky-Fire." That would be seven hundred and fifty hours. "If this happens, all is safe. If the Sky Fire blots Out the Always Same, we are all lost together. You must go among your people and tell them what madness they are doing, and command them to stop. You must command them to lay down their arms and cease fighting. And you must tell them of the awful curse that was put upon the Terrans in the long-ago time, for a lesser sin than they are now committing."
"If we say that Mailsh Heelbare told us this, the people may not believe us. He is not known to all, and some would take no Terran's word, not even his."
"Would anybody tell a secret of this sort, about his own people, if it were not real?"
"We had better say nothing about Mailsh Heelbare. We will say that the Gone Ones told us in dreams."
"Let us say that the Great Spirit sent a dream of warning to each of us," another shoonoo said. "There has been too much talk about dreams from the Gone Ones already."
"But the Great Spirit has never sent a dream--"
"Nothing like this has ever happened before, either."
He rose, and they were silent. "Go to your living-place, now," he told them. "Talk of how best you may warn your people." He pointed to the clock. "You have an oomphel like that in your living-place; when the shorter spear has moved three places, I will speak with you again, and then you will be sent in air cars to your people to speak to them."
They went up the escalator and down the hall to Miles' office on the third floor without talking. Foxx Travis was singing softly, almost inaudibly:
"You will eeeeat ... in the sweeeet ... bye-and-bye, You'll get oooom ... phel in the sky ... when you die!"
Inside, Edith Shaw slumped dispiritedly in a chair. Foxx Travis went to the coffee-maker and started it. Miles snapped on the communication screen and punched the combination of General Maith's headquarters. As soon as the uniformed girl who appeared in it saw him, her hands moved quickly; the screen flickered, and the general appeared in it.
"We have it made, general. They're sold; we're ready to start them out in three hours."
Maith's thin, weary face suddenly lighted. "You mean they are going to co-operate?"
He shook his head. "They think they're saving the world; they think we're co-operating with them."
The general laughed. "That's even better! How do you want them sent out?"
"The ones in the Bluelake area first. Better have some picked K.N.I. in native costume, with pistols, to go with them. They'll need protection, till they're able to get a hearing for themselves. After they're all out, the ones from Gonzales' area can be started." He thought for a moment. "I'll want four or five of them left here to help me when you start bringing more shoonoon in from other areas. How soon do you think you'll have another class for me?"
"Two or three days, if everything goes all right. We have the villages and plantations in the south under pretty tight control now; we can start gathering them up right away. As soon as we get things stabilized here, we can send reinforcements to the north. We'll have transport for you in three hours."
The general blanked out. He turned from the screen. Travis was laughing happily.
"Miles, did anybody ever tell you you were a genius?" he asked. "That last jolt you gave them was perfect. Why didn't you tell us about it in advance?"
"I didn't know about it in advance; I didn't think of it till I'd started talking to them. No cream or sugar for me."
"Cream," Edith said, lifelessly. "Why did you do it? Why didn't you just tell them the truth?"
Travis asked her to define the term. She started to say something bitter about Jesting Pilate. Miles interrupted.
"In spite of Lord Beacon, Pilate wasn't jesting," he said. "And he didn't stay for an answer because he knew he'd die of old age waiting for one. What kind of truth should I have told them?"
"Why, what you started to tell them. That Beta moves in a fixed orbit and can't get any closer to Alpha--"
"There's been some work done on the question since Pilate's time," Travis said. "My semantics prof at Command College had the start of an answer. He defined truth as a statement having a practical correspondence with reality on the physical levels of structure and observation and the verbal order of abstraction under consideration."
"He defined truth as a statement. A statement exists only in the mind of the person making it, and the mind of the person to whom it is made. If the person to whom it is made can't understand or accept it, it isn't the truth."
"They understood when you showed them that the planet is round, and they understood that tri-dimensional model of the system. Why didn't you let it go at that?"
"They accepted it intellectually. But when I told them that there wasn't any chance of Kwannon getting any closer to Alpha, they rebelled emotionally. It doesn't matter how conclusively you prove anything, if the person to whom you prove it can't accept your proof emotionally, it's still false. Not-real."
"They had all their emotional capital invested in this Always-Cool Time," Travis told her. "They couldn't let Miles wipe that out for them. So he shifted it from this world to the next, and convinced them that they were getting a better deal that way. You saw how quickly they picked it up. And he didn't have the sin of telling children there is no Easter Bunny on his conscience, either."
"But why did you tell them that story about the Oomphel Mother?" she insisted. "Now they'll go out and tell all the other natives, and they'll believe it."
"Would they have believed it if I'd told them about Terran scientific technology? Your people have been doing that for close to half a century. You see what impression it's made."
"But you told them--You told them that Terrans have no souls!"
"Can you prove that was a lie?" Travis asked. "Let's see yours. Draw--soul! Inspection--soul!"
Naturally. Foxx Travis would expect a soul to be carried in a holster.
"But they'll look down on us, now. They'll say we're just like animals," Edith almost wailed.
"Now it comes out," Travis said. "We won't be the lordly Terrans, any more, helping the poor benighted Kwanns out of the goodness of our hearts, scattering largess, bearing the Terran's Burden--new model, a give-away instead of a gun. Now they'll pity us; they'll think we're inferior beings."
"I don't think the natives are inferior beings!" She was almost in tears.
"If you don't, why did you come all the way to Kwannon to try to make them more like Terrans?"
"Knock it off, Foxx; stop heckling her." Travis looked faintly surprised. Maybe he hadn't realized, before, that a boss newsman learns to talk like a commanding officer. "You remember what Ramón Gonzales was saying, out at Sanders', about the inferior's hatred for the superior as superior? It's no wonder these Kwanns resent us. They have a right to; we've done them all an unforgivable injury. We've let them see us doing things they can't do. Of course they resent us. But now I've given them something to feel superior about. When they die, they'll go to the Place of the Gone Ones, and have oomphel in the sky, and they will live forever in new bodies, but when we die, we just die, period. So they'll pity us and politely try to hide their condescension toward us.
"And because they feel superior to us, they'll want to help us. They'll work hard on the plantations, so that we can have plenty of biocrystals, and their shoonoon will work magic for us, to help us poor benighted Terrans to grow souls for ourselves, so that we can almost be like them. Of course, they'll have a chance to exploit us, and get oomphel from us, too, but the important thing will be to help the poor Terrans. Maybe they'll even organize a Spiritual and Magical Assistance Agency."
THE END
OPERATION R.S.V.P.
By H. Beam Piper
Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky, Foreign Minister, Union of East European Soviet Republics, to Wu Fung Tung, Foreign Minister, United Peoples' Republics of East Asia:
15 Jan. 1984
Honored Sir:
Pursuant to our well known policy of exchanging military and scientific information with the Government, of friendly Powers, my Government takes great pleasure in announcing the completely successful final tests of our new nuclear-rocket guided missile Marxist Victory. The test launching was made from a position south of Lake Balkash; the target was located in the East Siberian Sea.
In order to assist you in appreciating the range of the new guided missile Marxist Victory, let me point out that the distance from launching-site to target is somewhat over 50 percent greater than the distance from launching-site to your capital, Nanking.
My Government is still hopeful that your Government will revise its present intransigeant position on the Khakum River dispute.
I have the honor, etc., etc., etc.,
V. N. Dzhoubinsky
Wu Fung Tung, to Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky:
7 Feb., 1984
Estimable Sir:
My Government was most delighted to learn of the splendid triumph of your Government in developing the new guided missile Marxist Victory, and at the same time deeply relieved. We had, of course, detected the release of nuclear energy incident to the test, and inasmuch as it had obviously originated in the disintegration of a quantity of Uranium 235, we had feared that an explosion had occurred at your Government's secret uranium plant at Khatanga. We have long known of the lax security measures in effect at this plant, and have, as a consequence, been expecting some disaster there.
I am therefore sure that your Government will be equally gratified to learn of the perfection, by my Government, of our own new guided missile Celestial Destroyer, which embodies, in greatly improved form, many of the features of your own Government's guided missile Marxist Victory. Naturally, your own scientific warfare specialists have detected the release of energy incident to the explosion of our own improved thorium-hafnium interaction bomb; this bomb was exploded over the North Polar ice cap, about two hundred miles south of the Pole, on about 35 degrees East Longitude, almost due north of your capital city of Moscow. The launching was made from a site in Thibet.
Naturally, my Government cannot deviate from our present just and reasonable attitude in the Khakum River question. Trusting that your Government will realize this, I have the honor to be,
Your obedient and respectful servant,
Wu Fung Tung
From N. Y. TIMES, Feb. 20, 1984:
AFGHAN RULER FETED AT NANKING
Ameer Shere Ali Abdallah Confers
With
UPREA Pres. Sung Li-Yin
UEESR Foreign Minister Dzhoubinsky to Maxim G. Krylenkoff, Ambassador at Nanking:
3 March, 1984
Comrade Ambassador:
It is desired that you make immediate secret and confidential repeat secret and confidential inquiry as to the whereabouts of Dr. Dimitri O. Voronoff, the noted Soviet rocket expert, designer of the new guided missile Marxist Victory, who vanished a week ago from the Josef Vissarionovitch Djugashvli Reaction-Propulsion Laboratories at Molotovgorod. It is feared in Government circles that this noted scientist has been abducted by agents of the United Peoples' Republics of East Asia, possibly to extract from him, under torture, information of a secret technical nature.
As you know, this is but the latest of a series of such disappearances, beginning about five years ago, when the Khakum River question first arose.
Your utmost activity in this matter is required.
Dzhoubinsky
Ambassador Krylenkoff to Foreign Minister Dzhoubinsky:
9 March, 1984
Comrade Foreign Minister:
Since receipt of yours of 3/3/'84, I have been utilizing all resources at my disposal in the matter of the noted scientist D. O. Voronoff, and availing myself of all sources of information, e.g., spies, secret agents, disaffected elements of the local population, and including two UPREA Cabinet Ministers on my payroll. I regret to report that results of this investigation have been entirely negative. No one here appears to know anything of the whereabouts of Dr. Voronoff.
At the same time, there is considerable concern in UPREA Government circles over the disappearances of certain prominent East Asian scientists, e.g.. Dr. Hong Foo, the nuclear physicist; Dr. Hin Yang-Woo, the great theoretical mathematician; Dr. Mong Shing, the electronics expert. I am informed that UPREA Government sources are attributing these disappearances to us.
I can only say that I am sincerely sorry that this is not the case.
Krylenkoff
Wu Fung Tung to Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky:
21 April, 1984
Estimable Sir:
In accordance with our established policy of free exchange with friendly Powers of scientific information, permit me to inform your Government that a new mutated disease-virus has been developed in our biological laboratories, causing a highly contagious disease similar in symptoms to bubonic plague, but responding to none of the treatments for this latter disease. This new virus strain was accidentally produced in the course of some experiments with radioactivity.
In spite of the greatest care, it is feared that this virus has spread beyond the laboratory in which it was developed. We warn you most urgently of the danger that it may have spread to the UEESR; enclosed are a list of symptoms, etc.
My Government instructs me to advise your Government that the attitude of your Government in the Khakum River question is utterly unacceptable, and will require considerable revision before my Government can even consider negotiation with your Government on the subject. Your obedient and respectful servant,
Wu Fung Tung
From N. Y. Times, May 12, 1984:
AFGHAN RULER FETED AT
MOSCOW
Ameer sees Red Square Troop Review;
Confers with Premier-President Mouzorgin
Sing Yat, UPREA Ambassador at Moscow, to Wu Fung Tung:
26 June, 1984
Venerable and Honored Sir:
I regret humbly that I can learn nothing whatever about the fate of the learned scholars of science of whom you inquire, namely: Hong Foo, Hin Yang-Woo, Mong Shing, Yee Ho Li, Wong Fat, and Bao Hu-Shin. This inability may be in part due to incompetence of my unworthy self, but none of my many sources of information, including Soviet Minister of Police Morgodoff, who is on my payroll, can furnish any useful data whatever. I am informed, however, that the UEESR Government is deeply concerned about similar disappearances of some of the foremost of their own scientists, including Voronoff, Jirnikov, Kagorinoff, Bakhorin, Himmelfarber and Pavlovinsky, all of whose dossiers are on file with our Bureau of Foreign Intelligence. I am further informed that the Government of the UEESR ascribes these disappearances to our own activities.
Ah, Venerable and Honored Sir, if this were only true!
Kindly condescend to accept compliments of,
Sing Yat
Dzhoubinsky to Wu Fung Tung:
6 October, 1984
Honored Sir:
Pursuant to our well known policy of exchanging scientific information with the Governments of friendly Powers, my Government takes the greatest pleasure in announcing a scientific discovery of inestimable value to the entire world. I refer to nothing less than a positive technique for liquidating rats as a species.
This technique involves treatment of male rats with certain types of hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and these, in turn, will sterilize all male rats coming in contact with them. Our mathematicians estimate that under even moderately favorable circumstances, the entire rat population of the world could be sterilized from one male rat in approximately two hundred years.
Rats so treated have already been liberated in the granaries at Odessa; in three months, rat-trappings there have fallen by 26.4 percent, and grain-losses to rats by 32.09 percent.
We are shipping you six dozen sterilized male rats, which you can use for sterilization stock, and, by so augmenting their numbers, may duplicate our own successes.
Curiously enough, this effect of venereally contagious sterility was discovered quite accidentally, in connection with the use of hard radiations for human sterilization (criminals, mental defectives, etc.). Knowing the disastrous possible effects of an epidemic of contagious human sterility, all persons so sterilized were liquidated as soon as the contagious nature of their sterility had been discovered, with the exception of a dozen or so convicts, who had been released before this discovery was made. It is believed that at least some of them have made their way over the border and into the territory of the United Peoples' Republics of East Asia. I must caution your Government to be on the lookout of them. Among a people still practicing ancestor-worship, an epidemic of sterility would be a disaster indeed.
My Government must insist that your Government take some definite step toward the solution of the Khakum River question; the present position of the Government of the United Peoples' Republics of East Asia on this subject is utterly unacceptable to the Government of the Union of East European Soviet Republics, and must be revised very considerably.
I have the honor, etc., etc.,
Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky
Coded radiogram, Dzhoubinsky to Krylenkoff:
25 OCTOBER, 1984
ASCERTAIN IMMEDIATELY CAUSE OF RELEASE OF NUCLEAR ENERGY VICINITY OF NOVA ZEMBLA THIS AM
DZHOUBINSKY
Coded radiogram, Wu Fung Tung to Sing Yat:
25 OCTOBER, 1984
ASCERTAIN IMMEDIATELY CAUSE OF RELEASE OF NUCLEAR ENERGY VICINITY OF NOVA ZEMBLA THIS AM
WU
Letter from the Ameer of Afghanistan to UEESR Premier-President Mouzorgin and UPREA President Sung Li-Yin:
26 October, 1984
SHERE ALI ABDALLAH, Ameer of Afghanistan, Master of Kabul, Lord of Herat and Kandahar, Keeper of Khyber Pass, Defender of the True Faith, Servant of the Most High and Sword-Hand of the Prophet; Ph.D. (Princeton); Sc.B. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); M.A. (Oxford): to their Excellencies A.A. Mouzorgin, Premier-President of the Union of East European Soviet Republics, and Sung Li-Yin, President of the United Peoples' Republics of East Asia,
Greetings, in the name of Allah!
For the past five years, I have watched, with growing concern, the increasing tensions between your Excellencies' respective Governments, allegedly arising out of the so-called Khakum River question. It is my conviction that this Khakum River dispute is the utterly fraudulent device by which both Governments hope to create a pretext for the invasion of India, each ostensibly to rescue that unhappy country from the rapacity of the other. Your Excellencies must surely realize that this is a contingency which the Government of the Kingdom of Afghanistan cannot and will not permit; it would mean nothing short of the national extinction of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, and the enslavement of the Afghan people.
Your Excellencies will recall that I discussed this matter most urgently on the occasions of my visits to your respective capitals of Moscow and Nanking, and your respective attitudes, on those occasions, has firmly convinced me that neither of your Excellencies is by nature capable of adopting a rational or civilized attitude toward this question. It appears that neither of your Excellencies has any intention of abandoning your present war of mutual threats and blackmail until forced to do so by some overt act on the part of one or the other of your Excellencies' Governments, which would result in physical war of pan-Asiatic scope and magnitude. I am further convinced that this deplorable situation arises out of the megalomaniac ambitions of the Federal Governments of the UEESR and the UPREA, respectively, and that the different peoples of what you unblushingly call your "autonomous" republics have no ambitions except, on a rapidly diminishing order of probability, to live out their natural span of years in peace. Therefore:
In the name of ALLAH, the Merciful, the Compassionate: We, Shere Ali Abdallah, Ameer of Afghanistan, etc., do decree and command that the political entities known as the Union of East European Soviet Republics and the United Peoples' Republics of East Asia respectively are herewith abolished and dissolved into their constituent autonomous republics, each one of which shall hereafter enjoy complete sovereignty within its own borders as is right and proper.
Now, in case either of you gentlemen feel inclined to laugh this off, let me remind you of the series of mysterious disappearances of some of the most noted scientists of both the UEESR and the UPREA, and let me advise your Excellencies that these scientists are now residents and subjects of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, and are here engaged in research and development work for my Government. These gentlemen were not abducted, as you gentlemen seem to believe; they came here of their own free will, and ask nothing better than to remain here, where they are treated with dignity and honor, given material rewards--riches, palaces, harems, retinues of servants, etc.--and are also free from the intellectual and ideological restraints which make life so intolerable in your respective countries to any man above the order of intelligence of a cretin. In return for these benefactions, these eminent scientists have developed, for my Government, certain weapons. For example:
1.) A nuclear-rocket guided missile, officially designated as the Sword of Islam, vastly superior to your Excellencies' respective guided missiles Marxist Victory and Celestial Destroyer. It should be; it was the product of the joint efforts of Dr. Voronoff and Dr. Bao Hu-Shin, whom your Excellencies know.
2.) A new type of radar-radio-electronic defense screen, which can not only detect the approach of a guided missile, at any velocity whatever, but will automatically capture and redirect same. In case either of your Excellencies doubt this statement, you are invited to aim a rocket at some target in Afghanistan and see what happens.
3.) Both the UPREA mutated virus and the UEESR contagious sterility, with positive vaccines against the former and means of instrumental detection of the latter.
4.) A technique for initiating and controlling the Bethe carbon-hydrogen cycle. We are now using this as a source of heat for industrial and even domestic purposes, and we also have a carbon-hydrogen cycle bomb. Such a bomb, delivered by one of our Sword of Islam Mark IV's, was activated yesterday over the Northern tip of Nova Zembla, at an altitude of four miles. I am enclosing photographic reproductions of views of this test, televised to Kabul by an accompanying Sword of Islam Mark V observation rocket. I am informed that expeditions have been sent by both the UEESR and the UPREA to investigate; they should find some very interesting conditions. For one thing, they won't need their climbing equipment to get over the Nova Zembla Glacier; the Nova Zembla Glacier isn't there, any more.
5.) A lithium bomb. This has not been tested, yet. A lithium bomb is nothing for a country the size of Afghanistan to let off inside its own borders. We intend making a test with it within the next ten days, however If your Excellencies will designate a target, which must be at the center of an uninhabited area at least five hundred miles square, the test can be made in perfect safety. If not, I cannot answer the results; that will be in the hands of Allah, Who has ordained all things. No doubt Allah has ordained the destruction of either Moscow or Nanking; whichever city Allah has elected to erase, I will make it my personal responsibility to see to it that the other isn't slighted, either.
However, if your Excellencies decide to accede to my modest and reasonable demands, not later than one week from today, this test-launching will be cancelled as unnecessary. Of course, that would leave unsettled a bet I have made with Dr. Hong Foo--a star sapphire against his favorite Persian concubine--that the explosion of a lithium bomb will not initiate a chain reaction in the Earth's crust and so disintegrate this planet. This, of course, is a minor consideration, unworthy of Your notice.
Of course, I am aware that both your Excellencies have, in the past, fomented mutual jealousies and suspicions among the several "autonomous" republics under your respective jurisdictions, as an instrument of policy. If these peoples were, at this time, to receive full independence, the present inevitability of a pan-Asiatic war on a grand scale would be replaced only by the inevitability of a pan-Asiatic war by detail. Obviously, some single supra-national sovereignty is needed to maintain peace, and such a sovereignty should be established under some leadership not hitherto associated with either the former UEESR or the former UPREA. I humbly offer myself as President of such a supra-national organization, counting as a matter of course upon the whole-hearted support and co-operation of both your Excellencies. It might be well if both your Excellencies were to come here to Kabul to confer with me on this subject at your very earliest convenience.
The Peace of Allah be upon both your Excellencies!
Shere Ali Abdallah, Ph.D., Sc.B., M.A.
From N. Y. Times, Oct. 30, 1984:
MOUZORGIN, SUN LI-YIN,
FETED AT KABUL
Confer With Ameer;
Discuss Peace Plans
Surprise Developments Seen....
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
By Frederik Pohl
Pinching yourself is no way to see if you are dreaming. Surgical instruments? Well, yes--but a mechanic's kit is best of all!
On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.
He croaked, "Mary?"
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.
But she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.
"Guy?" His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. "Guy, dear, are you all right?"
He called weakly, "Sure."
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, "Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you're all right? I thought I heard you yelling--"
Burckhardt said more confidently, "I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down."
* * * * *
In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still, bad dreams weren't unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?
Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. "You did?" Her voice was astonished. "Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn't actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?"
Burckhardt coughed. "Well, no," he said. Mary was not one of these strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, "Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming."
Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. "Maybe," she agreed. "It's almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn't you hurry? You don't want to be late to the office."
He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out--not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.
But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn't any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before: It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town's only skyscraper--that was the penalty of having Contro Chemical's main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.
None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn't anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.
He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn't behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.
"Where's Mr. Stebbins?" Burckhardt asked.
The man said politely, "Sick, sir. He'll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?"
"Chesterfields," Burckhardt corrected.
"Certainly, sir," the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.
"Do try these, sir," he suggested. "They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?"
* * * * *
Burckhardt said suspiciously, "I never heard of this brand."
"Of course not. They're something new." Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, "Look, try them out at my risk. If you don't like them, bring back the empty pack and I'll refund your money. Fair enough?"
Burckhardt shrugged. "How can I lose? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you?"
He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren't bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn't think much of Ralph's stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.
The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.
No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.
There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: "Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-Bite all up. That's Choco-Bite!" There was a sobbing female whine: "I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I'd do anything for a Feckle Freezer!" Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.
But the office was happily normal--except that Mr. Barth wasn't in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn't know exactly why. "His home phoned, that's all. He'll be in tomorrow."
"Maybe he went to the plant. It's right near his house."
She looked indifferent. "Yeah."
A thought struck Burckhardt. "But today is June 15th! It's quarterly tax return day--he has to sign the return!"
Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt's problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.
Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn't that he couldn't sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn't his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals' downtown office, should have taken.
* * * * *
He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn't really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn't a soul in the factory--that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul--just the machines.
According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn't hurt the man and it didn't make the machine into a monster.
But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.
He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures--which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.
He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. "Since Mr. Barth isn't here, we'd better go to lunch in shifts," he said. "You can go first."
"Thanks." Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply makeup.
Burckhardt offered her the envelope. "Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh--wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?"
"Didn't say." Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. "Wasn't his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message."
"The kid?" Burckhardt frowned. "I thought she was away at school."
"She called, that's all I know."
Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn't like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.
* * * * *
A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually caught his bus--someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze--so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying toward him.
Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.
He said, "Hello."
Swanson's face was desperately eager. "Burckhardt?" he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt's face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn't know how to supply it.
Burckhardt coughed and said again, "Hello, Swanson."
Swanson didn't even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.
"Nothing doing," he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.
Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn't much like. Things weren't going right.
Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.
It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong--the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.
It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in.
Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked--Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife's comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days.
Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him--he was strangely aware of it happening--he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.
II
On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room.
His wife came pattering up the stairs. "Darling!" she cried. "What's the matter?"
He mumbled, "Nothing. Bad dream."
She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: "You gave me such a shock--"
But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.
The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window.
There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.
Burckhardt said in amazement, "Mary, that's against the law! Do you know what they're doing? They're playing records of a fire. What are they up to?"
"Maybe it's a practical joke," his wife offered.
"Joke? Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o'clock in the morning?" He shook his head. "The police will be here in ten minutes," he predicted. "Wait and see."
But the police weren't--not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games.
The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted:
"Feckle Freezers! Feckle Freezers! Gotta have a Feckle Freezer! Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle--"
It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening.
Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, "What the hell is a Feckle Freezer?"
"Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear," she shrieked back unhelpfully.
* * * * *
Abruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty morning; the Sun's rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing the name of a freezer.
"A crazy advertising trick," Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. "Might as well get dressed. I guess that's the end of--"
The bellow caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the arch-angel's trumpet, howled:
"Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn't a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it's a last year's Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year's Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!"
The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. "I'm warning you! Get out and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle...."
It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to his wife, "Maybe we ought to call the police about--" when the speakers erupted again. It caught him off guard; it was intended to catch him off guard. It screamed:
"Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap freezers ruin your food. You'll get sick and throw up. You'll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you've got and see how rotten and moldy it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle--"
That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal--it was apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea--and while he was shakingly dialing again, the noise outside stopped.
He looked out the window. The truck was gone.
* * * * *
Burckhardt loosened his tie and ordered another Frosty-Flip from the waiter. If only they wouldn't keep the Crystal Cafe so hot! The new paint job--searing reds and blinding yellows--was bad enough, but someone seemed to have the delusion that this was January instead of June; the place was a good ten degrees warmer than outside.
He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiar flavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just as the waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton of them on the way home; Mary might like them. She was always interested in something new.
He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height, honey-blonde hair and a figure that--well, it was all hers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him.
"Mr. Burckhardt." The voice was like distant tomtoms. "It's wonderful of you to let me see you, after this morning."
He cleared his throat. "Not at all. Won't you sit down, Miss--"
"April Horn," she murmured, sitting down--beside him, not where he had pointed on the other side of the table. "Call me April, won't you?"
She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with what little of his mind was functioning at all. It didn't seem fair that she should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an order for filets mignon for two.
"Hey!" he objected.
"Please, Mr. Burckhardt." Her shoulder was against his, her face was turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous. "This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them--it's the least they can do."
He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.
"I put the price of the meal into your pocket," she whispered conspiratorially. "Please do that for me, won't you? I mean I'd appreciate it if you'd pay the waiter--I'm old-fashioned about things like that."
She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. "But you must take the money," she insisted. "Why, you're letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they've got, disturbing your sleep like that."
* * * * *
With a dizzy feeling, as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, "Why, it really wasn't so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but--"
"Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!" The blue eyes were wide and admiring. "I knew you'd understand. It's just that--well, it's such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you--and I'm so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer.
"I shouldn't tell you this, but--" the blue eyes were shyly lowered--"I'd do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It's more than a job to me." She looked up. She was enchanting. "I bet you think I'm silly, don't you?"
Burckhardt coughed. "Well, I--"
"Oh, you don't want to be unkind!" She shook her head. "No, don't pretend. You think it's silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn't think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet--"
Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn't only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street--and then left him cold.
But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns.
What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent "courtesy" discount--"Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt," she had said.
And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife.
* * * * *
He needn't have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we got to talking and--"
She had signed a purchase order, too.
It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went out.
"Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt.
"Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning, dear."
Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along."
It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.
When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.
He headed back to the steps, and stopped.
Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!
"Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were sharp.
The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.
The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!
* * * * *
Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.
He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.
It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.
The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.
"But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.
"That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?"
Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.
He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!
He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.
Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.
III
On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.
The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them--all completely unbelievable.
The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment.
Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps--and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.
But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget--it was quarterly tax-return day.
He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: "--and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising ... United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around--"
He hung the phone up. June 15th.
"Holy heaven!" Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the stairs.
Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.
"Oh!" she gasped, as her husband came in the room. "Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and--"
"Again?" Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. "Mary, something's funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and--"
He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.
She said, "Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn't notice anything."
"Positive!" said Guy Burckhardt. "I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and--"
"After we what?" Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.
"After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and--"
Mary sat up in bed. "Guy, the switch didn't stick. I turned out the lights myself last night."
Burckhardt glared at his wife. "Now I know you didn't! Come here and take a look!"
He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad switch, the one that he had unscrewed and left hanging the night before....
Only it wasn't. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls.
* * * * *
Mary, looking pale and worried, left him to go down to the kitchen and start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and shock; they simply were not functioning.
He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb introspection. Mary didn't disturb him; she was apprehensive and soothing. She kissed him good-by as he hurried out to the bus without another word.
Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn. "Morning," she said drowsily. "Mr. Barth won't be in today."
Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would not know that Barth hadn't been in yesterday, either, because she was tearing a June 14th pad off her calendar to make way for the "new" June 15th sheet.
He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning's mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck & Sons was a complaint.
After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were.
By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss Mitkin take her lunch hour first--the June-fifteenth-that-was-yesterday, he had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt's mood.
The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. "Contro Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking."
The voice said, "This is Swanson," and stopped.
Burckhardt waited expectantly, but that was all. He said, "Hello?"
Again the pause. Then Swanson asked in sad resignation, "Still nothing, eh?"
"Nothing what? Swanson, is there something you want? You came up to me yesterday and went through this routine. You--"
The voice crackled: "Burckhardt! Oh, my good heavens, you remember! Stay right there--I'll be down in half an hour!"
"What's this all about?"
"Never mind," the little man said exultantly. "Tell you about it when I see you. Don't say any more over the phone--somebody may be listening. Just wait there. Say, hold on a minute. Will you be alone in the office?"
"Well, no. Miss Mitkin will probably--"
"Hell. Look, Burckhardt, where do you eat lunch? Is it good and noisy?"
"Why, I suppose so. The Crystal Cafe. It's just about a block--"
"I know where it is. Meet you in half an hour!" And the receiver clicked.
* * * * *
The Crystal Cafe was no longer painted red, but the temperature was still up. And they had added piped-in music interspersed with commercials. The advertisements were for Frosty-Flip, Marlin Cigarettes--"They're sanitized," the announcer purred--and something called Choco-Bite candy bars that Burckhardt couldn't remember ever having heard of before. But he heard more about them quickly enough.
While he was waiting for Swanson to show up, a girl in the cellophane skirt of a nightclub cigarette vendor came through the restaurant with a tray of tiny scarlet-wrapped candies.
"Choco-Bites are tangy," she was murmuring as she came close to his table. "Choco-Bites are tangier than tangy!"
Burckhardt, intent on watching for the strange little man who had phoned him, paid little attention. But as she scattered a handful of the confections over the table next to his, smiling at the occupants, he caught a glimpse of her and turned to stare.
"Why, Miss Horn!" he said.
The girl dropped her tray of candies.
Burckhardt rose, concerned over the girl. "Is something wrong?"
But she fled.
The manager of the restaurant was staring suspiciously at Burckhardt, who sank back in his seat and tried to look inconspicuous. He hadn't insulted the girl! Maybe she was just a very strictly reared young lady, he thought--in spite of the long bare legs under the cellophane skirt--and when he addressed her, she thought he was a masher.
Ridiculous idea. Burckhardt scowled uneasily and picked up his menu.
"Burckhardt!" It was a shrill whisper.
Burckhardt looked up over the top of his menu, startled. In the seat across from him, the little man named Swanson was sitting, tensely poised.
"Burckhardt!" the little man whispered again. "Let's get out of here! They're on to you now. If you want to stay alive, come on!"
There was no arguing with the man. Burckhardt gave the hovering manager a sick, apologetic smile and followed Swanson out. The little man seemed to know where he was going. In the street, he clutched Burckhardt by the elbow and hurried him off down the block.
"Did you see her?" he demanded. "That Horn woman, in the phone booth? She'll have them here in five minutes, believe me, so hurry it up!"
* * * * *
Although the street was full of people and cars, nobody was paying any attention to Burckhardt and Swanson. The air had a nip in it--more like October than June, Burckhardt thought, in spite of the weather bureau. And he felt like a fool, following this mad little man down the street, running away from some "them" toward--toward what? The little man might be crazy, but he was afraid. And the fear was infectious.
"In here!" panted the little man.
It was another restaurant--more of a bar, really, and a sort of second-rate place that Burckhardt had never patronized.
"Right straight through," Swanson whispered; and Burckhardt, like a biddable boy, side-stepped through the mass of tables to the far end of the restaurant.
It was "L"-shaped, with a front on two streets at right angles to each other. They came out on the side street, Swanson staring coldly back at the question-looking cashier, and crossed to the opposite sidewalk.
They were under the marquee of a movie theater. Swanson's expression began to relax.
"Lost them!" he crowed softly. "We're almost there."
He stepped up to the window and bought two tickets. Burckhardt trailed him in to the theater. It was a weekday matinee and the place was almost empty. From the screen came sounds of gunfire and horse's hoofs. A solitary usher, leaning against a bright brass rail, looked briefly at them and went back to staring boredly at the picture as Swanson led Burckhardt down a flight of carpeted marble steps.
They were in the lounge and it was empty. There was a door for men and one for ladies; and there was a third door, marked "MANAGER" in gold letters. Swanson listened at the door, and gently opened it and peered inside.
"Okay," he said, gesturing.
Burckhardt followed him through an empty office, to another door--a closet, probably, because it was unmarked.
But it was no closet. Swanson opened it warily, looked inside, then motioned Burckhardt to follow.
It was a tunnel, metal-walled, brightly lit. Empty, it stretched vacantly away in both directions from them.
Burckhardt looked wondering around. One thing he knew and knew full well:
No such tunnel belonged under Tylerton.
* * * * *
There was a room off the tunnel with chairs and a desk and what looked like television screens. Swanson slumped in a chair, panting.
"We're all right for a while here," he wheezed. "They don't come here much any more. If they do, we'll hear them and we can hide."
"Who?" demanded Burckhardt.
The little man said, "Martians!" His voice cracked on the word and the life seemed to go out of him. In morose tones, he went on: "Well, I think they're Martians. Although you could be right, you know; I've had plenty of time to think it over these last few weeks, after they got you, and it's possible they're Russians after all. Still--"
"Start from the beginning. Who got me when?"
Swanson sighed. "So we have to go through the whole thing again. All right. It was about two months ago that you banged on my door, late at night. You were all beat up--scared silly. You begged me to help you--"
"I did?"
"Naturally you don't remember any of this. Listen and you'll understand. You were talking a blue streak about being captured and threatened, and your wife being dead and coming back to life, and all kinds of mixed-up nonsense. I thought you were crazy. But--well, I've always had a lot of respect for you. And you begged me to hide you and I have this darkroom, you know. It locks from the inside only. I put the lock on myself. So we went in there--just to humor you--and along about midnight, which was only fifteen or twenty minutes after, we passed out."
"Passed out?"
Swanson nodded. "Both of us. It was like being hit with a sandbag. Look, didn't that happen to you again last night?"
"I guess it did," Burckhardt shook his head uncertainly.
"Sure. And then all of a sudden we were awake again, and you said you were going to show me something funny, and we went out and bought a paper. And the date on it was June 15th."
"June 15th? But that's today! I mean--"
"You got it, friend. It's always today!"
It took time to penetrate.
Burckhardt said wonderingly, "You've hidden out in that darkroom for how many weeks?"
"How can I tell? Four or five, maybe. I lost count. And every day the same--always the 15th of June, always my landlady, Mrs. Keefer, is sweeping the front steps, always the same headline in the papers at the corner. It gets monotonous, friend."
IV
It was Burckhardt's idea and Swanson despised it, but he went along. He was the type who always went along.
"It's dangerous," he grumbled worriedly. "Suppose somebody comes by? They'll spot us and--"
"What have we got to lose?"
Swanson shrugged. "It's dangerous," he said again. But he went along.
Burckhardt's idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing--the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation, and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel.
They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck--at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use.
Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why?
And falling asleep, completely involuntarily--everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything--Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing.
And Swanson had lived his mouse's existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them.
Them. One of "them" was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt's office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected.
They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look--for they, alone in Tylerton, changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all.
Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade?
Burckhardt didn't know the answer--but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. They slipped through.
And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant.
* * * * *
Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd--the automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still.
Only--now it was still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no commands; the coils and relays were at rest.
Burckhardt said, "Come on." Swanson reluctantly followed him through the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks.
They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way, they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory, if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind.
Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.
Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never overlooking anything, never forgetting....
Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. "I'm scared," he said.
They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a door and dared to peer around it.
It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one--a dozen or more, at least--with a man or woman sitting before it, staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the same picture.
The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what looked like the cigar stand in his office building.
It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that someone would look their way or walk out and find them.
* * * * *
They found another room. This one was empty. It was an office, large and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared at them, briefly at first--then, as the words on one of them caught his attention, with incredulous fascination.
He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers.
Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk.
Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: "Look!" He dragged a gun from the desk. "And it's loaded, too!"
Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt's eyes sparked. "Good man!" he cried. "We'll take it. We're getting out of here with that gun, Swanson. And we're going to the police! Not the cops in Tylerton, but the F.B.I., maybe. Take a look at this!"
The sheaf he handed Swanson was headed: "Test Area Progress Report. Subject: Marlin Cigarettes Campaign." It was mostly tabulated figures that made little sense to Burckhardt and Swanson, but at the end was a summary that said:
Although Test 47-K3 pulled nearly double the number of new users of any of the other tests conducted, it probably cannot be used in the field because of local sound-truck control ordinances.
The tests in the 47-K12 group were second best and our recommendation is that retests be conducted in this appeal, testing each of the three best campaigns with and without the addition of sampling techniques.
An alternative suggestion might be to proceed directly with the top appeal in the K12 series, if the client is unwilling to go to the expense of additional tests.
All of these forecast expectations have an 80% probability of being within one-half of one per cent of results forecast, and more than 99% probability of coming within 5%.
Swanson looked up from the paper into Burckhardt's eyes. "I don't get it," he complained.
Burckhardt said, "I don't blame you. It's crazy, but it fits the facts, Swanson, it fits the facts. They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow--heaven knows how they did it--they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people, right under their thumbs.
"Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is that they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day, they see what happened--and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising."
* * * * *
Swanson's jaw was hanging. He managed to close it and swallow. "Nuts!" he said flatly.
Burckhardt shook his head. "Sure, it sounds crazy--but this whole thing is crazy. How else would you explain it? You can't deny that most of Tylerton lives the same day over and over again. You've seen it! And that's the crazy part and we have to admit that that's true--unless we are the crazy ones. And once you admit that somebody, somehow, knows how to accomplish that, the rest of it makes all kinds of sense.
"Think of it, Swanson! They test every last detail before they spend a nickel on advertising! Do you have any idea what that means? Lord knows how much money is involved, but I know for a fact that some companies spend twenty or thirty million dollars a year on advertising. Multiply it, say, by a hundred companies. Say that every one of them learns how to cut its advertising cost by only ten per cent. And that's peanuts, believe me!
"If they know in advance what's going to work, they can cut their costs in half--maybe to less than half, I don't know. But that's saving two or three hundred million dollars a year--and if they pay only ten or twenty per cent of that for the use of Tylerton, it's still dirt cheap for them and a fortune for whoever took over Tylerton."
Swanson licked his lips. "You mean," he offered hesitantly, "that we're a--well, a kind of captive audience?"
Burckhardt frowned. "Not exactly." He thought for a minute. "You know how a doctor tests something like penicillin? He sets up a series of little colonies of germs on gelatine disks and he tries the stuff on one after another, changing it a little each time. Well, that's us--we're the germs, Swanson. Only it's even more efficient than that. They don't have to test more than one colony, because they can use it over and over again."
It was too hard for Swanson to take in. He only said: "What do we do about it?"
"We go to the police. They can't use human beings for guinea pigs!"
"How do we get to the police?"
Burckhardt hesitated. "I think--" he began slowly. "Sure. This place is the office of somebody important. We've got a gun. We'll stay right here until he comes along. And he'll get us out of here."
Simple and direct. Swanson subsided and found a place to sit, against the wall, out of sight of the door. Burckhardt took up a position behind the door itself--
And waited.
* * * * *
The wait was not as long as it might have been. Half an hour, perhaps. Then Burckhardt heard approaching voices and had time for a swift whisper to Swanson before he flattened himself against the wall.
It was a man's voice, and a girl's. The man was saying, "--reason why you couldn't report on the phone? You're ruining your whole day's test! What the devil's the matter with you, Janet?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Dorchin," she said in a sweet, clear tone. "I thought it was important."
The man grumbled, "Important! One lousy unit out of twenty-one thousand."
"But it's the Burckhardt one, Mr. Dorchin. Again. And the way he got out of sight, he must have had some help."
"All right, all right. It doesn't matter, Janet; the Choco-Bite program is ahead of schedule anyhow. As long as you're this far, come on in the office and make out your worksheet. And don't worry about the Burckhardt business. He's probably just wandering around. We'll pick him up tonight and--"
They were inside the door. Burckhardt kicked it shut and pointed the gun.
"That's what you think," he said triumphantly.
It was worth the terrified hours, the bewildered sense of insanity, the confusion and fear. It was the most satisfying sensation Burckhardt had ever had in his life. The expression on the man's face was one he had read about but never actually seen: Dorchin's mouth fell open and his eyes went wide, and though he managed to make a sound that might have been a question, it was not in words.
The girl was almost as surprised. And Burckhardt, looking at her, knew why her voice had been so familiar. The girl was the one who had introduced herself to him as April Horn.
Dorchin recovered himself quickly. "Is this the one?" he asked sharply.
The girl said, "Yes."
Dorchin nodded. "I take it back. You were right. Uh, you--Burckhardt. What do you want?"
* * * * *
Swanson piped up, "Watch him! He might have another gun."
"Search him then," Burckhardt said. "I'll tell you what we want, Dorchin. We want you to come along with us to the FBI and explain to them how you can get away with kidnapping twenty thousand people."
"Kidnapping?" Dorchin snorted. "That's ridiculous, man! Put that gun away--you can't get away with this!"
Burckhardt hefted the gun grimly. "I think I can."
Dorchin looked furious and sick--but, oddly, not afraid. "Damn it--" he started to bellow, then closed his mouth and swallowed. "Listen," he said persuasively, "you're making a big mistake. I haven't kidnapped anybody, believe me!"
"I don't believe you," said Burckhardt bluntly. "Why should I?"
"But it's true! Take my word for it!"
Burckhardt shook his head. "The FBI can take your word if they like. We'll find out. Now how do we get out of here?"
Dorchin opened his mouth to argue.
Burckhardt blazed: "Don't get in my way! I'm willing to kill you if I have to. Don't you understand that? I've gone through two days of hell and every second of it I blame on you. Kill you? It would be a pleasure and I don't have a thing in the world to lose! Get us out of here!"
Dorchin's face went suddenly opaque. He seemed about to move; but the blonde girl he had called Janet slipped between him and the gun.
"Please!" she begged Burckhardt. "You don't understand. You mustn't shoot!"
"Get out of my way!"
"But, Mr. Burckhardt--"
She never finished. Dorchin, his face unreadable, headed for the door. Burckhardt had been pushed one degree too far. He swung the gun, bellowing. The girl called out sharply. He pulled the trigger. Closing on him with pity and pleading in her eyes, she came again between the gun and the man.
Burckhardt aimed low instinctively, to cripple, not to kill. But his aim was not good.
The pistol bullet caught her in the pit of the stomach.
* * * * *
Dorchin was out and away, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps racing into the distance.
Burckhardt hurled the gun across the room and jumped to the girl.
Swanson was moaning. "That finishes us, Burckhardt. Oh, why did you do it? We could have got away. We could have gone to the police. We were practically out of here! We--"
Burckhardt wasn't listening. He was kneeling beside the girl. She lay flat on her back, arms helter-skelter. There was no blood, hardly any sign of the wound; but the position in which she lay was one that no living human being could have held.
Yet she wasn't dead.
She wasn't dead--and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought: She isn't alive, either.
There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the outstretched fingers of one hand.
There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling noise.
The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.
She said, through lips that writhed erratically, "Don't--worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I'm--all right."
Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should have been blood, there was a clean break of a substance that was not flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire.
Burckhardt moistened his lips.
"You're a robot," he said.
The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, "I am. And so are you."
V
Swanson, after a single inarticulate sound, walked over to the desk and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words.
The girl managed to say, "I'm--sorry all this happened." The lovely lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young face, until she got them under control. "Sorry," she said again. "The--nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it difficult to--control this body."
Burckhardt nodded automatically, accepting the apology. Robots. It was obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something stranger still--idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted the facts better and more economically.
All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with its transplanted minds--why not transplant a mind into a humanoid robot, give it its original owner's features and form?
Could it know that it was a robot?
"All of us," Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. "My wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same."
"No." The voice was stronger. "Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose it, you see. I--" this time the convulsed lips were not a random contortion of the nerves--"I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt, and nearly sixty years old. Life had passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity. Believe me, I jumped, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is still alive--it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I never do."
"And the rest of us?"
"Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I'm carrying out Mr. Dorchin's orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests, watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead."
"Dead?" cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream.
The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him swallow, and sweat, and eat.
He said: "Oh. The explosion in my dream."
"It was no dream. You are right--the explosion. That was real and this plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast didn't get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that was Dorchin's chance."
"The damned ghoul!" said Burckhardt.
* * * * *
The twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. "Why? You were gone. And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted--a whole town, a perfect slice of America. It's as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one. Easier--the dead can't say no. Oh, it took work and money--the town was a wreck--but it was possible to rebuild it entirely, especially because it wasn't necessary to have all the details exact.
"There were the homes where even the brains had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn't be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day--June 15th--over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won't have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight."
The face tried to smile. "That's the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day of June 15th, because you never really lived it. It's a present from Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you responded to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down the tunnel to go through the whole city, washing out the new dream with their little electronic drains, and then the dream starts all over again. On June 15th.
"Always June 15th, because June 14th is the last day any of you can remember alive. Sometimes the crews miss someone--as they missed you, because you were under your boat. But it doesn't matter. The ones who are missed give themselves away if they show it--and if they don't, it doesn't affect the test. But they don't drain us, the ones of us who work for Dorchin. We sleep when the power is turned off, just as you do. When we wake up, though, we remember." The face contorted wildly. "If I could only forget!"
Burckhardt said unbelievingly, "All this to sell merchandise! It must have cost millions!"
The robot called April Horn said, "It did. But it has made millions for Dorchin, too. And that's not the end of it. Once he finds the master words that make people act, do you suppose he will stop with that? Do you suppose--"
The door opened, interrupting her. Burckhardt whirled. Belatedly remembering Dorchin's flight, he raised the gun.
"Don't shoot," ordered the voice calmly. It was not Dorchin; it was another robot, this one not disguised with the clever plastics and cosmetics, but shining plain. It said metallically: "Forget it, Burckhardt. You're not accomplishing anything. Give me that gun before you do any more damage. Give it to me now."
* * * * *
Burckhardt bellowed angrily. The gleam on this robot torso was steel; Burckhardt was not at all sure that his bullets would pierce it, or do much harm if they did. He would have put it to the test--
But from behind him came a whimpering, scurrying whirlwind; its name was Swanson, hysterical with fear. He catapulted into Burckhardt and sent him sprawling, the gun flying free.
"Please!" begged Swanson incoherently, prostrate before the steel robot. "He would have shot you--please don't hurt me! Let me work for you, like that girl. I'll do anything, anything you tell me--"
The robot voice said. "We don't need your help." It took two precise steps and stood over the gun--and spurned it, left it lying on the floor.
The wrecked blonde robot said, without emotion, "I doubt that I can hold out much longer, Mr. Dorchin."
"Disconnect if you have to," replied the steel robot.
Burckhardt blinked. "But you're not Dorchin!"
The steel robot turned deep eyes on him. "I am," it said. "Not in the flesh--but this is the body I am using at the moment. I doubt that you can damage this one with the gun. The other robot body was more vulnerable. Now will you stop this nonsense? I don't want to have to damage you; you're too expensive for that. Will you just sit down and let the maintenance crews adjust you?"
Swanson groveled. "You--you won't punish us?"
The steel robot had no expression, but its voice was almost surprised. "Punish you?" it repeated on a rising note. "How?"
Swanson quivered as though the word had been a whip; but Burckhardt flared: "Adjust him, if he'll let you--but not me! You're going to have to do me a lot of damage, Dorchin. I don't care what I cost or how much trouble it's going to be to put me back together again. But I'm going out of that door! If you want to stop me, you'll have to kill me. You won't stop me any other way!"
The steel robot took a half-step toward him, and Burckhardt involuntarily checked his stride. He stood poised and shaking, ready for death, ready for attack, ready for anything that might happen.
Ready for anything except what did happen. For Dorchin's steel body merely stepped aside, between Burckhardt and the gun, but leaving the door free.
"Go ahead," invited the steel robot. "Nobody's stopping you."
* * * * *
Outside the door, Burckhardt brought up sharp. It was insane of Dorchin to let him go! Robot or flesh, victim or beneficiary, there was nothing to stop him from going to the FBI or whatever law he could find away from Dorchin's synthetic empire, and telling his story. Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul's technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breath of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps--but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt.
There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton--an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now.
It had to be the other direction.
It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it--skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door.
It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen.
First there was light--brilliant, incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid.
He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him.
* * * * *
No wonder Dorchin could so easily give him his freedom! From the factory, there was nowhere to go--but how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above!
A voice by his side said inquiringly, "Burckhardt?" And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him.
Burckhardt wet his lips. "Y-yes?" he croaked.
"This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?"
Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him.
It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light.
It looked like--
Impossible!
The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, "Burckhardt?" But he was unable to answer.
A heavy rumbling sigh. "I see," said the voice. "You finally understand. There's no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I'm a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn't any need to in this case."
From the mountain before him, Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness....
"Poor little Burckhardt," crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. "It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top."
VI
It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words.
He shuddered and opened his eyes.
Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling.
Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scent was normal enough--except for the sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared:
"Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!"
Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles ... but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.
SUMMIT
By Mack Reynolds
Almost anything, if it goes on long enough, can be reduced to, first a Routine, and then, to a Tradition. And at the point it is, obviously, Necessary.
Two king-sized bands blared martial music, the "Internationale" and the "Star-Spangled Banner," each seemingly trying to drown the other in a Götterdämmerung of acoustics.
Two lines of troops, surfacely differing in uniforms and in weapons, but basically so very the same, so evenly matched, came to attention. A thousand hands slapped a thousand submachine gun stocks.
Marshal Vladimir Ignatov strode stiff-kneed down the long march, the stride of a man for years used to cavalry boots. He was flanked by frozen visaged subordinates, but none so cold of face as he himself.
At the entrance to the conference hall he stopped, turned and waited.
At the end of the corridor of troops a car stopped and several figures emerged, most of them in civilian dress, several bearing brief cases. They in their turn ran the gantlet.
At their fore walked James Warren Donlevy, spritely, his eyes darting here, there, politician-like. A half smile on his face, as though afraid he might forget to greet a voter he knew, or was supposed to know.
His hand was out before that of Vladimir Ignatov's.
"Your Excellency," he said.
Ignatov shook hands stiffly. Dropped that of the other's as soon as protocol would permit.
The field marshal indicated the door of the conference hall. "There is little reason to waste time, Mr. President."
"Exactly," Donlevy snapped.
* * * * *
The door closed behind them and the two men, one uniformed and bemedaled, the other nattily attired in his business suit, turned to each other.
"Nice to see you again, Vovo. How're Olga and the baby?"
The soldier grinned back in response. "Two babies now--you don't keep up on the real news, Jim. How's Martha?" They shook hands.
"Not so good," Jim said, scowling. "I'm worried. It's that new cancer. As soon as we conquer one type two more rear up. How are you people doing on cancer research?"
Vovo was stripping off his tunic. He hung it over the back of one of the chairs, began to unbutton his high, tight military collar. "I'm not really up on it, Jim, but I think that's one field where you can trust anything we know to be in the regular scientific journals our people exchange with yours. I'll make some inquiries when I get back home, though. You never know, this new strain--I guess you'd call it--might be one that we're up on and you aren't."
"Yeah," Jim said. "Thanks a lot." He crossed to the small portable bar. "How about a drink? Whisky, vodka, rum--there's ice."
Vovo slumped into one of the heavy chairs that were arranged around the table. He grimaced, "No vodka, I don't feel patriotic today. How about one of those long cold drinks, with the cola stuff?"
"Cuba libra," Jim said. "Coming up. Look, would you rather speak Russian?"
"No," Vovo said, "my English is getting rusty. I need the practice."
Jim brought the glasses over and put them on the table. He began stripping off his own coat, loosening his tie. "God, I'm tired," he said. "This sort of thing wears me down."
Vovo sipped his drink. "Now there's as good a thing to discuss as any, in the way of killing time. The truth now, Jim, do you really believe in a God? After all that's happened to this human race of ours, do you really believe in divine guidance?" He twisted his mouth sarcastically.
The other relaxed. "I don't know," he said. "I suppose so. I was raised in a family that believed in God. Just as, I suppose, you were raised in one that didn't." He lifted his shoulders slightly in a shrug. "Neither of us seems to be particularly brilliant in establishing a position of our own."
Vovo snorted. "Never thought of it that way," he admitted. "We're usually contemptuous of anyone still holding to the old beliefs. There aren't many left."
"More than you people admit, I understand."
Vovo shook his heavy head. "No, not really. Mostly crackpots. Have you ever noticed how it is that the nonconformists in any society are usually crackpots? The people on your side that admit belonging to our organizations, are usually on the wild eyed and uncombed hair side--I admit it. On the other hand, the people in our citizenry who subscribe to your system, your religion, that sort of thing, are crackpots, too. Applies to religion as well as politics. An atheist in your country is a nonconformist--in mine, a Christian is. Both crackpots."
Jim laughed and took a sip of his drink.
Vovo yawned and said, "How long are we going to be in here?"
"I don't know. Up to us, I suppose."
"Yes. How about another drink? I'll make it. How much of that cola stuff do you put in?"
Jim told him, and while the other was on his feet mixing the drinks, said, "You figure on sticking to the same line this year?"
"Have to," Vovo said over his shoulder. "What's the alternative?"
"I don't know. We're building up to a whale of a depression as it is, even with half the economy running full blast producing defense materials."
Vovo chuckled, "Defense materials. I wonder if ever in the history of the human race anyone ever admitted to producing offense materials."
"Well, you call it the same thing. All your military equipment is for defense. And, of course, according to your press, all ours is for offense."
"Of course," Vovo said.
He brought the glasses back and handed one to the other. He slumped back into his chair again, loosened two buttons of his trousers.
"Jim," Vovo said, "why don't you divert more of your economy to public works, better roads, reforestation, dams--that sort of thing."
Jim said wearily, "You're a better economist than that. Didn't your boy Marx, or was it Engels, write a small book on the subject? We're already overproducing--turning out more products than we can sell."
"I wasn't talking about your government building new steel mills. But dams, roads, that sort of thing. You could plow billions into such items and get some real use out of them. We both know that our weapons will never be used--they can't be."
Jim ticked them off on his fingers. "We already are producing more farm products than we know what to do with; if we build more dams it'll open up new farm lands and increase the glut. If we build more and better roads, it will improve transportation, which will mean fewer men will be able to move greater tonnage--and throw transportation employees into the unemployed. If we go all out for reforestation, it will eventually bring down the price of lumber and the lumber people are howling already. No," he shook his head, "there's just one really foolproof way of disposing of surpluses and using up labor power and that's war--hot or cold."
Vovo shrugged, "I suppose so."
"It amounts to building pyramids, of course." Jim twisted his mouth sourly. "And since we're asking questions about each other's way of life, when is your State going to begin to wither away?"
"How was that?" Vovo asked.
"According to your sainted founder, once you people came to power the State was going to wither away, class rule would be over, and Utopia be on hand. That was a long time ago, and your State is stronger than ours."
Vovo snorted. "How can we wither away the State as long as we are threatened by capitalist aggression?"
Jim said, "Ha!"
Vovo went on. "You know better than that, Jim. The only way my organization can keep in power is by continually beating the drums, keeping our people stirred up to greater and greater sacrifices by using you as a threat. Didn't the old Romans have some sort of maxim to the effect that when you're threatened with unease at home stir up trouble abroad?"
"You're being even more frank than usual," Jim said. "But that's one of the pleasures of these get-togethers, neither of us resorts to hypocrisy. But you can't keep up these tensions forever."
"You mean we can't keep up these tensions forever, Jim. And when they end? Well, personally I can't see my organization going out without a blood bath." He grimaced sourly, "And since I'd probably be one of the first to be bathed, I'd like to postpone the time. It's like having a tiger by the tail, Jim. We can't let go."
"Happily, I don't feel in the same spot," Jim said. He got up and went to the picture window that took up one entire wall. It faced out over a mountain vista. He looked soberly into the sky.
Vovo joined him, glass in hand.
"Possibly your position isn't exactly the same as ours but there'll be some awfully great changes if that military based economy of yours suddenly had peace thrust upon it. You'd have a depression such as you've never dreamed of. Let's face reality, Jim, neither of us can afford peace."
"Well, we've both known that for a long time."
* * * * *
They both considered somberly, the planet Earth blazing away, a small sun there in the sky.
Jim said, "I sometimes think that the race would have been better off, when man was colonizing Venus and Mars, if it had been a joint enterprise rather than you people doing one, and we the other. If it had all been in the hands of that organization ..."
"The United Nations?" Vovo supplied.
"... Then when Bomb Day hit, perhaps these new worlds could have gone on to, well, better things."
"Perhaps," Vovo shrugged. "I've often wondered how Bomb Day started. Who struck the spark."
"Happily there were enough colonists on both planets to start the race all over again," Jim said. "What difference does it make, who struck the spark?"
"None, I suppose." Vovo began to button his collar, readjust his clothes. "Well, shall we emerge and let the quaking multitudes know that once again we have made a shaky agreement? One that will last until the next summit meeting."
THE END.
LION LOOSE
By James H. Schmitz
For twelve years at a point where three major shipping routes of the Federation of the Hub crossed within a few hours' flight of one another, the Seventh Star Hotel had floated in space, a great golden sphere, gleaming softly in the void through its translucent shells of battle plastic. The Star had been designed to be much more than a convenient transfer station for travelers and freight; for some years after it was opened to the public, it retained a high rating among the more exotic pleasure resorts of the Hub. The Seventh Star Hotel was the place to have been that season, and the celebrities and fat cats converged on it with their pals and hangers-on. The Star blazed with life, excitement, interstellar scandals, tinkled with streams of credits dancing in from a thousand worlds. In short, it had started out as a paying proposition.
But gradually things changed. The Star's entertainment remained as delightfully outrageous as ever, the cuisine as excellent; the accommodations and service were still above reproach. The fleecing, in general, became no less expertly painless. But one had been there. By its eighth year, the Star was dated. Now, in its twelfth, it lived soberly off the liner and freighter trade, four fifths of the guest suites shut down, the remainder irregularly occupied between ship departures.
And in another seven hours, if the plans of certain men went through, the Seventh Star Hotel would abruptly wink out of existence.
* * * * *
Some fifty or sixty early diners were scattered about the tables on the garden terraces of Phalagon House, the Seventh Star Hotel's most exclusive eatery. One of them had just finished his meal, sat smoking and regarding a spiraling flow of exquisitely indicated female figures across the garden's skyscape with an air of friendly approval. He was a large and muscular young man, deeply tanned, with shoulders of impressive thickness, an aquiline nose, and dark, reflective eyes.
After a minute or two, he yawned comfortably, put out the cigarette, and pushed his chair back from the table. As he came to his feet, there was a soft bell-note from the table ComWeb. He hesitated, said, "Go ahead."
"Is intrusion permitted?" the ComWeb inquired.
"Depends," the guest said. "Who's calling?"
"The name is Reetal Destone."
He grinned, appeared pleasantly surprised. "Put the lady through."
There was a brief silence. Then a woman's voice inquired softly, "Quillan?"
"Right here, doll! Where--"
"Seal the ComWeb, Quillan."
He reached down to the instrument, tapped the seal button, said, "All right. We're private."
"Probably," the woman's voice said. "But better scramble this, too. I want to be very sure no one's listening."
Quillan grunted, slid his left hand into an inner coat pocket, briefly fingered a device of the approximate size and shape of a cigarette, drew his hand out again. "Scrambling!" he announced. "Now, what--"
"Mayday, Quillan," the soft voice said. "Can you come immediately?"
Quillan's face went expressionless. "Of course. Is it urgent?"
"I'm in no present danger. But we'd better waste no time."
"Is it going to take real hardware? I'm carrying a finger gun at the moment."
"Then go to your rooms and pick up something useful," Reetal said. "This should take real hardware, all right."
"All right. Then where do I go?"
"I'll meet you at your door. I know where it is."
When Quillan arrived, she was standing before the door to his suite, a tall blonde in a sleeveless black and gold sheath; a beautiful body, a warm, lovely, humorous face. The warmth and humor were real, but masked a mind as impersonally efficient as a computer, and a taste for high and dangerous living. When Quillan had last met Reetal Destone, a year and a half before, the taste was being satisfied in industrial espionage. He hadn't heard of her activities since then.
She smiled thoughtfully at him as he came up. "I'll wait outside," she said. "We're not talking here."
Quillan nodded, went on into his living room, selected a gun belt and holstered gun from a suitcase, fastened the belt around his waist under the coat, and came out. "Now what?"
"First a little portal-hopping--"
He followed her across the corridor and into a tube portal, watched as she tapped out a setting. The exit light flashed a moment later; they stepped out into a vacant lounge elsewhere in the same building, crossed it, entered another portal. After three more shifts, they emerged into a long hall, dimly lit, heavily carpeted. There was no one in sight.
"Last stop," Reetal said. She glanced up at his face. "We're on the other side of the Star now, in one of the sections they've closed up. I've established a kind of emergency headquarters here. The Star's nearly broke, did you know?"
"I'd heard of it."
"That appears to be part of the reason for what's going on."
Quillan said, "What's going on?"
Reetal slid her arm through his, said, "Come on. That's my, hm-m-m, unregistered suite over there. Big boy, it's very, very selfish of me, but I was extremely glad to detect your name on the list of newly arrived guests just now! As to what's going on ... the Camelot berths here at midnight, you know."
Quillan nodded. "I've some business with one of her passengers."
Reetal bent to unlock the entrance door to the indicated suite. "The way it looks now," she remarked, "the odds are pretty high that you're not going to keep that appointment."
"Why not?"
"Because shortly after the Camelot docks and something's been unloaded from her, the Camelot and the Seventh Star Hotel are scheduled to go poof! together. Along with you, me, and some twelve thousand other people. And, so far, I haven't been able to think of a good way to keep it from happening."
Quillan was silent a moment. "Who's scheduling the poof?" he asked.
"Some old acquaintances of ours are among them. Come on in. What they're doing comes under the heading of destroying the evidence."
* * * * *
She locked the door behind them, said, "Just a moment," went over to the paneled wall, turned down a tiny silver switch. "Room portal," she said, nodding at the wall. "It might come in handy. I keep it turned off most of the time."
"Why are you turning it on now?" Quillan asked.
"One of the Star's stewards is working on this with me. He'll be along as soon as he can get away. Now I'll give you the whole thing as briefly as I can. The old acquaintances I mentioned are some boys of the Brotherhood of Beldon. Movaine's here; he's got Marras Cooms and Fluel with him, and around thirty of the Brotherhood's top guns. Nome Lancion's coming in on the Camelot in person tonight to take charge. Obviously, with all that brass on the job, they're after something very big. Just what it is, I don't yet know. I've got one clue, but a rather puzzling one. Tell you about that later. Do you know Velladon?"
"The commodore here?" Quillan nodded. "I've never met him but I know who he is."
Reetal said, "He's been manager of the Seventh Star Hotel for the past nine years. He's involved in the Beldon outfit's operation. So is the chief of the Star's private security force--his name's Ryter--and half a dozen other Star executives. They've got plenty of firepower, too; close to half the entire security force, I understand, including all the officers. That would come to nearly seventy men. There's reason to believe the rest of the force was disarmed and murdered by them in the subspace section of the Star about twelve hours ago. They haven't been seen since then.
"Now, Velladon, aside from his share in whatever they're after, has another reason for wanting to wipe out the Star in an unexplained blowup. There I have definite information. Did you know the Mooley brothers owned the Star?"
"Yes."
"I've been working for the Mooleys the past eight months," Reetal said, "checking up on employees at Velladon's level for indications of graft. And it appears the commodore had been robbing them blind here for at least several years."
"Sort of risky thing to try with the Mooleys, from what I hear," Quillan remarked.
"Yes. Very. Velladon had reason to be getting a little desperate about that. Two men were planted here a month ago. One of them is Sher Heraga, the steward I told you about. The other man came in as a bookkeeper. Two weeks ago, Heraga got word out that the bookkeeper had disappeared. Velladon and Ryter apparently got wise to what he was trying to do. So the Mooleys sent me here to find out exactly what was going on before they took action. I arrived four days ago."
She gave a regretful little headshake. "I waited almost a day before contacting Heraga. It seemed advisable to move very cautiously in the matter. But that made it a little too late to do anything. Quillan, for the past three days, the Seventh Star Hotel has been locked up like a bank vault. And except for ourselves, only the people who are in on the plot are aware of it."
"The message transmitters are inoperative?" he asked.
Reetal nodded. "The story is that a gravitic storm center in the area has disrupted transmissions completely for the time being."
"What about incoming ships?"
"Yours was the only one scheduled before the Camelot arrives. It left again eight hours ago. Nobody here had been let on board. The guests who wanted to apply for outgoing berths were told there were none open, that they'd have to wait for the Camelot."
She went over to a desk, unlocked a drawer, took out a sheaf of papers, and handed one of them to Quillan. "That's the layout of the Star," she said. "This five-level building over by the shell is the Executive Block. The Brotherhood and the commodore's men moved in there this morning. The Block is the Star's defense center. It's raid-proofed, contains the control officers and the transmitter and armament rooms. About the standard arrangement. While they hold the Executive Block, they have absolute control of the Star."
"If it's the defense center, it should be practically impossible to do anything about them there," Quillan agreed. "They could close it up, and dump the air out of the rest of the Star in a minute, if they had to. But there must be ... well, what about the lifeboats in the subspace section--and our pals must have a getaway ship stashed away somewhere?"
"They have two ships," Reetal said. "A souped-up armed freighter the Brotherhood came in on, and a large armed yacht which seems to be the commodore's personal property. Unfortunately, they're both in subspace locks."
"Why unfortunately?"
"Because they've sealed off subspace. Try portaling down there, and you'll find yourself looking at a battle-plastic bulkhead. There's no way of getting either to those ships or to the lifeboats."
Quillan lifted his eyebrows. "And that hasn't caused any comment? What about the maintenance crews, the warehouse men, the--"
"All the work crews were hauled out of subspace this morning," Reetal said. "On the quiet, the Star's employees have been told that a gang of raiders was spotted in the warehouse area, and is at present cornered there. Naturally, the matter isn't to be mentioned to the guests, to avoid arousing unnecessary concern. And that explains everything very neatly. The absence of the security men, and why subspace is sealed off. Why the Executive Block is under guard, and can't be entered--and why the technical and office personnel in there don't come out, and don't communicate out. They've been put on emergency status, officially."
* * * * *
"Yunk," Quillan said disgustedly after a moment. "This begins to look like a hopeless situation, doll!"
"True."
"Let's see now--"
Reetal interrupted, "There is one portal still open to subspace. That's in the Executive Block, of course, and Heraga reports it's heavily guarded."
"How does he know?"
"The Block's getting its meals from Phalagon House. He floated a diner in there a few hours ago."
"Well," Quillan said, brightening, "perhaps a deft flavoring of poison--"
Reetal shook her head. "I checked over the hospital stocks. Not a thing there that wouldn't be spotted at once. Unless we can clobber them thoroughly, we can't afford to make them suspicious with a trick like that."
"Poison would be a bit rough on the office help, too," Quillan conceded. "They wouldn't be in on the deal."
"No, they're not. They're working under guard."
"Gas ... no, I suppose not. It would take too long to whip up something that could turn the trick." Quillan glanced at his watch. "If the Camelot docks at midnight, we've around six and a half hours left, doll! And I don't find myself coming up with any brilliant ideas. What have you thought of?"
Reetal hesitated a moment. "Nothing very brilliant either," she said then. "But there are two things we might try as a last resort."
"Let's hear them."
"I know a number of people registered in the Star at present who'd be carrying personal weapons. If they were told the facts, I could probably line up around twenty who'd be willing to make a try to get into the Executive Block, and take over either the control offices or the transmitter room. If we got a warning out to the Camelot, that would break up the plot. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily save the Star."
"No," Quillan said, "but it's worth trying if we can't think of something better. How would you get them inside?"
"We could crowd twenty men into one of those diner trucks, and Heraga could take us in."
"What kind of people are your pals?"
"A few smugglers and confidence men I've had connections with. Fairly good boys for this sort of thing. Then there's an old millionaire sportsman, with a party of six, waiting to transfer to the Camelot for a safari on Jontarou. Old Philmarron isn't all there, in my opinion, but he's dead game and loves any kind of a ruckus. We can count on him and his friends, if they're not too drunk at the moment. Still ... that's not too many to set against something less than a hundred professional guns, even though some of them must be down on the two ships."
"No, not enough." Quillan looked thoughtful. "What's the other idea?"
"Let the cat out of the bag generally. Tell the guests and the employees out here what's going on, and see if somebody can think of something that might be done."
He shook his head. "What you'd set off with that would be anywhere between a riot and a panic. The boys in the Executive Block would simply give us the breathless treatment. Apparently, they prefer to have everything looking quiet and normal when the Camelot gets here--"
"But they don't have to play it that way," Reetal agreed. "We might be dead for hours before the liner docks. If they keep the landing lock closed until what they want has been unloaded, nobody on the Camelot would realize what had happened before it was too late."
* * * * *
There was a moment's silence. Then Quillan said, "You mentioned you'd picked up a clue to what they're after. What was that?"
"Well, that's a curious thing," Reetal said. "On the trip out here, a young girl name of Solvey Kinmarten attached herself to me. She didn't want to talk much, but I gathered she was newly married, and that her husband was on board and was neglecting her. She's an appealing little thing, and she seemed so forlorn and upset that I adopted her for the rest of the run. After we arrived, of course, I pretty well forgot about the Kinmartens and their troubles.
"A few hours ago, Solvey suddenly came bursting into the suite where I'm registered. She was shaking all over. After I calmed her down a bit, she spilled out her story. She and her husband, Brock Kinmarten, are rest wardens. With another man named Eltak, whom Solvey describes as 'some sort of crazy old coot,' they're assigned to escort two deluxe private rest cubicles to a very exclusive sanatorium on Mezmiali. But Brock told Solvey at the beginning of the trip that this was a very unusual assignment, that he didn't want her even to come near the cubicles. That wouldn't have bothered her so much, she says, but on the way here Brock became increasingly irritable and absent-minded. She knew he was worrying about the cubicles, and she began to wonder whether they weren't involved in something illegal. The pay was very high; they're both getting almost twice the regular warden fee for the job. One day, she found an opportunity to do a little investigating.
"The cubicles are registered respectively to a Lady Pendrake and a Major Pendrake. Lady Pendrake appears to be genuine; the cubicle is unusually large and constructed somewhat differently from the ones with which Solvey was familiar, but it was clear that it had an occupant. However, the life indicator on 'Major Pendrake's cubicle registered zero when she switched it on. If there was something inside it, it wasn't a living human being.
"That was all she learned at the time, because she was afraid Brock might catch her in the cubicle room. Here in the Star, the cubicles were taken to a suite reserved for Lady Pendrake. The other man, Eltak, stayed in the suite with the cubicles, while the Kinmartens were given other quarters. However, Brock was still acting oddly and spending most of his time in the Pendrake suite. So this morning, Solvey swiped his key to the suite and slipped in when she knew the two men had left it."
"She'd barely got there when she heard Brock and Eltak at the door again. She ran into the next room, and hid in a closet. Suddenly there was a commotion in the front room, and Solvey realized that men from the Star's security force had arrived and were arresting Brock and Eltak. They hauled both of them away, then floated the cubicles out and on a carrier and took them off too, locking the suite behind them.
"Solvey was in a complete panic, sure that she and Brock had become involved in some serious breach of the Warden Code. She waited a few minutes, then slipped out of the Pendrake suite, and looked me up to see if I couldn't help them. I had Heraga check, and he reported that the Kinmarten suite was under observation. Evidently, they wanted to pick up the girl, too. So I tucked her away in one of the suites in this section, and gave her something to put her to sleep. She's there now."
* * * * *
Quillan said, "And where are the prisoners and the cubicles?"
"In the Executive Block."
"How do you know?"
Reetal smiled briefly. "The Duke of Fluel told me."
"Huh? The Brotherhood knows you're here?"
"Relax," Reetal said. "Nobody but Heraga knows I'm working for the Mooleys. I told the Duke I had a big con deal set up when the Camelot came in--I even suggested he might like to get in on it. He laughed, and said he had other plans. But he won't mention to anyone that I'm here."
"Why not?"
"Because," Reetal said dryly, "what the Duke is planning to get in on is an hour of tender dalliance. Before the Camelot arrives, necessarily. The cold-blooded little skunk!" She hesitated a moment; when she spoke again, her voice had turned harsh and nasal, wicked amusement sounding through it. "Sort of busy at the moment, sweetheart, but we might find time for a drink or two later on in the evening, eh?"
Quillan grunted. "You're as good at the voice imitations as ever. How did you find out about the cubicles?"
"I took a chance and fed him a Moment of Truth."
"With Fluel," Quillan said thoughtfully, "that was taking a chance!"
"Believe me, I was aware of it! I've run into card-carrying sadists before, but the Duke's the only one who scares me silly. But it did work. He dropped in for a about a minute and a half, and came out without noticing a thing. Meanwhile, I'd got the answers to a few questions. The bomb with which they're planning to mop up behind them already has been planted up here in the normspace section. Fluel didn't know where; armaments experts took care of it. It's armed now. There's a firing switch on each of their ships, and both switches have to be tripped before the thing goes off. Part of what they're after is in those Pendrake rest cubicles--"
"Part of it?" Quillan asked.
"Uh-huh. An even hundred similar cubicles will be unloaded from the Camelot--the bulk of the haul; which is why Nome Lancion is supervising things on the liner. I started to ask what was in the cubicles, but I saw Fluel was beginning to lose that blank look they have under Truth, and switched back to light chitchat just before he woke up. Yaco's paying for the job--or rather, it will pay for the stuff, on delivery, and no questions asked."
"That's not very much help, is it?" Quillan said after a moment. "Something a big crooked industrial combine like Yaco thinks it can use--"
"It must expect to be able to use it to extremely good advantage," Reetal said. "The Brotherhood will collect thirty million credits for their part of the operation. The commodore's group presumably won't do any worse." She glanced past Quillan toward the room portal. "It's O.K., Heraga! Come in."
* * * * *
Sher Heraga was a lean, dark-skinned little man with a badly bent nose, black curly hair, and a nervous look. He regretted, he said, that he hadn't been able to uncover anything which might be a lead to the location of the bomb. Apparently, it wasn't even being guarded. And, of course, a bomb of the size required here would be quite easy to conceal.
"If they haven't placed guards over it," Reetal agreed, "it'll take blind luck to spot it! Unless we can get hold of one of the men who knows where it's planted--"
There was silence for some seconds. Then Quillan said, "Well, if we can't work out a good plan, we'd better see what we can do with one of the bad ones. Are the commodore's security men wearing uniforms?"
Heraga shook his head, "Not the ones I saw."
"Then here's an idea," Quillan said. "As things stand, barging into the Executive Block with a small armed group can't accomplish much. It might be more interesting than sitting around and waiting to be blown up, but it still would be suicide. However, if we could get things softened up and disorganized in there first--"
"Softened up and disorganized how?" Reetal asked.
"We can use that notion you had of having Heraga float in another diner. This time, I'm on board--in a steward's uniform, in case the guards check."
"They didn't the first time," Heraga said.
"Sloppy of them. Well, they're just gun hands. Anyway, once we're inside I shuck off the uniform and get out. Heraga delivers his goodies, and leaves again--"
Reetal gave him a look. "You'll get shot down the instant you're seen, dope!"
"I think not. There're two groups in there--around a hundred men in all--and they haven't had time to get well acquainted yet. I'll have my gun in sight, and anyone who sees me should figure I belong to the other group, until I run into one of the Brotherhood boys who knows me personally."
"Then that's when you get shot down. I understand the last time you and the Duke of Fluel met, he woke up with lumps."
"The Duke doesn't love me," Quillan admitted. "But there's nothing personal between me and Movaine or Marras Cooms--and I'll have a message for Movaine."
"What kind of a message?"
"I'll have to play that by ear a little. It depends on how things look in there. But I have a few ideas, based on what you've learned of the operation. Now, just what I can do when I get that far, I don't know yet. I'll simply try to louse the deal up as much as I can. That may take time, and, of course, it might turn out to be impossible to get word out to you."
"So what do we do meanwhile?" Reetal asked. "If we start lining up our attack group immediately, and then there's no action for another five or six hours, there's always the chance of a leak, with around twenty people in the know."
"And if there's a leak," Quillan agreed, "we've probably had it. No, you'd better wait with that! If I'm not out, and you haven't heard from me before the Camelot's actually due to dock, Heraga can still take the group--everyone but yourself--in as scheduled."
"Why everyone but me?" Reetal asked.
"If nothing else works, you might find some way of getting a warning to the liner's security force after they've docked. It isn't much of a possibility, but we can't afford to throw it away."
"Yes, I see." Reetal looked reflective. "What do you think, Heraga?"
The little man shrugged. "You told me that Mr. Quillan is not inexperienced in dealing with, ah, his enemies. If he feels he might accomplish something in the Executive Block, I'm in favor of the plan. The situation certainly could hardly become worse."
"That's the spirit!" Quillan approved. "The positive outlook--that's what a think like this mainly takes. Can you arrange for the diner and the uniform?"
"Oh, yes," Heraga said, "I've had myself put in charge of that detail, naturally."
"Then what can you tell me about the Executive Block's layout?"
Reetal stood up. "Come over to the desk," she said. "We've got diagrams."
* * * * *
"The five levels, as you see," Heraga was explaining a few moments later, "are built directly into the curve of the Star's shells. Level Five, on the top, is therefore quite small. The other levels are fairly extensive. Two, Three, and Four could each accommodate a hundred men comfortably. These levels contain mainly living quarters, private offices, and the like. The Brotherhood men appear to be occupying the fourth level, Velladon's group the second. The third may be reserved for meetings between representatives of the two groups. All three of these levels are connected by single-exit portals to the large entrance area on the ground level.
"The portals stood open when I went in earlier today, and there were about twenty armed men lounging about the entrance hall. I recognized approximately half of them as being members of the Star's security force. The others were unfamiliar." Heraga cleared his throat. "There is a possibility that the two groups do not entirely trust each other."
Quillan nodded. "If they're playing around with something like sixty million CR, anybody would have to be crazy to trust the Brotherhood of Beldon. The transmitter room and the control officers are guarded, too?"
"Yes, but not heavily," Heraga said. "There seem to be only a few men stationed at each of those points. Ostensibly, they're there as a safe-guard--in case the imaginary raiders attempt to break out of the subspace section."
"What's the arrangement of the ordinary walk-in tube portals in the Executive Block?"
"There is one which interconnects the five levels. On each of the lower levels, there are, in addition, several portals which lead out to various points in the Seventh Star Hotel. On the fifth level, there is only one portal of this kind. Except for the portal which operates between the different levels in the Executive Block, all of them have been rendered unusable at present."
"Unusable in what way?"
"They have been sealed off on the Executive Block side."
"Can you get me a diagram of the entry and exit systems those outgoing portals connect with?" Quillan asked. "I might turn one of them usable again."
"Yes, I can do that."
"How about the communication possibilities?"
"The ComWeb system is functioning normally on the second, third, and fourth levels. It has been shut off on the first level--to avoid the spread of 'alarming rumors' by office personnel. There is no ComWeb on the fifth level."
Reetal said, "We'll shift our operating headquarters back to my registered suite then. The ComWebs are turned off in these vacant sections. I'll stay in the other suite in case you find a chance to signal in."
Heraga left a few minutes later to make his arrangements. Reetal smiled at Quillan, a little dubiously.
"Good luck, guy," she said. "Anything else to settle before you start off?"
Quillan nodded. "Couple of details. If you're going to be in your regular suite, and Fluel finds himself with some idle time on hand, he might show up for the dalliance you mentioned."
Reetal's smile changed slightly. Her left hand fluffed the hair at the back of her head, flicked down again. There was a tiny click, and Quillan looked at a small jeweled hair-clasp in her palm, its needle beak pointing at him.
"It hasn't got much range," Reetal said, "but within ten feet it will scramble the Duke's brains just as thoroughly as they need to be scrambled."
"Good enough," Quillan said. "Just don't give that boy the ghost of a chance, doll. He has a rep for playing very unnice games with the ladies."
"I know his reputation." Reetal replaced the tiny gun in her hair. "Anything else?"
"Yes. Let's look in on the Kinmarten chick for a moment. If she's awake, she may have remembered something or other by now that she didn't think to tell you."
They found Solvey Kinmarten awake, and tearfully glad to see Reetal. Quillan was introduced as a member of the legal profession who would do what he could for Solvey and her husband. Solvey frowned prettily, trying very hard to remember anything that might be of use. But it appeared that she had told Reetal all she knew.
* * * * *
The blue and white Phalagon House diner, driven by Heraga, was admitted without comment into the Executive Block. It floated on unchallenged through the big entry hall and into a corridor. Immediately behind the first turn of the corridor, the diner paused a few seconds. Its side door opened and closed. The diner moved on.
Quillan, coatless and with the well-worn butt of a big Miam Devil Special protruding from the holster on his right hip, came briskly back along the corridor. Between fifteen and twenty men, their guns also conspicuously in evidence, were scattered about the entrance hall, expressions and attitudes indicating a curious mixture of boredom and uneasy tension. The eyes of about half of them swiveled around to Quillan when he came into the hall; then, with one exception, they looked indifferently away again.
The exception, leaning against the wall near the three open portals to the upper levels, continued to stare as Quillan came toward him, forehead creased in a deep scowl as if he were painfully ransacking his mind for something. Quillan stopped in front of him.
"Chum," he asked, "any idea where Movaine is at the moment? They just give me this message for him--"
Still scowling, the other scratched his chin and blinked. "Uh ... dunno for sure," he said after a moment. "He oughta be in the third level conference room with the rest of 'em. Uh ... dunno you oughta barge in there right now, pal! The commodore's reee-lly hot about somethin'!"
Quillan looked worried. "Gotta chance it, I guess! Message is pretty important, they say--" He turned, went through the center portal of the three, abruptly found himself walking along a wide, well-lit hall.
Nobody in sight here, or in the first intersecting passage he came to. When he reached the next passage, he heard voices on the right, turned toward them, went by a string of closed doors on both sides until, forty feet on, the passage angled again and opened into a long, high-ceilinged room. The voices came through an open door on the right side of the room. Standing against the wall beside the door were two men whose heads turned sharply toward Quillan as he appeared in the passage. The short, chunky one scowled. The big man next to him, the top of whose head had been permanently seared clear of hair years before by a near miss from a blaster, dropped his jaw slowly. His eyes popped.
"My God!" he said.
"Movaine in there, Baldy?" Quillan inquired, coming up.
"Movaine! He ... you ... how--"
The chunky man took out his gun, waved it negligently at Quillan. "Tell the ape to blow, Perk. He isn't wanted here."
"Ape?" Quillan asked softly. His right hand moved, had the gun by the barrel, twisted, reversed the gun, jammed it back with some violence into the chunky man's stomach. "Ape?" he repeated. The chunky man went white.
"Bad News--" Baldy Perk breathed. "Take it easy! That's Orca. He's the commodore's torpedo. How--"
"Where's Movaine?"
"Movaine ... he ... uh--"
"All right, he's not here. And Lancion can't have arrived yet. Is Cooms in there?"
"Yeah," Baldy Perk said weakly. "Cooms is in there, Quillan."
"Let's go in." Quillan withdrew the gun, slid it into a pocket, smiled down at Orca. "Get it back from your boss, slob. Be seeing you!"
Orca's voice was a husky whisper.
"You will, friend! You will!"
* * * * *
The conference room was big and sparsely furnished. Four men sat at the long table in its center. Quillan knew two of them--Marras Cooms, second in command of the Beldon Brotherhood's detachment here, and the Duke of Fluel, Movaine's personal gun. Going by Heraga's descriptions, the big, florid-faced man with white hair and flowing white mustaches who was doing the talking was Velladon, the commodore; while the fourth man, younger, wiry, with thinning black hair plastered back across his skull, would be Ryter, chief of the Star's security force.
"What I object to primarily is that the attempt was made without obtaining my consent, and secretly," Velladon was saying, with a toothy grin but in a voice that shook with open fury. "And now it's been made and bungled, you have a nerve asking for our help. The problem is yours--and you better take care of it fast! I can't spare Ryter. If--"
"Cooms," Baldy Perk broke in desperately from the door, "Bad News Quillan's here an'--"
The heads of the four men at the table came around simultaneously. The eyes of two of them widened for an instant. Then Marras Cooms began laughing softly.
"Now everything's happened!" he said.
"Cooms," the commodore said testily, "I prefer not to be interrupted. Now--"
"Can't be helped, commodore," Quillan said, moving forward, Perk shuffling along unhappily beside him. "I've got news for Movaine, and the news can't wait."
"Movaine?" the commodore repeated, blue eyes bulging at Quillan. "Movaine! Cooms, who is this man?"
"You're looking at Bad News Quillan," Cooms said. "A highjacking specialist, with somewhat numerous sidelines. But the point right now is that he isn't a member of the Brotherhood."
"What!" Velladon's big fist smashed down on the table. "Now what kind of a game ... how did he get in here?"
"Well," Quillan said mildly, "I oozed in through the north wall about a minute ago. I--"
He checked, conscious of having created some kind of sensation. The four men at the table were staring up at him without moving. Baldy Perk appeared to be holding his breath. Then the commodore coughed, cleared his throat, drummed his fingers on the table.
He said reflectively: "He could have news--good or bad--at that! For all of us." He chewed on one of his mustache tips, grinned suddenly up at Quillan. "Well, sit down, friend! Let's talk. You can't talk to Movaine, you see. Movaine's um, had an accident. Passed away suddenly half an hour ago."
"Sorry to hear it," Quillan said. "That's the sort of thing that happens so often in the Brotherhood." He swung a chair around, sat down facing the table. "You're looking well tonight, Fluel," he observed.
The Duke of Fluel, lean and dapper in silver jacket and tight-fitting silver trousers, gave him a wintry smile, said nothing.
* * * * *
"Now, then, friend," Velladon inquired confidentially, "just what was your business with Movaine?"
"Well, it will come to around twenty per cent of the take," Quillan informed him. "We won't argue about a half-million CR more or less. But around twenty per."
The faces thoughtful. After some seconds, the commodore asked, "And who's we?"
"A number of citizens," Quillan said, "who have been rather unhappy since discovering that you, too, are interested in Lady Pendrake and her pals. We'd gone to considerable expense and trouble to ... well, her ladyship was scheduled to show up in Mezmiali, you know. And now she isn't going to show up there. All right, that's business. Twenty per--no hard feelings. Otherwise, it won't do you a bit of good to blow up the Star and the liner. There'd still be loose talk--maybe other complications, too. You know how it goes. You wouldn't be happy, and neither would Yaco. Right?"
The commodore's massive head turned back to Cooms. "How well do you know this man, Marras?"
Cooms grinned dryly. "Well enough."
"Is he leveling?"
"He'd be nuts to be here if he wasn't. And he isn't nuts--at least, not that way."
"There might be a question about that," Fluel observed. He looked at the commodore. "Why not ask him for a couple of the names that are in it with him?"
"Hagready and Boltan," Quillan said.
Velladon chewed the other mustache tip. "I know Hagready. If he--"
"I know both of them," Cooms said. "Boltan works highjacking crews out of Orado. Quillan operates there occasionally."
"Pappy Boltan's an old business associate," Quillan agreed. "Reliable sort of a guy. Doesn't mind taking a few chances either."
Velladon's protruding blue eyes measured him a moment. "We can check on those two, you know--"
"Check away," Quillan said.
Velladon nodded. "We will." He was silent for a second or two, then glanced over at Cooms. "There've been no leaks on our side," he remarked. "And they must have known about this for weeks! Of all the inept, bungling--"
"Ah, don't be too hard on the Brotherhood, commodore," Quillan said. "Leaks happen. You ought to know."
"What do you mean?" Velladon snapped.
"From what we heard, the Brotherhood's pulling you out of a hole here. You should feel rather kindly toward them."
The commodore stared at him reflectively. Then he grinned. "Could be I should," he said, "Did you come here alone?"
"Yes."
The commodore nodded. "If you're bluffing, God help you. If you're not, your group's in. Twenty per. No time for haggling--we can raise Yaco's price to cover it." He stood up, and Ryter stood up with him. "Marras," the commodore went on, "tell him what's happened. If he's half as hot as he sounds, he's the boy to put on that job. Let him get in on a little of the work for the twenty per cent. Ryter, come on. We--"
"One moment, sir," Quillan interrupted. He took Orca's gun by the muzzle from his pocket, held it out to Velladon. "One of your men lost this thing. The one outside the door. If you don't mind--he might pout if he doesn't get it back."
* * * * *
The fifth level of the Executive Block appeared to be, as Heraga had said, quite small. The tiny entry hall, on which two walk-in portals opened, led directly into the large room where the two Pendrake rest cubicles had been placed. One of the cubicles now stood open. To right and left, a narrow passage stretched away from the room, ending apparently in smaller rooms.
Baldy Perk was perspiring profusely.
"Now right here," he said in a low voice, "was where I was standing. Movaine was over there, on the right of the cubicle, and Cooms was beside him. Rubero was a little behind me, hanging on to the punk--that Kinmarten. An' the Duke"--he nodded back at the wide doorspace to the hall--"was standing back there.
"All right. The punk's opened the cubicle a crack, looking like he's about to pass out while he's doin' it. This bearded guy, Eltak, stands in front of the cubicle, holding the gadget he controls the thing with--"
"Where's the gadget now?" Quillan asked.
"Marras Cooms' got it."
"How does it work?"
Baldy shook his head. "We can't figure it out. It's got all kinds of little knobs and dials on it. Push this one an' it squeaks, turn that one an' it buzzes. Like that."
Quillan nodded. "All right. What happened?"
"Well, Movaine tells the old guy to go ahead an' do the demonstrating. The old guy sort of grins and fiddles with the gadget. The cubicle door pops open an' this thing comes pouring out. I never seen nothin' like it! It's like a barn door with dirty fur on it! It swirls up an' around an'--it wraps its upper end clean around poor Movaine. He never even screeches.
"Then everything pops at once. The old guy is laughing like crazy, an' that half-smart Rubero drills him right through the head. I take one shot at the thing, low so's not to hit Movaine, an' then we're all running, I'm halfway to the hall when Cooms tears past me like a rocket. The Duke an' the others are already piling out through the portal. I get to the hall, and there's this terrific smack of sound in the room. I look back ... an' ... an'--" Baldy paused and gulped.
"And what?" Quillan asked.
"There, behind the cubicles, I see poor Movaine stickin' halfway out o' the wall!" Baldy reported in a hushed whisper.
"Halfway out of the wall?"
"From the waist up he's in it! From the waist down he's dangling into the room! I tell you, I never seen nothin' like it."
"And this Hlat creature--"
"That's gone. I figure the smack I heard was when it hit the wall flat, carrying Movaine. It went on into it. Movaine didn't--at least, the last half of him didn't."
"Well," Quillan said after a pause, "in a way, Movaine got his demonstration. The Hlats can move through solid matter and carry other objects along with them, as advertised. If Yaco can work out how it's done and build a gadget that does the same thing, they're getting the Hlats cheap. What happened then?"
"I told Marras Cooms about Movaine, and he sent me and a half dozen other boys back up here with riot guns to see what we could do for him. Which was nothin', of course." Baldy gulped again. "We finally cut this end of him off with a beam and took it back down."
"The thing didn't show up while you were here?"
Baldy shuddered and said, "Naw."
"And the technician ... Eltak ... was dead?"
"Sure. Hole in his head you could shove your fist through."
"Somebody," Quillan observed, "ought to drill Rubero for that stupid trick!"
"The Duke did--first thing after we got back to the fourth level."
"So the Hlat's on the loose, and all we really have at the moment are the cubicles ... and Rest Warden Kinmarten. Where's he, by the way?"
"He tried to take off when we got down to Level Four, and somebody cold-cocked him. The doc says he ought to be coming around again pretty soon."
Quillan grunted, shoved the Miam Devil Special into its holster, said, "O.K., you stay here where you can watch the room and those passages and the hall. If you feel the floor start moving under, scream. I'll take a look at the cubicle."
* * * * *
Lady Pendrake's cubicle was about half as big again as a standard one; but, aside from one detail, its outer settings, instruments, and operating devices appeared normal. The modification was a recess almost six feet long and a foot wide and deep, in one side, which could be opened either to the room or to the interior of the rest cubicle, but not simultaneously to both. Quillan already knew its purpose; the supposed other cubicle was a camouflaged food locker, containing fifty-pound slabs of sea beef, each of which represented a meal for the Hlat. The recess made it possible to feed it without allowing it to be seen, or, possibly, attempting to emerge. Kinmarten's nervousness, as reported by his wife, seemed understandable. Any rest warden might get disturbed over such a charge.
Quillan asked over his shoulder, "Anyone find out yet why the things can't get out of the closed rest cubicle?"
"Yeah," Baldy Perk said. "Kinmarten says it's the cubicle's defense fields. They could get through the material. They can't get through the field."
"Someone think to energize the Executive Block's battle fields?" Quillan inquired.
"Yeah. Velladon took care of that before he came screaming up to the third level to argue with Cooms and Fluel."
"So it can't slip out of the Block unless it shows itself down on the ground level when the entry lock's open."
"Yeah," Baldy muttered. "But I dunno. Is that good?"
Quillan looked at him. "Well, we would like it back."
"Why? There's fifty more coming in on the liner tonight."
"We don't have the fifty yet. If someone louses up the detail--"
"Yawk!" Baldy said faintly. There was a crash of sound as his riot gun went off. Quillan spun about, hair bristling, gun out. "What happened?"
"I'll swear," Baldy said, white-faced, "I saw something moving along that passage!"
Quillan looked, saw nothing, slowly replaced the gun. "Baldy," he said, "if you think you see it again, just say so. That's an order! If it comes at us, we get out of this level fast. But we don't shoot before we have to. If we kill it, it's no good to us. Got that?"
"Yeah," Baldy said. "But I got an idea now, Bad News." He nodded at the other cubicle. "Let's leave that meat box open."
"Why?"
"If it's hungry," Baldy explained simply, "I'd sooner it wrapped itself around a few chunks of sea beef, an' not around me."
Quillan punched him encouragingly in the shoulder. "Baldy," he said, "in your own way, you have had an idea! But we won't leave the meat box open. When Kinmarten wakes up, I want him to show me how to bait this cubicle with a piece of sea beef, so it'll snap shut if the Hlat goes inside. Meanwhile it won't hurt if it gets a little hungry."
"That," said Baldy, "isn't the way I feel about it."
"There must be around a hundred and fifty people in the Executive Block at present," Quillan said. "Look at it that way! Even if the thing keeps stuffing away, your odds are pretty good, Baldy."
Baldy shuddered.
* * * * *
Aside from a dark bruise high on his forehead, Brock Kinmarten showed no direct effects of having been knocked out. However, his face was strained and his voice not entirely steady. It was obvious that the young rest warden had never been in a similarly unnerving situation before. But he was making a valiant effort not to appear frightened and, at the same time, to indicate that he would co-operate to the best of his ability with his captors.
He'd regained consciousness by the time Quillan and Perk returned to the fourth level, and Quillan suggested bringing him to Marras Cooms' private quarters for questioning. The Brotherhood chief agreed; he was primarily interested in finding out how the Hlat-control device functioned.
Kinmarten shook his head. He knew nothing about the instrument, he said, except that it was called a Hlat-talker. It was very unfortunate that Eltak had been shot, because Eltak undoubtedly could have told them all they wanted to know about it. If what he had told Kinmarten was true, Eltak had been directly involved in the development of the device.
"Was he some Federation scientist?" Cooms asked, fiddling absently with the mysterious cylindrical object.
"No, sir," the young man said. "But--again if what he told me was the truth--he was the man who actually discovered these Hlats. At least, he was the first man to discover them who wasn't immediately killed by them."
Cooms glanced thoughtfully at Quillan, then asked, "And where was that?"
Kinmarten shook his head again. "He didn't tell me. And I didn't really want to know. I was anxious to get our convoy to its destination, and then to be relieved of the assignment. I ... well, I've been trained to act as Rest Warden to human beings, after all, not to monstrosities!" He produced an uncertain smile, glancing from one to the other of his interrogators. The smile promptly faded out again.
"You've no idea at all then about the place they came from?" Cooms asked expressionlessly.
"Oh, yes," Kinmarten said hastily. "Eltak talked a great deal about the Hlats, and actually--except for its location--gave me a fairly good picture of what the planet must be like. For one thing, it's an uncolonized world, of course. It must be terratype or very nearly so, because Eltak lived there for fifteen years with apparently only a minimum of equipment. The Hlats are confined to a single large island. He discovered them by accident and--"
"What was he doing there?"
"Well, sir, he came from Hyles-Frisian. He was a crim ... he'd been engaged in some form of piracy, and when the authorities began looking for him, he decided it would be best to get clean out of the Hub. He cracked up his ship on this world and couldn't leave again. When he discovered the Hlats and realized their peculiar ability, he kept out of their way and observed them. He found out they had a means of communicating with each other, and that he could duplicate it. That stopped them from harming him, and eventually, he said, he was using them like hunting dogs. They were accustomed to co-operating with one another, because when there was some animal around that was too large for one of them to handle, they would attack, it in a group...."
He went on for another minute or two on the subject. The Hlats--the word meant "rock lion" in one of the Hyles-Frisian dialects, describing a carnivorous animal which had some superficial resemblance to the creatures Eltak had happened on--frequented the seacoast and submerged themselves in sand, rocks and debris, whipping up out of it to seize some food animal, and taking it down with them again to devour it at leisure.
Quillan interrupted, "You heard what happened to the man it attacked on the fifth level?"
"Yes, sir."
"Why would the thing have left him half outside the wall as it did?"
Kinmarten said that it must simply have been moving too fast. It could slip into and out of solid substances without a pause itself, but it needed a little time to restructure an object it was carrying in the same manner. No more time, however, than two or three seconds--depending more on the nature of the object than on its size, according to Eltak.
"It can restructure anything in that manner?" Quillan asked.
Kinmarten hesitated. "Well, sir, I don't know. I suppose there might be limitations on its ability. Eltak told me the one we were escorting had been the subject of extensive experimentation during the past year, and that the results are very satisfactory."
"Suppose it carries a living man through a wall. Will the man still be alive when he comes out on the other side, assuming the Hlat doesn't kill him deliberately?"
"Yes, sir. The process itself wouldn't hurt him."
* * * * *
Quillan glanced at Cooms. "You know," he said, "we might be letting Yaco off too cheaply!"
Cooms raised an eyebrow warningly, and Quillan grinned. "Our friend will be learning about Yaco soon enough. Why did Eltak tell the creature to attack, Kinmarten?"
"Sir, I don't know," Kinmarten said. "He was a man of rather violent habits. My impression, however, was that he was simply attempting to obtain a hostage."
"How did he get off that island with the Hlat?"
"A University League explorer was investigating the planet. Eltak contacted them and obtained the guarantee of a full pardon and a large cash settlement in return for what he could tell them about the Hlats. They took him and this one specimen along for experimentation."
"What about the Hlats on the Camelot?"
"Eltak said those had been quite recently trapped on the island."
Cooms ran his fingers over the cylinder, producing a rapid series of squeaks and whistles. "That's one thing Yaco may not like," he observed. "They won't have a monopoly on the thing."
Quillan shook his head. "Their scientists don't have to work through red tape like the U-League. By the time the news breaks--if the Federation ever intends to break it--Yaco will have at least a five-year start on everyone else. That's all an outfit like that needs." He looked at Kinmarten. "Any little thing you haven't thought to tell us, friend?" he inquired pleasantly.
A thin film of sweat showed suddenly on Kinmarten's forehead.
"No, sir," he said. "I've really told you everything I know. I--"
"Might try him under dope," Cooms said absently.
"Uh-uh!" Quillan said, "I want him wide awake to help me bait the cubicle for the thing. Has Velladon shown any indication of becoming willing to co-operate in hunting it?"
Cooms gestured with his head. "Ask Fluel! I sent him down to try to patch things up with the commodore. He just showed up again."
Quillan glanced around. The Duke was lounging in the doorway. He grinned slightly, said, "Velladon's still sore at us. But he'll talk to Quillan. Kinmarten here ... did he tell you his wife's on the Star?"
Brock Kinmarten went utterly white. Cooms looked at him, said softly, "No, that must have slipped his mind."
Fluel said, "Yeah, Well, she is. And Ryter says they'll have her picked up inside half an hour. When they bring her in, we really should check on how candid Kinmarten's been about everything."
The rest warden said in a voice that shook uncontrollably, "Gentlemen, my wife knows absolutely nothing about these matters! I swear it! She--"
Quillan stood up. "Well, I'll go see if I can't get Velladon in a better mood. Are you keeping that Hlat-talker, Cooms?"
Cooms smiled. "I am."
"Marras figures," the Duke's flat voice explained, "that if the thing comes into the room and he squeaks at it a few times, he won't get hurt."
"That's possible," Cooms said, unruffled. "At any rate, I intend to hang on to it."
"Well, I wouldn't play around with those buttons too much," Quillan observed.
"Why not?"
"You might get lucky and tap out some pattern that spells 'Come to chow' in the Hlat's vocabulary."
* * * * *
There were considerably more men in evidence on Level Two than on the fourth, and fewer signs of nervousness. The Star men had been told of the Hlat's escape from its cubicle, but weren't taking it too seriously. Quillan was conducted to the commodore and favored with an alarmingly toothy grin. Ryter, the security chief, joined them a few seconds later. Apparently, Velladon had summoned him.
Velladon said, "Ryter here's made a few transmitter calls. We hear Pappy Boltan pulled his outfit out of the Orado area about a month ago. Present whereabouts unknown. Hagready went off on some hush-hush job at around the same time."
Quillan smiled. "Uh-huh! So he did."
"We also," said Ryter, "learned a number of things about you personally." He produced a thin smile. "You lead a busy and--apparently--profitable life."
"Business is fair," Quillan agreed. "But it can always be improved."
The commodore turned on the toothy grin. "So all right," he growled, "you're clear. We rather liked what we learned. Eh, Ryter?"
Ryter nodded.
"This Brotherhood of Beldon, now--" The commodore shook his head heavily.
Quillan was silent a moment. "They might be getting sloppy," he said. "I don't know. It's one possibility. They used to be a rather sharp outfit, you know."
"That's what I'd heard!" Velladon chewed savagely on his mustache, asked finally, "What's another possibility?"
Quillan leaned back in his chair. "Just a feeling, so far. But the business with the cubicle upstairs might have angles that weren't mentioned."
They looked at him thoughtfully. Ryter said, "Mind amplifying that?"
"Cooms told me," Quillan said, "that Nome Lancion had given Movaine instructions to make a test with Lady Pendrake on the quiet and find out if those creatures actually can do what they're supposed to do. I think he was telling the truth. Nome tends to be overcautious when it's a really big deal. Unless he's sure of the Hlats, he wouldn't want to be involved in a thing like blowing up the Star and the liner."
The commodore scowled absently. "Uh-huh," he said. "He knows we can't back out of it--"
"All right. The Brotherhood's full of ambitious men. Behind Lancion, Movaine was top man. Cooms behind him; Fluel behind Cooms. Suppose that Hlat-control device Cooms is hanging on to so tightly isn't as entirely incomprehensible as they make it out to be. Suppose Cooms makes a deal with Eltak. Eltak tickles the gadget, and the Hlat kills Movaine. Rubero immediately guns down Eltak--and is killed by Fluel a couple of minutes later, supposedly for blowing his top and killing the man who knew how to control the Hlat."
Ryter cleared his throat. "Fluel was Movaine's gun," he observed.
"So he was," Quillan said. "Would you like the Duke to be yours?"
Ryter grinned, shook his head. "No, thanks!"
Quillan looked back at Velladon. "How well are you actually covered against the Brotherhood?"
"Well, that's air-tight," the commodore said. "We've got 'em outgunned here. When the liner lands, we'll be about even. But Lancion won't start anything. We're too even. Once we're clear of the Star, we don't meet again. We deal with Yaco individually. The Brotherhood has the Hlats, and we have the trained Federation technicians accompanying them, who ... who--"
"Who alone are supposed to be able to inform Yaco how to control the Hlats," Ryter finished for him. The security chief's face was expressionless.
"By God!" the commodore said softly.
"Well, it's only a possibility that somebody's playing dirty," Quillan remarked. "We'd want to be sure of it. But if anyone can handle a Hlat with the control instrument, the Brotherhood has an advantage now that it isn't talking about--it can offer Yaco everything Yaco needs in one package. Of course, Yaco might still be willing to pay for the Hlat technicians. If it didn't, you and Ryter could make the same kind of trouble for it that my friends can."
* * * * *
The color was draining slowly from Velladon's face. "There's a difference," he said. "If we threaten to make trouble for Yaco, they'd see to it that our present employers learn that Ryter and I are still alive."
"That's the Mooleys, eh?"
"Yes."
"Tough." Quillan knuckled his chin thoughtfully. "Well, let's put it this way then," he said. "My group doesn't have that kind of problem, but if things worked out so that we'd have something more substantial than nuisance value to offer Yaco, we'd prefer it, of course."
Velladon nodded. "Very understandable! Under the circumstances, co-operation appears to be indicated, eh?"
"That's what I had in mind."
"You've made a deal," Velladon said. "Any immediate suggestions?"
Quillan looked at his watch. "A couple. We don't want to make any mistake about this. It's still almost five hours before the Camelot pulls in, and until she does you're way ahead on firepower. I wouldn't make any accusations just now. But you might mention to Cooms you'd like to borrow the Hlat gadget to have it examined by some of your technical experts. The way he reacts might tell us something. If he balks, the matter shouldn't be pushed too hard at the moment--it's a tossup whether you or the Brotherhood has a better claim to the thing.
"But then there's Kinmarten, the rest warden in charge of the cubicle. I talked with him while Cooms and Fluel were around, but he may have been briefed on what to say. Cooms mentioned doping him, which could be a convenient way to keeping him shut up, assuming he knows more than he's told. He's one of the personnel you're to offer Yaco. I think you can insist on having Kinmarten handed over to you immediately. It should be interesting again to see how Cooms reacts."
Velladon's big head nodded vigorously. "Good idea!"
"By the way," Quillan said, "Fluel mentioned you've been looking for Kinmarten's wife, the second rest warden on the Pendrake convoy. Found her yet?"
"Not a trace, so far," Ryter said.
"That's a little surprising, too, isn't it?"
"Under the circumstances," the commodore said, "it might not be surprising at all!" He had regained his color, was beginning to look angry. "If they--"
"Well," Quillan said soothingly, "we don't know. It's just that things do seem to be adding up a little. Now, there's one other point. We should do something immediately about catching that Hlat."
Velladon grunted and picked at his teeth with his thumbnail. "It would be best to get it back in its cubicle, of course. But I'm not worrying about it--just an animal, after all. Even the light hardware those Beldon fancy Dans carry should handle it. You use a man-sized gun, I see. So do I. If it shows up around here, it gets smeared, that's all. There're fifty more of the beasts on the Camelot."
Quillan nodded. "You're right on that. But there's the possibility that it is being controlled by the Brotherhood at present. If it is, it isn't just an animal any more. It could be turned into a thoroughly dangerous nuisance."
The commodore thought a moment, nodded. "You're right, I suppose. What do you want to do about it?"
"Baiting the cubicle on the fifth level might work. Then there should be life-detectors in the Star's security supplies--"
Ryter nodded. "We have a couple of dozen of them, but not in the Executive Block. They were left in the security building."
The commodore stood up. "You stay here with Ryter," he told Quillan. "There're a couple of other things I want to go over with you two. I'll order the life-detectors from the office here--second passage down, isn't it, Ryter?... And, Ryter, I have another idea. I'm pulling the man in space-armor off the subspace portal and detailing him to Level Five." He grinned at Quillan. "That boy's got a brace of grenades and built-in spray guns! If Cooms is thinking of pulling any funny stunts up there, he'll think again."
* * * * *
The commodore headed briskly down the narrow passageway, his big holstered gun slapping his thigh with every step. The two security guards stationed at the door to the second level office came to attention as he approached, saluted smartly. He grunted, went in without returning the salutes, and started over toward the ComWeb on a desk at the far end of the big room, skirting the long, dusty-looking black rug beside one wall.
Velladon unbuckled his gun belt, placed the gun on the desk, sat down and switched on the ComWeb.
Behind him, the black rug stirred silently and rose up.
* * * * *
"You called that one," Ryter was saying seven or eight minutes later, "almost too well!"
Quillan shook his head, poked at the commodore's gun on the desk with his finger, looked about the silent office and back at the door where a small group of security men stood staring in at them.
"Three men gone without a sound!" he said. He indicated the glowing disk of the ComWeb. "He had time enough to turn it on, not time enough to make his call. Any chance of camouflaged portals in this section?"
"No," Ryter said. "I know the location of every portal in the Executive Block. No number of men could have taken Velladon and the two guards without a fight anyway. We'd have heard it. It didn't happen that way."
"Which leaves," Quillan said, "one way it could have happened." He jerked his head toward the door. "Will those men keep quiet?"
"If I tell them to."
"Then play it like this. Two guards have vanished. The Hlat obviously did it. The thing's deadly. That'll keep every man in the group on the alert every instant from now on. But we don't say Velladon has vanished. He's outside in the Star at the moment, taking care of something."
Ryter licked his lips. "What does that buy us?"
"If the Brotherhood's responsible for this--"
"I don't take much stock in coincidences," Ryter said.
"Neither do I. But the Hlat's an animal; it can't tell them it's carried out the job. If they don't realize we suspect them, it gives us some advantage. For the moment, we just carry on as planned, and get rid of the Hlat in one way or another as the first step. The thing's three times as dangerous as anyone suspected--except, apparently, the Brotherhood. Get the life-detectors over here as soon as you can, and slap a space-armor guard on the fifth level."
Ryter hesitated, nodded. "All right."
"Another thing," Quillan said, "Cooms may have the old trick in mind of working from the top down. If he can take you out along with a few other key men, he might have this outfit demoralized to the point of making up for the difference in the number of guns--especially if the Hlat's still on his team. You'd better keep a handful of the best boys you have around here glued to your back from now on."
Ryter smiled bleakly. "Don't worry. I intend to. What about you?"
"I don't think they're planning on giving me any personal attention at the moment. My organization is outside, not here. And it would look odd to the Brotherhood if I started dragging a few Star guards around with me at this point."
Ryter shrugged. "Suit yourself. It's your funeral if you've guessed wrong."
* * * * *
"There was nothing," Quillan told Marras Cooms, "that you could actually put a finger on. It was just that the commodore and Ryter may have something up their sleeves. Velladon's looking too self-satisfied to suit me."
The Brotherhood chief gnawed his lower lip reflectively. He seemed thoughtful, not too disturbed. Cooms might be thoroughly afraid of the escaped Hlat, but he wouldn't have reached his present position in Nome Lancion's organization if he had been easily frightened by what other men were planning.
He said, "I warned Movaine that if Velladon learned we'd checked out the Hlat, he wasn't going to like it."
"He doesn't," Quillan said. "He regards it as something pretty close to an attempted double cross."
Cooms grinned briefly. "It was."
"Of course. The question is, what can he do about it? He's got you outgunned two to one, but if he's thinking of jumping you before Lancion gets here, he stands to lose more men than he can afford to without endangering the entire operation for himself."
Cooms was silent a few seconds. "There's an unpleasant possibility which didn't occur to me until a short while ago," he said then. "The fact is that Velladon actually may have us outgunned here by something like four to one. If that's the case, he can afford to lose quite a few men. In fact, he'd prefer to."
Quillan frowned. "Four to one? How's that?"
Cooms said, "The commodore told us he intended to let only around half of the Seventh Star's security force in on the Hlat deal. The other half was supposed to have been dumped out of one of the subspace section's locks early today, without benefit of suits. We had no reason to disbelieve him. Velladon naturally would want to cut down the number of men who got in on the split with him to as many as he actually needed. But if he's been thinking about eliminating us from the game, those other men may still be alive and armed."
Quillan grunted. "I see. You know, that could explain something that looked a little odd to me."
"What was that?" Cooms asked.
Quillan said, "After they discovered down there that two of their guards were missing and decided the Hlat must have been on their level, I tried to get hold of the commodore again. Ryter told me Velladon won't be available for a while, that he's outside in the Star, taking care of something there. I wondered what could be important enough to get Velladon to leave the Executive Block at present, but--"
"Brother, I'm way ahead of you!" Cooms said. His expression hardened. "That doesn't look good. But at least he can't bring in reinforcements without tipping us off. We've got our own guards down with theirs at the entrance."
Quillan gave him a glance, then nodded at the wall beyond them. "That's a portal over there, Marras. How many of them on this level?"
"Three or four. Why? The outportals have been plugged, man! Sealed off. Fluel checked them over when we moved in."
"Sure they're sealed." Quillan stood up, went to the portal, stood looking at the panel beside it a moment, then pressed on it here and there, and removed it. "Come over here, friend. I suppose portal work's been out of your line. I'll show you how fast a thing like that can get unplugged!" He slid a pocketbook-sized tool kit out of his belt, snapped it open. About a minute later, the lifeless VACANT sign above the portal flickered twice, then acquired a steady white glow.
"Portal in operation," Quillan announced. "I'll seal it off again now. But that should give you the idea."
Cooms' tongue flicked over his lips. "Could somebody portal through to this level from the Star while the exits are sealed here?"
"If the mechanisms have been set for that purpose, the portals can be opened again at any time from the Star side. The Duke's an engineer of sorts, isn't he? Let him check on it. He should have been thinking of the point himself, as far as that goes. Anyway, Velladon can bring in as many men as he likes to his own level without using the main entrance." He considered. "I didn't see anything to indicate that he's started doing it--"
Marras Cooms shrugged irritably. "That means nothing! It would be easy enough to keep half a hundred men hidden away on any of the lower levels."
"I suppose that's right. Well, if the commodore intends to play rough, you should have some warning anyway."
"What kind of warning?"
"There's Kinmarten and that Hlat-talking gadget, for example," Quillan pointed out. "Velladon would want both of those in his possession and out of the way where they can't get hurt before he starts any shooting."
Cooms looked at him a few seconds. "Ryter," he said then, "sent half a dozen men up here for Kinmarten just after you got back! Velladon's supposed to deliver the Hlats' attendants to Yaco, so I let them have Kinmarten." He paused. "They asked for the Hlat-talker, too."
Quillan grunted. "Did you give them that?"
"No."
"Well," Quillan said after a moment, "that doesn't necessarily mean that we're in for trouble with the Star group. But it does mean, I think, that we'd better stay ready for it!" He stood up. "I'll get back down there and go on with the motions of getting the hunt for the Hlat organized. Velladon would sooner see the thing get caught, too, of course, so he shouldn't try to interfere with that. If I spot anything that looks suspicious, I'll get the word to you."
* * * * *
"I never," said Orca, unconsciously echoing Baldy Perk, "saw anything like it!" The commodore's chunky little gunman was ashen-faced. The circle of Star men standing around him hardly looked happier. Most of them were staring down at the empty lower section of a suit of space armor which appeared to have been separated with a neat diagonal slice from its upper part.
"Let's get it straight," Ryter said, a little unsteadily. "You say this half of the suit was lying against the wall like that?"
"Not exactly," Quillan told him. "When we got up to the fifth level, the suit was stuck against the wall--like that--about eight feet above the floor. That was in the big room where the cubicles are. When Kinmarten and Orca and I finally got the suit worked away from the wall, I expected frankly that we'd find half the body of the guard still inside. But he'd vanished."
Ryter cleared his throat. "Apparently," he said, "the creature drew the upper section of the suit into the wall by whatever means it uses, then stopped applying the transforming process to the metal, and simply moved on with the upper part of the suit and the man."
Quillan nodded. "That's what it looks like."
"But he had two grenades!" Orca burst out. "He had sprayguns! How could it get him that way?"
"Brother," Quillan said, "grenades won't help you much if you don't spot what's moving up behind you!"
Orca glared speechlessly at him. Ryter said, "All right! We've lost another man. We're not going to lose any more. We'll station no more guards on the fifth level. Now, get everyone who isn't on essential guard duty to the main room, and split 'em up into life-detector units. Five men to each detail, one to handle the detector, four to stay with him, guns out. If the thing comes back to this level, we want to have it spotted the instant it arrives. Orca, you stay here--and keep your gun out!"
The men filed out hurriedly. Ryter turned to Quillan. "Were you able to get the cubicle baited?"
Quillan nodded. "Kinmarten figured out how the thing should be set for the purpose. If the Hlat goes in after the sea beef, it's trapped. Of course, if the hunting it's been doing was for food, it mightn't be interested in the beef."
"We don't know," Ryter said, "that the hunting it's been doing was for food."
"No. Did you manage to get the control device from Cooms?"
Ryter shook his head. "He's refused to hand it over."
"If you tried to take it from him," Quillan said, "you might have a showdown on your hands."
"And if this keeps on," Ryter said, "I may prefer a showdown! Another few rounds of trouble with the Hlat, and the entire operation could blow up in our faces! The men aren't used to that kind of thing. It's shaken them up. If we've got to take care of the Brotherhood, I'd rather do it while I still have an organized group. Where did you leave Kinmarten, by the way?"
"He's back in the little room with his two guards," Quillan said.
"Well, he should be all right there. We can't spare--" Ryter's body jerked violently. "What's that?"
There had been a single thudding crash somewhere in the level. Then shouts and cursing.
"Main hall!" Quillan said. "Come on!"
* * * * *
The main hall was a jumble of excitedly jabbering Star men when they arrived there. Guns waved about, and the various groups were showing a marked tendency to stand with their backs toward one another and their faces toward the walls.
Ryter's voice rose in a shout that momentarily shut off the hubbub. "What's going on here?"
Men turned, hands pointed, voices babbled again. Someone nearby said sharply and distinctly, "... Saw it drop right out of the ceiling!" Farther down the hall, another group shifted aside enough to disclose it had been clustered about something which looked a little like the empty shell of a gigantic black beetle.
The missing section of the suit of space armor had been returned. But not its occupant.
Quillan moved back a step, turned, went back down the passage from which they had emerged, pulling the Miam Devil from its holster. Behind him the commotion continued; Ryter was shouting something about getting the life-detector units over there. Quillan went left down the first intersecting corridor, right again on the following one, keeping the gun slightly raised before him. Around the next corner, he saw the man on guard over the portal connecting the building levels facing him, gun pointed.
"What happened?" the guard asked shakily.
Quillan shook his head, coming up. "That thing got another one!"
The guard breathed, "By God!" and lowered his gun a little. Quillan raised his a little, the Miam Devil grunted, and the guard sighed and went down. Quillan went past him along the hall, stopped two doors beyond the portal and rapped on the locked door.
"Quillan here! Open up!"
The door opened a crack, and one of Kinmarten's guards looked out questioningly. Quillan shot him through the head, slammed on into the room across the collapsing body, saw the second guard wheeling toward him, shot again, and slid the gun back into the holster. Kinmarten, standing beside a table six feet away, right hand gripping a heavy marble ashtray, was staring at him in white-faced shock.
"Take it easy, chum!" Quillan said, turning toward him. "I--"
He ducked hurriedly as the ashtray came whirling through the air toward his head. An instant later, a large fist smacked the side of Kinmarten's jaw. The rest warden settled limply to the floor.
"Sorry to do that, pal," Quillan muttered, stooping over him. "Things are rough all over right now." He hauled Kinmarten upright, bent, and had the unconscious young man across his shoulder. The hall was still empty except for the body of the portal guard. Quillan laid Kinmarten on the carpet before the portal, hauled the guard off into the room, and pulled the door to the room shut behind him as he came out. Picking up Kinmarten, he stepped into the portal with him and jabbed the fifth level button. A moment later, he moved out into the small dim entry hall on the fifth level, the gun in his right hand again.
He stood there silently for some seconds, looking about him listening. The baited cubicle yawned widely at him from the center of the big room. Nothing seemed to be stirring. Kinmarten went back to the floor. Quillan moved over to the panel which concealed the other portal's mechanisms.
He had the outportal unsealed in considerably less than a minute this time, and slapped the panel gently back in place. He turned back to Kinmarten and started to bend down for him, then straightened quietly again, turning his head.
Had there been a flicker of shadowy motion just then at the edge of his vision, behind the big black cube of the Hlat's food locker? Quillan remained perfectly still, the Miam Devil ready and every sense straining for an indication that the thing was there--or approaching stealthily now, gliding behind the surfaces of floor or ceiling or walls like an underwater swimmer.
But half a minute passed and nothing else happened. He went down on one knee beside Kinmarten, the gun still in his right hand. With his left, he carefully wrestled the rest warden back up across his shoulder, came upright, moved three steps to the side, and disappeared in the outportal.
* * * * *
Reetal Destone unlocked the entry door to her suite and stepped hurriedly inside, letting the door slide shut behind her. She crossed the room to the ComWeb stand and switched on the playback. There was the succession of tinkling tones which indicated nothing had been recorded.
She shut the instrument off again, passing her tongue lightly over her lips. No further messages from Heraga....
And none from Quillan.
She shook her head, feeling a surge of sharp anxiety, glanced at her watch and told herself that, after all, less than two hours had passed since Quillan had gone into the Executive Block. Heraga reported there had been no indications of disturbance or excitement when he passed through the big entrance hall on his way out. So Quillan, at any rate, had succeeded in bluffing his way into the upper levels.
It remained a desperate play, at best.
Reetal went down the short passage to her bedroom. As she came into the room, her arms were caught from the side at the elbows, pulled suddenly and painfully together behind her. She stood still, frozen with shock.
"In a hurry, sweetheart?" Fluel's flat voice said.
Reetal managed a breathless giggle. "Duke! You startled me! How did you get in?"
She felt one hand move up her arm to her shoulder. Then she was swung about deftly and irresistibly, held pinned back against the wall, still unable to move her arms.
He looked at her a moment, asked, "Where are you hiding it this time?"
"Hiding what, Duke?"
"I've been told sweet little Reetal always carries a sweet little gun around with her in some shape or form or other."
Reetal shook her head, her eyes widening. "Duke, what's the matter? I...."
He let go of her suddenly, and his slap exploded against the side of her face. Reetal cried out, dropping her head between her hands. Immediately he had her wrists again, and her fingers were jerked away from the jeweled ornament in her hair.
"So that's where it is!" Fluel said. "Thought it might be. Don't get funny again now, sweetheart. Just stay quiet."
She stayed quiet, wincing a little as he plucked the glittering little device out of her hair. He turned it around in his fingers, examining it, smiled and slid it into an inside pocket, and took her arm again. "Let's go to the front room, Reetal," he said almost pleasantly. "We've got a few things to do."
* * * * *
A minute later, she was seated sideways on a lounger, her wrists fastened right and left to its armrests. The Duke placed a pocket recorder on the floor beside her. "This is a crowded evening, sweetheart," he remarked, "which is lucky for you in a way. We'll have to rush things along a little. I'll snap the recorder on in a minute so you can answer questions--No, keep quiet. Just listen very closely now, so you'll know what the right answers are. If you get rattled and gum things up, the Duke's going to get annoyed with you."
He sat down a few feet away from her, hitched his shoulders to straighten out the silver jacket, and lit a cigarette. "A little while after Bad News Quillan turned up just now," he went on, "a few things occurred to me. One of them was that a couple of years ago you and he were operating around Beldon at about the same time. I thought, well, maybe you knew each other; maybe not. And then--"
"Duke," Reetal said uncertainly, "just what are you talking about? I don't know--"
"Shut up." He reached over, tapped her knee lightly with his fingertips. "Of course, if you want to get slapped around, all right. Otherwise, don't interrupt again. Like I said, you're in luck; I don't have much time to spend here. You're getting off very easy. Now just listen.
"Bad News knew a lot about our operation and had a story to explain that. If the story was straight, we couldn't touch him. But I was wondering about the two of you happening to be here on the Star again at the same time. A team maybe, eh? But he didn't mention you as being in on the deal. So what was the idea?
"And then, sweetheart, I remembered something else--and that tied it in. Know that little jolt people sometimes get when they're dropping off to sleep? Of course. Know another time they sometimes get it? When they're snapping back out of a Moment of Truth, eh? I remembered suddenly I'd felt a little jump like that while we were talking to-day. Might have been a reflex of some kind. Of course, it didn't occur to me at the time you could be pulling a lousy stunt like that on old Duke. Why take a chance on getting your neck broken?
"But, sweetheart, that's the tie-in! Quillan hasn't told it straight. He's got no backing. He's on his own. There's no gang outside somewhere that knows all about our little deal. He got his information right here, from you. And you got it from dumb old Duke, eh?"
"Duke," Reetal said quite calmly, "can I ask just one question?"
He stared bleakly at her a moment, then grinned. "It's my night to be big-hearted, I guess. Go ahead."
"I'm not trying to argue. But it simply doesn't make sense. If I learned about this operation you're speaking of from you, what reason could I have to feed you Truth in the first place? There'd be almost a fifty-fifty chance that you'd spot it immediately. Why should I take such a risk? Don't you see?"
Fluel shrugged, dropped his cigarette and ground it carefully into the carpet with the tip of his shoe.
"You'll start answering those questions yourself almost immediately, sweetheart! Let's not worry about that now. Let me finish. Something happened to Movaine couple of hours ago. Nobody's fault. And something else happened to Marras Cooms just now. That puts me in charge of the operation here. Nice, isn't it? When we found Cooms lying in the hall with a hole through his stupid head, I told Baldy Perk it looked like Bad News had thrown in with the Star boys and done it. Know Baldy? He's Cooms' personal gun. Not what you'd call bright, and he's mighty hot now about Cooms. I left him in charge on our level, with orders to get Quillan the next time he shows up there. Well and good. The boys know Bad News' rep too well to try asking him questions. They won't take chances with him. They'll just gun him down together the instant they see him."
He paused to scuff his shoe over the mark the cigarette had left on the carpet, went on, "But there's Nome Lancion now. He kind of liked Cooms, and he might get suspicious. When there's a sudden vacancy in the organization like that. Nome takes a good look first at the man next in line. He likes to be sure the facts are as stated.
"So now you know the kind of answers from you I want to hear go down on the recorder, sweetheart. And be sure they sound right. I don't want to waste time on replays. You and Quillan were here on the Star. You got some idea of what was happening, realized you were due to be vaporized along with the rest of them after we left. There was no way out of the jam for you unless you could keep the operation from being carried out. You don't, by the way, mention getting any of that information from me. I don't want Lancion to think I'm beginning to get dopey. You and Quillan just cooked up this story, and he managed to get into the Executive Block. The idea being to knock off as many of the leaders as he could, and mess things up."
* * * * *
Fluel picked up the recorder, stood up, and placed it on the chair. "That's all you have to remember. You're a smart girl; you can fill in the details any way you like. Now let's get started--"
She stared at him silently for an instant, a muscle beginning to twitch in her cheek. "If I do that," she said, "if I give you a story Nome will like, what happens next?"
Fluel shrugged. "Just what you're thinking happens next. You're a dead little girl right now, Reetal. Might as well get used to the idea. You'd be dead anyhow four, five hours from now, so that shouldn't make too much difference. What makes a lot of difference is just how unpleasant the thing can get."
She drew a long breath. "Duke, I--"
"You're stalling, sweetheart."
"Duke, give me a break. I really didn't know a thing about this. I--"
He looked down at her for a moment. "I gave you a break," he said. "You've wasted it. Now we'll try it the other way. If we work a few squeals into the recording, that'll make it more convincing to Lancion. He'll figure little Reetal's the type who wouldn't spill a thing like that without a little pressure." He checked himself, grinned. "And that reminds me. When you're talking for the record, use your own voice."
"My own voice?" she half whispered.
"Nome will remember what you sound like--and I've heard that voice imitations are part of your stock in trade. You might think it was cute if Nome got to wondering after you were dead whether that really had been you talking. Don't try it, sweetheart."
He brought a glove out of his jacket pocket, slipped it over his left hand, flexing his fingers to work it into position. Reetal's eyes fastened on the rounded metal tips capping thumb, forefinger and middle finger of the glove. Her face went gray.
"Duke," she said, "No--"
"Shut up." He brought out a strip of transparent plastic, moved over to her. The gloved hand went into her hair, gripped it, turned her face up. He laid the plastic gag lengthwise over her mouth, pressed it down and released it. Reetal closed her eyes.
"That'll keep it shut," he said. "Now--" His right hand clamped about the back of her neck, forcing her head down and forward almost to her knees. The gloved left hand brushed her hair forwards, then its middle finger touched the skin at a point just above her shoulder blades.
"Right there," Fluel said. The finger stiffened, drove down.
Reetal jerked violently, twisted, squirmed sideways, wrists straining against the grip of the armrests. Her breath burst out of her nostrils, followed by squeezed, whining noises. The metal-capped finger continued to grind savagely against the nerve center it had found.
"Thirty," Fluel said finally. He drew his hand back, pulled her upright again, peeled the gag away from her lips. "Only thirty seconds, sweetheart. Think you'd sooner play along now?"
Reetal's head nodded.
"Fine. Give you a minute to steady up. This doesn't really waste much time, you see--" He took up the recorder, sat down on the chair again, watching her. She was breathing raggedly and shallowly, eyes wide and incredulous. She didn't look at him.
The Duke lit another cigarette.
"Incidentally," he observed, "if you were stalling because you hoped old Bad News might show up, forget it. If the boys haven't gunned him down by now, he's tied up on a job the commodore gave him to do. He'll be busy another hour or two on that. He--"
He checked himself. A central section of the wall paneling across the room from him had just dilated open. Old Bad News stood in the concealed suite portal, Rest Warden Kinmarten slung across his shoulder.
Both men moved instantly. Fluel's long legs bounced him sideways out of the chair, right hand darting under his coat, coming out with a gun. Quillan turned to the left to get Kinmarten out of the way. The big Miam Devil seemed to jump into his hand. Both guns spoke together.
Fluel's gun thudded to the carpet. The Duke said, "Ah-aa-ah!" in a surprised voice, rolled up his eyes, and followed the gun down.
Quillan said, stunned, "He was fast! I felt that one parting my hair."
* * * * *
He became very solicitous then--after first ascertaining that Fluel had left the Executive Block unaccompanied, on personal business. He located a pain killer spray in Reetal's bedroom and applied it to the bruised point below the back of her neck. She was just beginning to relax gratefully, as the warm glow of the spray washed out the pain and the feeling of paralysis, when Kinmarten, lying on the carpet nearby, began to stir and mutter.
Quillan hastily put down the spray.
"Watch him!" he cautioned. "I'll be right back. If he sits up, yell. He's a bit wild at the moment. If he wakes up and sees the Duke lying there, he'll start climbing the walls."
"What--" Reetal began. But he was gone down the hall.
He returned immediately with a glass of water, went down on one knee beside Kinmarten, slid an arm under the rest warden's shoulder, and lifted him to a sitting position.
"Wake up, old pal!" he said loudly. "Come on, wake up! Got something good for you here--"
"What are you giving him?" Reetal asked, cautiously massaging the back of her neck.
"Knockout drops. I already had to lay him out once. We want to lock him up with his wife now, and if he comes to and tells her what's happened, they'll both be out of their minds by the time we come to let them out--"
He interrupted himself. Kinmarten's eyelids were fluttering. Quillan raised the glass to his lips. "Here you are, pal," he said in a deep, soothing voice. "Drink it! It'll make you feel a lot better."
Kinmarten swallowed obediently, swallowed again. His eyelids stopped fluttering. Quillan lowered him back to the floor.
"That ought to do it," he said.
"What," Reetal asked, "did happen? The Duke--"
"Tell you as much as I can after we get Kinmarten out of the way. I have to get back to the Executive Block. Things are sort of teetering on the edge there." He jerked his head at Fluel's body. "I want to know about him, too, of course. Think you can walk now?"
Reetal groaned. "I can try," she said.
They found Solvey Kinmarten dissolved in tears once more. She flung herself on her husband's body when Quillan place him on the bed. "What have those beasts done to Brock?" she demanded fiercely.
"Nothing very bad," Quillan said soothingly. "He's, um, under sedation at the moment, that's all. We've got him away from them now, and he's safe ... look at it that way. You stay here and take care of him. We'll have the whole deal cleared up before morning, doll. Then you can both come out of hiding again." He gave her an encouraging wink.
"I'm so very grateful to both of you--"
"No trouble, really. But we'd better get back to work on the thing."
"Heck," Quillan said a few seconds later, as he and Reetal came out on the other side of the portal, "I feel like hell about those two. Nice little characters! Well, if the works blow up, they'll never know it."
"We'll know it," Reetal said meaningly. "Start talking."
He rattled through a brief account of events in the Executive Block, listened to her report on the Duke's visit, scratched his jaw reflectively.
"That might help!" he observed. "They're about ready to jump down each other's throats over there right now. A couple more pushes--" He stood staring down at the Duke's body for a moment. Blood soiled the back of the silver jacket, seeping out from a tear above the heart area. Quillan bent down, got his hands under Fluel's armpits, hauled the body upright.
Reetal asked, startled, "What are you going to do with it?"
"Something useful, I think. And wouldn't that shock the Duke ... the first time he's been of any use to anybody. Zip through the Star's ComWeb directory, doll, and get me the call symbol for Level Four of the Executive Block!"
* * * * *
Solvey Kinmarten dimmed the lights a trifle in the bedroom, went back to Brock, rearranged the pillows under his head, and bent down to place her lips tenderly to the large bruises on his forehead and the side of his jaw. Then she brought a chair up beside the bed, and sat down to watch him.
Perhaps a minute later, there was a slight noise behind her. Startled, she glanced around, saw something huge, black and shapeless moving swiftly across the carpet of the room toward her.
Solvey quietly fainted.
* * * * *
"Sure you know what to say?" Quillan asked.
Reetal moistened her lips. "Just let me go over it in my mind once more." She was sitting on the floor, on the right side of the ComWeb stand, her face pale and intent, "You know," she said, "this makes me feel a little queasy somehow, Quillan! And suppose they don't fall for it?"
"They'll fall for it!" Quillan was on his knees in front of the stand, supporting Fluel's body, which was sprawled half across it, directly before the lit vision screen. An outflung arm hid the Duke's face from the screen. "You almost had me thinking I was listening to Fluel when you did the take-off of him this evening. A dying man can be expected to sound a little odd, anyway." He smiled at her encouragingly. "Ready now?"
Reetal nodded nervously, cleared her throat.
Quillan reached across Fluel tapped out Level Four's call symbol on the instrument, ducked back down below the stand. After a moment, there was a click.
Reetal produced a quavering, agonized groan. Somebody else gasped.
"Duke!" Baldy Perk's voice shouted. "What's happened?"
"Baldy Perk!" Quillan whispered quickly.
Reetal stammered hoarsely, "The c-c-commodore, Baldy! Shot me ... shot Marras! They're after ... Quillan ... now!"
"I thought Bad News...." Baldy sounded stunned.
"Was w-wrong, Baldy," Reetal croaked. "Bad News ... with us! Bad News ... pal! The c-c-comm--"
Beneath the ComWeb stand the palm of Quillan's right hand thrust abruptly up and forward. The stand tilted, went crashing back to the floor. Fluel's body lurched over with it. The vision screen shattered. Baldy's roaring question was cut off abruptly.
"Great stuff, doll!" Quillan beamed, helping Reetal to her feet. "You sent shudders down my back!"
"Down mine, too!"
"I'll get him out of here now. Ditch him in one of the shut-off sections. Then I'll get back to the Executive Block. If Ryter's thought to look into Kinmarten's room, they'll really be raving on both sides there now!"
"Is that necessary?" Reetal asked. "For you to go back, I mean. Somebody besides Fluel might have become suspicious of you by now."
"Ryter might," Quillan agreed. "He's looked like the sharpest of the lot right from the start. But we'll have to risk that. We've got all the making of a shooting war there now, but we've got to make sure it gets set off before somebody thinks of comparing notes. If I'm around, I'll keep jolting at their nerves."
"I suppose you're right. Now, our group--"
Quillan nodded. "No need to hold off on that any longer, the way things are moving. Get on another ComWeb and start putting out those Mayday messages right now! As soon as you've rounded the boys up--"
"That might," Reetal said, "take a little less than an hour."
"Fine. Then move them right into the Executive Block. With just a bit of luck, one hour from now should land them in the final stages of a beautiful battle on the upper levels. Give them my description and Ryter's, so we don't have accidents."
"Why Ryter's?"
"Found out he was the boy who took care of the bomb-planting detail. We want him alive. The others mightn't know where it's been tucked away. Heraga says the clerical staff and technicians in there are all wearing the white Star uniforms. Anyone else who isn't in one of those uniforms is fair game--" He paused. "Oh, and tip them off about the Hlat!--God only knows what that thing will be doing when the ruckus starts."
"What about sending a few men in through the fifth level portal, the one you've unplugged?"
Quillan considered, shook his head. "No. Down on the ground level is where we want them. They'd have to portal there again from the fifth, and a portal is too easy to seal off and defend. Now let's get a blanket or something to tuck Fluel into. I don't want to feel conspicuous if I run into somebody on the way."
* * * * *
Quillan emerged cautiously from the fifth portal in the Executive Block a short while later, came to a sudden stop just outside it. In the big room beyond the entry hall, the door of the baited cubicle was closed, and the life-indicator on the door showed a bright steady green glow.
Quillan stared at it a moment, looking somewhat surprised, then went quietly into the room and bent to study the cubicle's instruments. A grin spread slowly over his face. The trap had been sprung. He glanced at the deep-rest setting and turned it several notches farther down.
"Happy dreams, Lady Pendrake!" he murmured. "That takes care of you. What an appetite! And now--"
As the Level Four portal dilated open before him, a gun blazed from across the hall. Quillan flung himself out and down, rolled to the side, briefly aware of a litter of bodies and tumbled furniture farther up the hall. Then he was flat on the carpet, gun out before him, pointing back at the overturned, ripped couch against the far wall from which the fire had come.
A hoarse voice bawled, "Bad News--hold it!"
Quillan hesitated, darting a glance right and left. Men lying about everywhere, the furnishings a shambles. "That you, Baldy?" he asked.
"Yeah," Baldy Perk half sobbed. "I'm hurt--"
"What happened?"
"Star gang jumped us. Portaled in here--spitballs and riot guns! Bad News, we're clean wiped out! Everyone that was on this level--"
Quillan stood up, holstering the gun, went over to the couch and moved it carefully away from the wall. Baldy was crouched behind it, kneeling on the blood-soaked carpet, gun in his right hand. He lifted a white face, staring eyes, to Quillan.
"Waitin' for 'em to come back," he muttered. "Man, I'm not for long! Got hit twice. Near passed out a couple of times already."
"What about your boys on guard downstairs?"
"Same thing there, I guess ... or they'd have showed up. They got Cooms and the Duke, too! Man, it all happened fast!"
"And the crew on the freighter?"
"Dunno about them."
"You know the freighter's call number?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure. Never thought of that," Baldy said wearily. He seemed dazed now.
"Let's see if you can stand."
Quillan helped the big man to his feet. Baldy hadn't bled too much outwardly, but he seemed to have estimated his own condition correctly. He wasn't for long. Quillan slid an arm under his shoulders.
"Where's a ComWeb?" he asked.
Baldy blinked about. "Passage there--" His voice was beginning to thicken.
The ComWeb was in the second room up the passage. Quillan eased Perk into the seat before it. Baldy's head lolled heavily forward, like a drunken man's. "What's the number?" Quillan asked.
Baldy reflected a few seconds, blinking owlishly at the instrument, then told him. Quillan tapped out the number, flicked on the vision screen, then stood aside and back, beyond the screen's range.
"Yeah, Perk?" a voice said some seconds later. "Hey, Perk ... Perk, what's with ya?"
Baldy spat blood, grinned. "Shot--" he said.
"What?"
"Yeah." Baldy scowled, blinking. "Now, lessee--Oh, yeah. Star gang's gonna jump ya! Watch it!"
"What?"
"Yeah, watch--" Baldy coughed, laid his big head slowly down face forward on the ComWeb stand, and stopping moving.
"Perk! Man, wake up! Perk!"
Quillan quietly took out the gun, reached behind the stand and blew the ComWeb apart. He wasn't certain what the freighter's crew would make of the sudden break in the connection, but they could hardly regard it as reassuring. He made a brief prowl then through the main sections of the level. Evidence everywhere of a short and furious struggle, a struggle between men panicked and enraged almost beyond any regard for self-preservation. It must have been over in minutes. He found that the big hall portal to the ground level had been sealed, whether before or after the shooting he couldn't know. There would have been around twenty members of the Brotherhood on the level. None of them had lived as long as Baldy Perk, but they seemed to have accounted for approximately an equal number of the Star's security force first.
* * * * *
Five Star men came piling out of the fifth level portal behind him a minute or two later, Ryter in the lead. Orca behind Ryter. All five held leveled guns.
"You won't need the hardware," Quillan assured them. "It's harmless enough now. Come on in."
They followed him silently up to the cubicle, stared comprehendingly at dials and indicators. "The thing's back inside there, all right!" Ryter said. He looked at Quillan. "Is this where you've been all the time?"
"Sure, Where else?" The others were forming a half-circle about him, a few paces back.
"Taking quite a chance with that Hlat, weren't you?" Ryter remarked.
"Not too much. I thought of something." Quillan indicated the outportal in the hall. "I had my back against that. A portal's space-break, not solid matter. It couldn't come at me from behind. And if it attacked from any other angle"--he tapped the holstered Miam Devil lightly, and the gun in Orca's hand jerked upward a fraction of an inch--"There aren't many animals that can swallow more than a bolt or two from that baby and keep coming."
There was a moment's silence. Then Orca said thoughtfully, "That would work!"
"Did it see you?" Ryter asked.
"It couldn't have. First I saw of it, it was sailing out from that corner over there. It slammed in after that chunk of sea beef so fast, it shook the cubicle. And that was that." He grinned. "Well, most of our troubles should be over now!"
One of the men gave a brief, nervous laugh. Quillan looked at him curiously. "Something, chum?"
Ryter shook his head. "Something is right! Come on downstairs again, Bad News. This time we have news for you--"
The Brotherhood guards on the ground level had been taken by surprise and shot down almost without losses for the Star men. But the battle on the fourth level had cost more than the dead left up there. An additional number had returned with injures that were serious enough to make them useless for further work.
"It's been expensive," Ryter admitted. "But one more attack by the Hlat would have left me with a panicked mob on my hands. If we'd realized it was going to trap itself--"
"I wasn't so sure that would work either," Quillan said. "Did you get Kinmarten back?"
"Not yet. The chances are he's locked up somewhere on the fourth level. Now the Hlat's out of the way, some of the men have gone back up there to look for him. If Cooms thought he was important enough to start a fight over, I want him back."
"How about the crew on the Beldon ship?" Quillan asked, "Have they been cleaned up?"
"No," Ryter said. "We'll have to do that now, of course."
"How many of them?"
"Supposedly twelve. And that's probably what it is."
"If they know or suspect what's happened," Quillan said, "twelve men can give a boarding party in a lock a remarkable amount of trouble."
Ryter shrugged irritably. "I know, but there isn't much choice. Lancion's bringing in the other group on the Camelot. We don't want to have to handle both of them at the same time."
"How are you planning to take the freighter?"
"When the search party comes back down, we'll put every man we can spare from guard duty here on the job. They'll be instructed to be careful about it ... if they can wind up the matter within the next several hours, that will be early enough. We can't afford too many additional losses now. But we should come out with enough men to take care of Lancion and handle the shipment of Hlats. And that's what counts."
"Like me to take charge of the boarding party?" Quillan inquired. "That sort of thing's been a kind of specialty of mine."
Ryter looked at him without much expression on his face. "I understand that," he said. "But perhaps it would be better if you stayed up here with us."
* * * * *
The search party came back down ten minutes later. They'd looked through every corner of the fourth level. Kinmarten wasn't there, either dead or alive. But one observant member of the group had discovered, first, that the Duke of Fluel was also not among those present, and, next that one of the four outportals on the level had been unsealed. The exit on which the portal was found to be set was in a currently unused hall in the General Office building on the other side of the Star. From that hall, almost every other section of the Star was within convenient portal range.
None of the forty-odd people working in the main control office on the ground level had actually witnessed any shooting; but it was apparent that a number of them were uncomfortably aware that something quite extraordinary must be going on. They were a well-disciplined group, however. An occasional uneasy glance toward one of the armed men lounging along the walls, some anxious faces, were the only noticeable indications of tension. Now and then, there was a brief, low-pitched conversation at one of the desks.
Quillan stood near the center of the office, Ryter and Orca a dozen feet from him on either side. Four Star guards were stationed along the walls. From the office one could see through a large doorspace cut through both sides of a hall directly into the adjoining transmitter room. Four more guards were in there. Aside from the men in the entrance hall and at the subspace portal, what was available at the moment of Ryter's security force was concentrated at this point.
The arrangement made considerable sense; and Quillan gave no sign of being aware that the eyes of the guards shifted to him a little more frequently than to any other point in the office, or that none of them had moved his hand very far away from his gun since they had come in here. But that also made sense. In the general tension area of the Executive Block's ground level, a specific point of tension--highly charged though undetected by the non-involved personnel--was the one provided by the presence of Bad News Quillan here. Ryter was more than suspicious by now; the opened portal on the fourth level, the disappearance of Kinmarten and the Duke, left room for a wide variety of speculations. Few of those speculations could be very favorable to Bad News. Ryter obviously preferred to let things stand as they were until the Beldon freighter was taken and the major part of his group had returned from the subspace sections of the Star. At that time, Bad News could expect to come in for some very direct questioning by the security chief.
The minutes dragged on. Under the circumstances, a glance at his watch could be enough to bring Ryter's uncertainties up to the explosion point, and Quillan also preferred to let things stand as they were for the moment. But he felt reasonably certain that over an hour had passed since he'd left Reetal; and so far there had been no hint of anything unusual occurring in the front part of the building. The murmur of voices in the main control office continued to eddy about him. There were indications that in the transmitter room across the hall messages had begun to be exchanged between the Star and the approaching liner.
A man sitting at a desk near Quillan stood up presently, went out into the hall and disappeared. A short while later, the white-suited figure returned and picked up the interrupted work. Quillan's glance went over the clerk, shifted on. He felt something tighten up swiftly inside him. There was a considerable overall resemblance, but that wasn't the man who had left the office.
Another minute or two went by. Then two other uniformed figures appeared at the opening to the hall, a sparse elderly man, a blond girl. They stood there talking earnestly together for some seconds, then came slowly down the aisle toward Quillan. It appeared to be an argument about some detail of her work. The girl frowned, stubbornly shaking her head. Near Quillan they separated, started off into different sections of the office. The girl, glancing back, still frowning, brushed against Ryter. She looked up at him, startled.
"I'm sorry," she said.
Ryter scowled irritably, started to say something, suddenly appeared surprised. Then his eyes went blank and his knees buckled under him.
The clerk sitting at the nearby desk whistled shrilly.
Quillan wheeled, gun out and up, toward the wall behind him. The two guards there were still lifting their guns. The Miam Devil grunted disapprovingly twice, and the guards went down. Noise crashed from the hall ... heavy sporting rifles. He turned again, saw the two other guards stumbling backward along the far wall. Feminine screaming erupted around the office as the staff dove out of sight behind desks, instrument stands and filing cabinets. The elderly man stood above Orca, a sap in his hand and a please smile on his face.
In the hallway, four white-uniformed men had swung about and were pointing blazing rifles into the transmitter room. The racketing of the gunfire ended abruptly and the rifles were lowered again. The human din in the office began to diminish, turned suddenly into a shocked, strained silence. Quillan realized the blond girl was standing at his elbow.
"Did you get the rest of them?" he asked quickly, in a low voice.
"Everyone who was on this level," Reetal told him. "There weren't many of them."
"I know. But there's a sizable batch still in the subspace section. If we can get the bomb disarmed, we'll just leave them sealed up there. How long before you can bring Ryter around?"
"He'll be able to talk in five minutes."
* * * * *
Quillan had been sitting for some little while in a very comfortable chair in what had been the commodore's personal suite on the Seventh Star, broodingly regarding the image of the Camelot in a huge wall screen. The liner was still over two hours' flight away but would arrive on schedule. On the Star, at least in the normspace section, everything was quiet, and in the main control offices and in the transmitter room normal working conditions had been restored.
A room portal twenty feet away opened suddenly, and Reetal Destone stepped out.
"So there you are!" she observed.
Quillan Looked mildly surprised, then grinned. "I'd hate to have to try to hide from you!" he said.
"Hm-m-m!" said Reetal. She smiled. "What are you drinking?"
He nodded at an open liquor cabinet near the screen. "Velladon was leaving some excellent stuff behind. Join me?"
"Hm-m-m." She went to the cabinet, looked over the bottles, made her selection and filled a glass. "One has the impression," she remarked, "that you were hiding from me."
"One does? I'd have to be losing my cotton-picking mind--"
"Not necessarily." Reetal brought the drink over to his chair, sat down on the armrest with it. "You might just have a rather embarrassing problem to get worked out before you give little Reetal a chance to start asking questions about it."
Quillan looked surprised. "What gave you that notion?"
"Oh," Reetal said, "adding things up gave me that notion.... Care to hear what the things were?"
"Go ahead, doll."
"First," said Reetal, "I understand that a while ago, after you'd first sent me off to do some little job for you, you were in the transmitter room having a highly private--shielded and scrambled--conversation with somebody on board the Camelot."
"Why, yes," Quillan said. "I was talking to the ship's security office. They're arranging to have a Federation police boat pick up what's left of the commodore's boys and the Brotherhood in the subspace section.
"And that," said Reetal, "is where that embarrassing little problem begins. Next, I noticed, as I say, that you were showing this tendency to avoid a chance for a private talk between us. And after thinking about that for a little, and also about a few other things which came to mind at around that time, I went to see Ryter."
"Now why--?"
Reetal ran her fingers soothingly through his hair. "Let me finish, big boy. I found Ryter and Orca in a highly nervous condition. And do you know why they're nervous? They're convinced that some time before the Camelot gets here, you're going to do them both in."
"Hm-m-m," said Quillan.
"Ryter," she went on, "besides being nervous, is also very bitter. In retrospect, he says, it's all very plain what you've done here. You and your associates--a couple of tough boys named Hagready and Boltan, and others not identified--are also after these Hlats. The Duke made some mention of that, too, you remember. The commodore and Ryter bought the story you told them because a transmitter check produced the information that Hagready and Boltan had, in fact, left their usual work areas and gone off on some highly secret business about a month ago.
"Ryter feels that your proposition--to let your gang in on the deal for twenty per cent, or else--was made in something less than good faith. He's concluded that when you learned of the operation being planned by Velladon and the Brotherhood, you and your pals decided to obstruct them and take the Hlats for delivery to Yaco yourselves, without cutting anybody in. He figures that someone like Hagready or Boltan is coming in on the Camelot with a flock of sturdy henchmen to do just that. You, personally, rushed to the Seventh Star to interfere as much as you could here. Ryter admits reluctantly that you did an extremely good job of interfering. He says it's now obvious that every move you made since you showed up had the one purpose of setting the Star group and the Brotherhood at each other's throats. And now that they've practically wiped each other out, you and your associates can go on happily with your original plans.
"But, of course, you can't do that if Ryter and Orca are picked up alive by the Federation cops. The boys down in the subspace section don't matter; they're ordinary gunhands and all they know is that you were somebody who showed up on the scene. But Ryter could, and certainly would, talk--"
"Ah, he's too imaginative," Quillan said, taking a swallow of his drink. "I never heard of the Hlats before I got here. As I told you, I'm on an entirely different kind of job at the moment. I had to make up some kind of story to get an in with the boys, that's all."
"So you're not going to knock those two weasels off?"
"No such intentions. I don't mind them sweating about it till the Feds arrive, but that's it."
"What about Boltan and Hagready?"
"What about them? I did happen to know that if anyone started asking questions about those two, he'd learn that neither had been near his regular beat for close to a month."
"I'll bet!" Reetal said cryptically.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Hm-m-m," she said. "Bad News Quillan! A really tough boy, for sure. You know, I didn't believe for an instant that you were after the Hlats--"
"Why not?"
Reetal said, "I've been on a couple of operations with you, and you'd be surprised how much I've picked up about you from time to time on the side. Swiping a shipment of odd animals and selling them to Yaco, that could be Bad News, in character. Selling a couple of hundred human beings--like Brock and Solvey Kinmarten--to go along with the animals to an outfit like Yaco would not be in character."
"So I have a heart of gold," Quillan said.
"So you fell all over your own big feet about half a minute ago!" Reetal told him. "Bad News Quillan--with no interest whatsoever in the Hlats--still couldn't afford to let Ryter live to talk about him to the Feds, big boy!"
Quillan looked reflective for a moment. "Dirty trick!" he observed. "For that, you might freshen up my glass."
* * * * *
Reetal took both glasses over to the liquor cabinet, freshened them up, and settled down on the armrest of the chair again. "So there we're back to the embarrassing little problem," she said.
"Ryter?"
"No, idiot. We both know that Ryter is headed for Rehabilitation. Fifteen years or so of it, as a guess. The problem is little Reetal who has now learned a good deal more than she was ever intended to learn. Does she head for Rehabilitation, too?"
Quillan took a swallow of his drink and set the glass down again. "Are you suggesting," he inquired, "that I might be, excuse the expression, a cop?"
Reetal patted his head. "Bad News Quillan! Let's look back at his record. What do we find? A shambles, mainly. Smashed-up organizations, outfits, gangs. Top-level crooks with suddenly vacant expressions and unexplained holes in their heads. Why go on? The name is awfully well earned! And nobody realizing anything because the ones who do realize it suddenly ... well, where are Boltan Hagready at the moment."
Quillan sighed. "Since you keep bringing it up--Hagready played it smart, so he's in Rehabilitation. Be cute if Ryter ran into him there some day. Pappy Boltan didn't want to play it smart. I'm not enough of a philosopher to make a guess at where he might be at present. But I knew he wouldn't be talking."
"All right," Reetal said, "we've got that straight. Bad News is Intelligence of some kind. Federation maybe, or maybe one of the services. It doesn't matter, really, I suppose. Now, what about me?"
He reached out and tapped his glass with a fingertip. "That about you, doll. You filled it. I'm drinking it. I may not think quite as fast as you do, but I still think. Would I take a drink from a somewhat lawless and very clever lady who really believed I had her lined up for Rehabilitation? Or who'd be at all likely to blab out something that would ruin an old pal's reputation?"
Reetal ran her fingers through his hair again. "I noticed the deal with the drink," she said. "I guess I just wanted to hear you say it. You don't tell on me, I don't tell on you. Is that it?"
"That's it," Quillan said. "What Ryter and Orca want to tell the Feds doesn't matter. It stops there, the Feds will have the word on me before they arrive. By the way, did you go wake up the Kinmartens yet?"
"Not yet," Reetal said. "Too busy getting the office help soothed down and back to work."
"Well, lets finish these drinks and go do that, then. The little doll's almost bound to be asleep by now, but she might still be sitting there biting nervously at her pretty knuckles."
* * * * *
Major Hesler Quillan of Space Scout Intelligence, was looking unhappy. "We're still searching for them everywhere," he explained to Klayung, "but it's a virtual certainty that the Hlat got them shortly before it was trapped."
Klayung, a stringy, white-haired old gentleman, was an operator of the Psychology Service, in charge of the shipment of Hlats the Camelot had brought in. He and Quillan were waiting in the vestibule of the Seventh Star's rest cubicle vaults for Lady Pendrake's cubicle to be brought over from the Executive Block.
Klayung said reflectively, "Couldn't the criminals with who you were dealing here have hidden the couple away somewhere?"
Quillan shook his head. "There's no way they could have located them so quickly. I made half a dozen portal switches when I was taking Kinmarten to the suite. It would take something with a Hlat's abilities to follow me over that route and stay undetected. And it must be an unusually cunning animal to decide to stay out of sight until I'd led it where it wanted to go."
"Oh, they're intelligent enough," Klayung agreed absently. "Their average basic I.Q. is probably higher than that of human beings. A somewhat different type of mentality, of course. Well, when the cubicle arrives, I'll question the Hlat and we'll find out."
Quillan looked at him. "Those control devices make it possible to hold two-way conversations with the things?"
"Not exactly," Klayung said. "You see, major, the government authorities who were concerned with the discovery of the Hlats realized it would be almost impossible to keep some information about them from getting out. The specimen which was here on the Star has been stationed at various scientific institutions for the past year; a rather large number of people were involved in investigating it and experimenting with it. In consequence, several little legends about them have been deliberately built up. The legends aren't entirely truthful, so they help to keep the actual facts about the Hlats satisfactorily vague.
"The Hlat-talker is such a legend. Actually, the device does nothing. The Hlats respond to telepathic stimuli, both among themselves and from other beings, eventually begin to correlate such stimuli with the meanings of human speech."
"Then you--" Quillan began.
"Yes. Eltak, their discoverer, was a fairly good natural telepath. If he hadn't been abysmally lazy, he might have been very good at it. I carry a variety of the Service's psionic knick-knacks about with me, which gets me somewhat comparable results."
He broke off as the vestibule portal dilated widely. Lady Pendrake's cubicle floated through, directed by two gravity crane operators behind it. Klayung stood up.
"Set it there for the present, please," he directed the operators. "We may call for you later if it needs to be moved again."
He waited until the portal had closed behind the men before walking over to the cubicle. He examined the settings and readings at some length.
"Hm-m-m, yes," he said, straightening finally. His expression became absent for a few seconds; then he went on. "I'm beginning to grasp the situation, I believe. Let me tell you a few things about the Hlats, major. For one, they form quite pronounced likes and dislikes. Eltak, for example, would have been described by most of his fellow men as a rather offensive person. But the Hlats actually became rather fond of him during the fifteen or so years he lived on their island.
"That's one point. The other has to do with their level of intelligence. We discovered on the way out here that our charges had gained quite as comprehensive an understanding of the functioning of the cubicles that had been constructed for them as any human who was not a technical specialist might do. And--"
He interrupted himself, stood rubbing his chin for a moment.
"Well, actually," he said, "that should be enough to prepare you for a look inside the Hlat's cubicle."
Quillan gave him a somewhat surprised glance. "I've been told it's ugly as sin," he remarked. "But I've seen some fairly revolting looking monsters before this."
Klayung coughed. "That's not exactly what I meant," he said. "I ... well, let's just open the thing up. Would you mind, major?"
"Not at all." Quillan stepped over to the side of the cubicle, unlocked the door switch and pulled it over. They both moved back a few feet before the front of the cubicle. A soft humming came for some seconds from the door's mechanisms; then it suddenly swung open. Quillan stooped to glance inside, straightened instantly again, hair bristling.
"Where is it?" he demanded, the Miam Devil out in his hand.
Klayung looked at him thoughtfully. "Not very far away, I believe. But I can assure you, major, that it hasn't the slightest intention of attacking us--or anybody else--at present."
Quillan grunted, looked back into the cubicle. At the far end, the Kinmartens lay side by side, their faces composed. They appeared to be breathing regularly.
"Yes," Klayung said, "they're alive and unharmed." He rubbed his chin again. "And I think it would be best if we simply closed the cubicle now. Later we can call a doctor over from the hospital to put them under sedation before they're taken out. They've both had thoroughly unnerving experiences, and it would be advisable to awaken them gradually to avoid emotional shock."
He moved over to the side of the cubicle, turned the door switch back again. "And now for the rest of it," he said. "We may as well sit down again, major. This may take a little time."
* * * * *
"Let's look at the thing for a moment from the viewpoint of the Hlat," he resumed when he was once more comfortably seated. "Eltak's death took it by surprise. It hadn't at that point grasped what the situation in the Executive Block was like. It took itself out of sight for the moment, killing one of the gang leaders in the process, then began prowling about the various levels of the building, picking up information from the minds and conversation of the men it encountered. In a fairly short time, it learned enough to understand what was planned by the criminals; and it arrived at precisely your own conclusion ... that it might be possible to reduce and demoralize the gangs to the extent that they would no longer be able to carry out their plan. It began a systematic series of attacks on them with that end in mind.
"But meanwhile you had come into the picture. The Hlat was rather puzzled by your motive at first because there appeared to be an extraordinary degree of discrepancy between what you were saying and what you were thinking. But after observing your activities for a while, it began to comprehend what you were trying to do. It realized that your approach was more likely to succeed than its own, and that further action on its side might interfere with your plans. But there remained one thing for it to do.
"I may tell you in confidence, major, that another legend which has been spread about these Hlats is their supposed inability to escape from the cubicles. Even their attendants are supplied with this particular bit of misinformation. Actually, the various force fields in the cubicles don't hamper them in the least. The cubicles are designed simply to protect the Hlats and keep them from being seen; and rest cubicles, of course, can be taken anywhere without arousing undue curiosity.
"You mentioned that the Kinmartens very likable young people. The Hlat had the same feeling about them; they were the only human beings aside from Eltak with whose minds it had become quite familiar. There was no assurance at this point that the plans to prevent a bomb from being exploded in the Star would be successful, and the one place where human beings could hope to survive such an explosion was precisely the interior of the Hlat's cubicle, which had been constructed to safeguard its occupant against any kind of foreseeable accident.
"So the Hlat sprang your cubicle trap, removed the bait, carried the Kinmartens inside, and whipped out of the cubicle again before the rest current could take effect on it. It concluded correctly that everyone would decide it had been recaptured. After that, it moved about the Executive Block, observing events there and prepared to take action again if that appeared to be advisable. When you had concluded your operation successfully, it remained near the cubicle, waiting for me to arrive."
Quillan shook his head. "That's quite an animal!" he observed after some seconds. "You say, it's in our general vicinity now?"
"Yes," Klayung said. "It followed the cubicle down here, and has been drifting about the walls of the vestibule while we ... well, while I talked."
"Why doesn't it show itself?"
Klayung cleared his throat. "For two reasons," he said. "One is that rather large gun you're holding on your knees. It saw you use it several times, and after all the shooting in the Executive Block, you see--"
Quillan slid the Miam Devil into its holster. "Sorry," he said. "Force of habit, I guess. Actually, of course, I've understood for some minutes now that I wasn't ... well, what's the other reason?"
"I'm afraid," Klayung said, "that you offended it with your remark about its appearance. Hlats may have their share of vanity. At any rate, it seems to be sulking."
"Oh," said Quillan. "Well, I'm sure," he went on rather loudly, "that it understands I received the description from a prejudiced source. I'm quite willing to believe it was highly inaccurate."
"Hm-m-m," said Klayung. "That seems to have done it, major. The wall directly across from us--"
Something like a ripple passed along the side wall of the vestibule. Then the wall darkened suddenly, turned black. Quillan blinked, and the Hlat came into view. It hung, spread out like a spider, along half the length of the vestibule wall. Something like a huge, hairy amoeba in overall appearance, though the physical structures under the coarse, black pelt must be of very unamoeba-like complexity. No eyes were in sight, but Quillan had the impression of being regarded steadily. Here and there, along the edges and over the surface of the body, were a variety of flexible extensions.
Quillan stood up, hitched his gun belt into position, and started over toward the wall.
"Lady Pendrake," he said, "honored to meet you. Could we shake hands?"
The End
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
By Robert Sheckley
He said he wasn't immortal--but nothing could kill him. Still, if the Earth was to live as a free world, he had to die.
"Come right in, gentlemen," the Ambassador waved them into the very special suite the State Department had given him. "Please be seated."
Colonel Cercy accepted a chair, trying to size up the individual who had all Washington chewing its fingernails. The Ambassador hardly looked like a menace. He was of medium height and slight build, dressed in a conservative brown tweed suit that the State Department had given him. His face was intelligent, finely molded and aloof.
As human as a human, Cercy thought, studying the alien with bleak, impersonal eyes.
"How may I serve you?" the Ambassador asked, smiling.
"The President has put me in charge of your case," Cercy said. "I've studied Professor Darrig's reports--" he nodded at the scientist beside him--"but I'd like to hear the whole thing for myself."
"Of course," the alien said, lighting a cigarette. He seemed genuinely pleased to be asked; which was interesting, Cercy thought. In the week since he had landed, every important scientist in the country had been at him.
But in a pinch they call the Army, Cercy reminded himself. He settled back in his chair, both hands jammed carelessly in his pockets. His right hand was resting on the butt of a .45, the safety off.
* * * * *
"I have come," the alien said, "as an ambassador-at-large, representing an empire that stretches half-way across the Galaxy. I wish to extend the welcome of my people and to invite you to join our organization."
"I see," Cercy replied. "Some of the scientists got the impression that participation was compulsory."
"You will join," the Ambassador said, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
Cercy could see Darrig stiffen in his chair and bite his lip. Cercy moved the automatic to a position where he could draw it easily. "How did you find us?" he asked.
"We ambassadors-at-large are each assigned an unexplored section of space," the alien said. "We examine each star-system in that region for planets, and each planet for intelligent life. Intelligent life is rare in the Galaxy, you know."
Cercy nodded, although he hadn't been aware of the fact.
"When we find such a planet, we land, as I did, and prepare the inhabitants for their part in our organization."
"How will your people know that you have found intelligent life?" Cercy asked.
"There is a sending mechanism that is part of our structure," the Ambassador answered. "It is triggered when we reach an inhabited planet. This signal is beamed continually into space, to an effective range of several thousand light-years. Follow-up crews are continually sweeping through the limits of the reception area of each Ambassador, listening for such messages. Detecting one, a colonizing team follows it to the planet."
He tapped his cigarette delicately on the edge of an ash tray. "This method has definite advantages over sending combined colonization and exploration teams obviously. It avoids the necessity of equipping large forces for what may be decades of searching."
"Sure." Cercy's face was expressionless. "Would you tell me more about this message?"
"There isn't much more you need know. The beam is not detectable by your methods and, therefore, cannot be jammed. The message continues as long as I am alive."
* * * * *
Darrig drew in his breath sharply, glancing at Cercy.
"If you stopped broadcasting," Cercy said casually, "our planet would never be found."
"Not until this section of space was resurveyed," the diplomat agreed.
"Very well. As a duly appointed representative of the President of the United States, I ask you to stop transmitting. We don't choose to become part of your empire."
"I'm sorry," the Ambassador said. He shrugged his shoulders easily. Cercy wondered how many times he had played this scene on how many other planets.
"There's really nothing I can do." He stood up.
"Then you won't stop?"
"I can't. I have no control over the sending, once it's activated." The diplomat turned and walked to the window. "However, I have prepared a philosophy for you. It is my duty, as your Ambassador, to ease the shock of transition as much as possible. This philosophy will make it instantly apparent that--"
As the Ambassador reached the window, Cercy's gun was out of his pocket and roaring. He squeezed six rounds in almost a single explosion, aiming at the Ambassador's head and back. Then an uncontrollable shudder ran through him.
The Ambassador was no longer there!
* * * * *
Cercy and Darrig stared at each other. Darrig muttered something about ghosts. Then, just as suddenly, the Ambassador was back.
"You didn't think," he said, "that it would be as easy as all that, did you? We Ambassadors have, necessarily, a certain diplomatic immunity." He fingered one of the bullet holes in the wall. "In case you don't understand, let me put it this way. It is not in your power to kill me. You couldn't even understand the nature of my defense."
He looked at them, and in that moment Cercy felt the Ambassador's complete alienness.
"Good day, gentlemen," he said.
Darrig and Cercy walked silently back to the control room. Neither had really expected that the Ambassador would be killed so easily, but it had still been a shock when the slugs had failed.
"I suppose you saw it all, Malley?" Cercy asked, when he reached the control room.
The thin, balding psychiatrist nodded sadly. "Got it on film, too."
"I wonder what his philosophy is," Darrig mused, half to himself.
"It was illogical to expect it would work. No race would send an ambassador with a message like that and expect him to live through it. Unless--"
"Unless what?"
"Unless he had a pretty effective defense," the psychiatrist finished unhappily.
Cercy walked across the room and looked at the video panel. The Ambassador's suite was very special. It had been hurriedly constructed two days after he had landed and delivered his message. The suite was steel and lead lined, filled with video and movie cameras, recorders, and a variety of other things.
It was the last word in elaborate death cells.
In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He was typing on a little portable the Government had given him.
"Hey, Harrison!" Cercy called. "Might as well go ahead with Plan Two."
Harrison came out of a side room where he had been examining the circuits leading to the Ambassador's suite. Methodically he checked his pressure gauges, set the controls and looked at Cercy. "Now?" he asked.
"Now." Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing.
Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from the ceiling and floor.
In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace.
Cercy let it burn for two minutes, then motioned Harrison to cut the switch. They stared at the roasted room.
They were looking, hopefully, for a charred corpse.
But the Ambassador reappeared beside his desk, looking ruefully at the charred typewriter. He was completely unsinged.
"Could you get me another typewriter?" he asked, looking directly at one of the hidden projectors. "I'm setting down a philosophy for you ungrateful wretches."
He seated himself in the wreckage of an armchair. In a moment, he was apparently asleep.
* * * * *
"All right, everyone grab a seat," Cercy said. "Time for a council of war."
Malley straddled a chair backward. Harrison lighted a pipe as he sat down, slowly puffing it into life.
"Now, then," Cercy said. "The Government has dropped this squarely in our laps. We have to kill the Ambassador--obviously. I've been put in charge." Cercy grinned with regret. "Probably because no one higher up wants the responsibility of failure. And I've selected you three as my staff. We can have anything we want, any assistance or advice we need. All right. Any ideas?"
"How about Plan Three?" Harrison asked.
"We'll get to that," Cercy said. "But I don't believe it's going to work."
"I don't either," Darrig agreed. "We don't even know the nature of his defense."
"That's the first order of business. Malley, take all our data so far, and get someone to feed it into the Derichman Analyzer. You know the stuff we want. What properties has X, if X can do thus and thus?"
"Right," Malley said. He left, muttering something about the ascendancy of the physical sciences.
"Harrison," Cercy asked, "is Plan Three set up?"
"Sure."
"Give it a try."
While Harrison was making his last adjustments, Cercy watched Darrig. The plump little physicist was staring thoughtfully into space, muttering to himself. Cercy hoped he would come up with something. He was expecting great things of Darrig.
Knowing the impossibility of working with great numbers of people, Cercy had picked his staff with care. Quality was what he wanted.
With that in mind, he had chosen Harrison first. The stocky, sour-faced engineer had a reputation for being able to build anything, given half an idea of how it worked.
Cercy had selected Malley, the psychiatrist, because he wasn't sure that killing the Ambassador was going to be a purely physical problem.
Darrig was a mathematical physicist, but his restless, curious mind had come up with some interesting theories in other fields. He was the only one of the four who was really interested in the Ambassador as an intellectual problem.
"He's like Metal Old Man," Darrig said finally.
"What's that?"
"Haven't you ever heard the story of Metal Old Man? Well, he was a monster covered with black metal armor. He was met by Monster-Slayer, an Apache culture hero. Monster-Slayer, after many attempts, finally killed Metal Old Man."
"How did he do it?"
"Shot him in the armpit. He didn't have any armor there."
"Fine," Cercy grinned. "Ask our Ambassador to raise his arm."
"All set!" Harrison called.
"Fine. Go."
In the Ambassador's room, an invisible spray of gamma rays silently began to flood the room with deadly radiation.
But there was no Ambassador to receive them.
"That's enough," Cercy said, after a while. "That would kill a herd of elephants."
But the Ambassador stayed invisible for five hours, until some of the radioactivity had abated. Then he appeared again.
"I'm still waiting for that typewriter," he said.
* * * * *
"Here's the Analyzer's report." Malley handed Cercy a sheaf of papers. "This is the final formulation, boiled down."
Cercy read it aloud: "The simplest defense against any and all weapons, is to become each particular weapon."
"Great," Harrison said. "What does it mean?"
"It means," Darrig explained, "that when we attack the Ambassador with fire, he turns into fire. Shoot at him, and he turns into a bullet--until the menace is gone, and then he changes back again." He took the papers out of Cercy's hand and riffled through them.
"Hmm. Wonder if there's any historical parallel? Don't suppose so." He raised his head. "Although this isn't conclusive, it seems logical enough. Any other defense would involve recognition of the weapon first, then an appraisal, then a countermove predicated on the potentialities of the weapon. The Ambassador's defense would be a lot faster and safer. He wouldn't have to recognize the weapon. I suppose his body simply identifies, in some way, with the menace at hand."
"Did the Analyzer say there was any way of breaking this defense?" Cercy asked.
"The Analyzer stated definitely that there was no way, if the premise were true," Malley answered gloomily.
"We can discard that judgment," Darrig said. "The machine is limited."
"But we still haven't got any way of stopping him," Malley pointed out. "And he's still broadcasting that beam."
Cercy thought for a moment. "Call in every expert you can find. We're going to throw the book at the Ambassador. I know," he said, looking at Darrig's dubious expression, "but we have to try."
* * * * *
During the next few days, every combination and permutation of death was thrown at the Ambassador. He was showered with weapons, ranging from Stone-Age axes to modern high-powered rifles, peppered with hand grenades, drowned in acid, suffocated in poison gas.
He kept shrugging his shoulders philosophically, and continued to work on the new typewriter they had given him.
Bacteria was piped in, first the known germ diseases, then mutated species.
The diplomat didn't even sneeze.
He was showered with electricity, radiation, wooden weapons, iron weapons, copper weapons, brass weapons, uranium weapons--anything and everything, just to cover all possibilities.
He didn't suffer a scratch, but his room looked as though a bar-room brawl had been going on in it continually for fifty years.
Malley was working on an idea of his own, as was Darrig. The physicist interrupted himself long enough to remind Cercy of the Baldur myth. Baldur had been showered with every kind of weapon and remained unscathed, because everything on Earth had promised to love him. Everything, except the mistletoe. When a little twig of it was shot at him, he died.
Cercy turned away impatiently, but had an order of mistletoe sent up, just in case.
It was, at least, no less effective than the explosive shells or the bow and arrow. It did nothing except lend an oddly festive air to the battered room.
After a week of this, they moved the unprotesting Ambassador into a newer, bigger, stronger death cell. They were unable to venture into his old one because of the radioactivity and micro-organisms.
The Ambassador went back to work at his typewriter. All his previous attempts had been burned, torn or eaten away.
"Let's go talk to him," Darrig suggested, after another day had passed. Cercy agreed. For the moment, they were out of ideas.
* * * * *
"Come right in, gentlemen," the Ambassador said, so cheerfully that Cercy felt sick. "I'm sorry I can't offer you anything. Through an oversight, I haven't been given any food or water for about ten days. Not that it matters, of course."
"Glad to hear it," Cercy said. The Ambassador hardly looked as if he had been facing all the violence Earth had to offer. On the contrary, Cercy and his men looked as though they had been under bombardment.
"You've got quite a defense there," Malley said conversationally.
"Glad you like it."
"Would you mind telling us how it works?" Darrig asked innocently.
"Don't you know?"
"We think so. You become what is attacking you. Is that right?"
"Certainly," the Ambassador said. "You see, I have no secrets from you."
"Is there anything we can give you," Cercy asked, "to get you to turn off that signal?"
"A bribe?"
"Sure," Cercy said. "Anything you--?"
"Nothing," the Ambassador replied.
"Look, be reasonable," Harrison said. "You don't want to cause a war, do you? Earth is united now. We're arming--"
"With what?"
"Atom bombs," Malley answered him. "Hydrogen bombs. We're--"
"Drop one on me," the Ambassador said. "It wouldn't kill me. What makes you think it will have any effect on my people?"
* * * * *
The four men were silent. Somehow, they hadn't thought of that.
"A people's ability to make war," the Ambassador stated, "is a measure of the status of their civilization. Stage one is the use of simple physical extensions. Stage two is control at the molecular level. You are on the threshold of stage three, although still far from mastery of atomic and subatomic forces." He smiled ingratiatingly. "My people are reaching the limits of stage five."
"What would that be?" Darrig asked.
"You'll find out," the Ambassador said. "But perhaps you've wondered if my powers are typical? I don't mind telling you that they're not. In order for me to do my job and nothing more, I have certain built-in restrictions, making me capable only of passive action."
"Why?" Darrig asked.
"For obvious reasons. If I were to take positive action in a moment of anger, I might destroy your entire planet."
"Do you expect us to believe that?" Cercy asked.
"Why not? Is it so hard to understand? Can't you believe that there are forces you know nothing about? And there is another reason for my passiveness. Certainly by this time you've deduced it?"
"To break our spirit, I suppose," Cercy said.
"Exactly. My telling you won't make any difference, either. The pattern is always the same. An Ambassador lands and delivers his message to a high-spirited, wild young race like yours. There is frenzied resistance against him, spasmodic attempts to kill him. After all these fail, the people are usually quite crestfallen. When the colonization team arrives, their indoctrination goes along just that much faster." He paused, then said, "Most planets are more interested in the philosophy I have to offer. I assure you, it will make the transition far easier."
He held out a sheaf of typewritten pages. "Won't you at least look through it?"
Darrig accepted the papers and put them in his pocket. "When I get time."
"I suggest you give it a try," the Ambassador said. "You must be near the crisis point now. Why not give it up?"
"Not yet," Cercy replied tonelessly.
"Don't forget to read the philosophy," the Ambassador urged them.
The men hurried from the room.
* * * * *
"Now look," Malley said, once they were back in the control room, "there are a few things we haven't tried. How about utilizing psychology?"
"Anything you like," Cercy agreed, "including black magic. What did you have in mind?"
"The way I see it," Malley answered, "the Ambassador is geared to respond, instantaneously, to any threat. He must have an all-or-nothing defensive reflex. I suggest first that we try something that won't trigger that reflex."
"Like what?" Cercy asked.
"Hypnotism. Perhaps we can find out something."
"Sure," Cercy said. "Try it. Try anything."
Cercy, Malley and Darrig gathered around the video screen as an infinitesimal amount of a light hypnotic gas was admitted into the Ambassador's room. At the same time, a bolt of electricity lashed into the chair where the Ambassador was sitting.
"That was to distract him," Malley explained. The Ambassador vanished before the electricity struck him, and then appeared again, curled up in his armchair.
"That's enough," Malley whispered, and shut the valve. They watched. After a while, the Ambassador put down his book and stared into the distance.
"How strange," he said. "Alfern dead. Good friend ... just a freak accident. He ran into it, out there. Didn't have a chance. But it doesn't happen often."
"He's thinking out loud," Malley whispered, although there was no possibility of the Ambassador's hearing them. "Vocalizing his thoughts. His friend must have been on his mind for some time."
"Of course," the Ambassador went on, "Alfern had to die sometime. No immortality--yet. But that way--no defense. Out there in space they just pop up. Always there, underneath, just waiting for a chance to boil out."
"His body isn't reacting to the hypnotic as a menace yet," Cercy whispered.
"Well," the Ambassador told himself, "the regularizing principle has been doing pretty well, keeping it all down, smoothing out the inconsistencies--"
Suddenly he leaped to his feet, his face pale for a moment, as he obviously tried to remember what he had said. Then he laughed.
"Clever. That's the first time that particular trick has been played on me, and the last time. But, gentlemen, it didn't do you any good. I don't know, myself, how to go about killing me." He laughed at the blank walls.
"Besides," he continued, "the colonizing team must have the direction now. They'll find you with or without me."
He sat down again, smiling.
* * * * *
"That does it!" Darrig cried. "He's not invulnerable. Something killed his friend Alfern."
"Something out in space," Cercy reminded him. "I wonder what it was."
"Let me see," Darrig reflected aloud. "The regularizing principle. That must be a natural law we knew nothing about. And underneath--what would be underneath?"
"He said the colonization team would find us anyhow," Malley reminded them.
"First things first," Cercy said. "He might have been bluffing us ... no, I don't suppose so. We still have to get the Ambassador out of the way."
"I think I know what is underneath!" Darrig exclaimed. "This is wonderful. A new cosmology, perhaps."
"What is it?" Cercy asked. "Anything we can use?"
"I think so. But let me work it out. I think I'll go back to my hotel. I have some books there I want to check, and I don't want to be disturbed for a few hours."
"All right," Cercy agreed. "But what--?"
"No, no, I could be wrong," Darrig said. "Let me work it out." He hurried from the room.
"What do you think he's driving at?" Malley asked.
"Beats me," Cercy shrugged. "Come on, let's try some more of that psychological stuff."
First they filled the Ambassador's room with several feet of water. Not enough to drown him, just enough to make him good and uncomfortable.
To this, they added the lights. For eight hours, lights flashed in the Ambassador's room. Bright lights to pry under his eyelids; dull, clashing ones to disturb him.
Sound came next--screeches and screams and shrill, grating noises. The sound of a man's fingernails being dragged across slate, amplified a thousand times, and strange, sucking noises, and shouts and whispers.
Then, the smells. Then, everything else they could think of that could drive a man insane.
The Ambassador slept peacefully through it all.
* * * * *
"Now look," Cercy said, the following day, "let's start using our damned heads." His voice was hoarse and rough. Although the psychological torture hadn't bothered the Ambassador, it seemed to have backfired on Cercy and his men.
"Where in hell is Darrig?"
"Still working on that idea of his," Malley said, rubbing his stubbled chin. "Says he's just about got it."
"We'll work on the assumption that he can't produce," Cercy said. "Start thinking. For example, if the Ambassador can turn into anything, what is there he can't turn into?"
"Good question," Harrison grunted.
"It's the payoff question," Cercy said. "No use throwing a spear at a man who can turn into one."
"How about this?" Malley asked. "Taking it for granted he can turn into anything, how about putting him in a situation where he'll be attacked even after he alters?"
"I'm listening," Cercy said.
"Say he's in danger. He turns into the thing threatening him. What if that thing were itself being threatened? And, in turn, was in the act of threatening something else? What would he do then?"
"How are you going to put that into action?" Cercy asked.
"Like this." Malley picked up the telephone. "Hello? Give me the Washington Zoo. This is urgent."
The Ambassador turned as the door opened. An unwilling, angry, hungry tiger was propelled in. The door slammed shut.
The tiger looked at the Ambassador. The Ambassador looked at the tiger.
"Most ingenious," the Ambassador said.
At the sound of his voice, the tiger came unglued. He sprang like a steel spring uncoiling, landing on the floor where the Ambassador had been.
The door opened again. Another tiger was pushed in. He snarled angrily and leaped at the first. They smashed together in midair.
The Ambassador appeared a few feet off, watching. He moved back when a lion entered the door, head up and alert. The lion sprang at him, almost going over on his head when he struck nothing. Not finding any human, the lion leaped on one of the tigers.
The Ambassador reappeared in his chair, where he sat smoking and watching the beasts kill each other.
In ten minutes the room looked like an abattoir.
But by then the Ambassador had tired of the spectacle, and was reclining on his bed, reading.
* * * * *
"I give up," Malley said. "That was my last bright idea."
Cercy stared at the floor, not answering. Harrison was seated in the corner, getting quietly drunk.
The telephone rang.
"Yeah?" Cercy said.
"I've got it!" Darrig's voice shouted over the line. "I really think this is it. Look, I'm taking a cab right down. Tell Harrison to find some helpers."
"What is it?" Cercy asked.
"The chaos underneath!" Darrig replied, and hung up.
They paced the floor, waiting for him to show up. Half an hour passed, then an hour. Finally, three hours after he had called, Darrig strolled in.
"Hello," he said casually.
"Hello, hell!" Cercy growled. "What kept you?"
"On the way over," Darrig said, "I read the Ambassador's philosophy. It's quite a work."
"Is that what took you so long?"
"Yes. I had the driver take me around the park a few times, while I was reading it."
"Skip it. How about--"
"I can't skip it," Darrig said, in a strange, tight voice. "I'm afraid we were wrong. About the aliens, I mean. It's perfectly right and proper that they should rule us. As a matter of fact, I wish they'd hurry up and get here."
But Darrig didn't look certain. His voice shook and perspiration poured from his face. He twisted his hands together, as though in agony.
"It's hard to explain," he said. "Everything became clear as soon as I started reading it. I saw how stupid we were, trying to be independent in this interdependent Universe. I saw--oh, look, Cercy. Let's stop all this foolishness and accept the Ambassador as our friend."
"Calm down!" Cercy shouted at the perfectly calm physicist. "You don't know what you're saying."
"It's strange," Darrig said. "I know how I felt--I just don't feel that way any more. I think. Anyhow, I know your trouble. You haven't read the philosophy. You'll see what I mean, once you've read it." He handed Cercy the pile of papers. Cercy promptly ignited them with his cigarette lighter.
"It doesn't matter," Darrig said. "I've got it memorized. Just listen. Axiom one. All peoples--"
Cercy hit him, a short, clean blow, and Darrig slumped to the floor.
"Those words must be semantically keyed," Malley said. "They're designed to set off certain reactions in us, I suppose. All the Ambassador does is alter the philosophy to suit the peoples he's dealing with."
"Look, Malley," Cercy said. "This is your job now. Darrig knows, or thought he knew, the answer. You have to get that out of him."
"That won't be easy," Malley said. "He'd feel that he was betraying everything he believes in, if he were to tell us."
"I don't care how you get it," Cercy said. "Just get it."
"Even if it kills him?" Malley asked.
"Even if it kills you."
"Help me get him to my lab," Malley said.
* * * * *
That night Cercy and Harrison kept watch on the Ambassador from the control room. Cercy found his thoughts were racing in circles.
What had killed Alfern in space? Could it be duplicated on Earth? What was the regularizing principle? What was the chaos underneath?
What in hell am I doing here? he asked himself. But he couldn't start that sort of thing.
"What do you figure the Ambassador is?" he asked Harrison. "Is he a man?"
"Looks like one," Harrison said drowsily.
"But he doesn't act like one. I wonder if this is his true shape?"
Harrison shook his head, and lighted his pipe.
"What is there of him?" Cercy asked. "He looks like a man, but he can change into anything else. You can't attack him; he adapts. He's like water, taking the shape of any vessel he's poured into."
"You can boil water," Harrison yawned.
"Sure. Water hasn't any shape, has it? Or has it? What's basic?"
With an effort, Harrison tried to focus on Cercy's words. "Molecular pattern? The matrix?"
"Matrix," Cercy repeated, yawning himself. "Pattern. Must be something like that. A pattern is abstract, isn't it?"
"Sure. A pattern can be impressed on anything. What did I say?"
"Let's see," Cercy said. "Pattern. Matrix. Everything about the Ambassador is capable of change. There must be some unifying force that retains his personality. Something that doesn't change, no matter what contortions he goes through."
"Like a piece of string," Harrison murmured with his eyes closed.
"Sure. Tie it in knots, weave a rope out of it, wind it around your finger; it's still string."
"Yeah."
"But how do you attack a pattern?" Cercy asked. And why couldn't he get some sleep? To hell with the Ambassador and his hordes of colonists, he was going to close his eyes for a moment....
* * * * *
"Wake up, Colonel!"
Cercy pried his eyes open and looked up at Malley. Besides him, Harrison was snoring deeply. "Did you get anything?"
"Not a thing," Malley confessed. "The philosophy must've had quite an effect on him. But it didn't work all the way. Darrig knew that he had wanted to kill the Ambassador, and for good and sufficient reasons. Although he felt differently now, he still had the feeling that he was betraying us. On the one hand, he couldn't hurt the Ambassador; on the other, he wouldn't hurt us."
"Won't he tell anything?"
"I'm afraid it's not that simple," Malley said. "You know, if you have an insurmountable obstacle that must be surmounted ... and also, I think the philosophy had an injurious effect on his mind."
"What are you trying to say?" Cercy got to his feet.
"I'm sorry," Malley apologized, "there wasn't a damned thing I could do. Darrig fought the whole thing out in his mind, and when he couldn't fight any longer, he--retreated. I'm afraid he's hopelessly insane."
"Let's see him."
They walked down the corridor to Malley's laboratory. Darrig was relaxed on a couch, his eyes glazed and staring.
"Is there any way of curing him?" Cercy asked.
"Shock therapy, maybe." Malley was dubious. "It'll take a long time. And he'll probably block out everything that had to do with producing this."
Cercy turned away, feeling sick. Even if Darrig could be cured, it would be too late. The aliens must have picked up the Ambassador's message by now and were undoubtedly heading for Earth.
"What's this?" Cercy asked, picking up a piece of paper that lay by Darrig's hand.
"Oh, he was doodling," Malley said. "Is there anything written on it?"
Cercy read aloud: "'Upon further consideration I can see that Chaos and the Gorgon Medusa are closely related.'"
"What does that mean?" Malley asked.
"I don't know," Cercy puzzled. "He was always interested in folklore."
"Sounds schizophrenic," the psychiatrist said.
Cercy read it again. "'Upon further consideration, I can see that Chaos and the Gorgon Medusa are closely related.'" He stared at it. "Isn't it possible," he asked Malley, "that he was trying to give us a clue? Trying to trick himself into giving and not giving at the same time?"
"It's possible," Malley agreed. "An unsuccessful compromise--But what could it mean?"
"Chaos." Cercy remembered Darrig's mentioning that word in his telephone call. "That was the original state of the Universe in Greek myth, wasn't it? The formlessness out of which everything came?"
"Something like that," Malley said. "And Medusa was one of those three sisters with the horrible faces."
Cercy stood for a moment, staring at the paper. Chaos ... Medusa ... and the organizing principle! Of course!
"I think--" He turned and ran from the room. Malley looked at him; then loaded a hypodermic and followed.
* * * * *
In the control room, Cercy shouted Harrison into consciousness.
"Listen," he said, "I want you to build something, quick. Do you hear me?"
"Sure." Harrison blinked and sat up. "What's the rush?"
"I know what Darrig wanted to tell us," Cercy said. "Come on, I'll tell you what I want. And Malley, put down that hypodermic. I haven't cracked. I want you to get me a book on Greek mythology. And hurry it up."
Finding a Greek mythology isn't an easy task at two o'clock in the morning. With the aid of FBI men, Malley routed a book dealer out of bed. He got his book and hurried back.
Cercy was red-eyed and excited, and Harrison and his helpers were working away at three crazy looking rigs. Cercy snatched the book from Malley, looked up one item, and put it down.
"Great work," he said. "We're all set now. Finished, Harrison?"
"Just about." Harrison and ten helpers were screwing in the last parts. "Will you tell me what this is?"
"Me too," Malley put in.
"I don't mean to be secretive," Cercy said. "I'm just in a hurry. I'll explain as we go along." He stood up. "Okay, let's wake up the Ambassador."
* * * * *
They watched the screen as a bolt of electricity leaped from the ceiling to the Ambassador's bed. Immediately, the Ambassador vanished.
"Now he's a part of that stream of electrons, right?" Cercy asked.
"That's what he told us," Malley said.
"But still keeping his pattern, within the stream," Cercy continued. "He has to, in order to get back into his own shape. Now we start the first disrupter."
Harrison hooked the machine into circuit, and sent his helpers away.
"Here's a running graph of the electron stream," Cercy said. "See the difference?" On the graph there was an irregular series of peaks and valleys, constantly shifting and leveling. "Do you remember when you hypnotized the Ambassador? He talked about his friend who'd been killed in space."
"That's right," Malley nodded. "His friend had been killed by something that had just popped up."
"He said something else," Cercy went on. "He told us that the basic organizing force of the Universe usually stopped things like that. What does that mean to you?"
"The organizing force," Malley repeated slowly. "Didn't Darrig say that that was a new natural law?"
"He did. But think of the implications, as Darrig did. If an organizing principle is engaged in some work, there must be something that opposes it. That which opposes organization is--"
"Chaos!"
"That's what Darrig thought, and what we should have seen. The chaos is underlying, and out of it there arose an organizing principle. This principle, if I've got it right, sought to suppress the fundamental chaos, to make all things regular.
"But the chaos still boils out in spots, as Alfern found out. Perhaps the organizational pattern is weaker in space. Anyhow, those spots are dangerous, until the organizing principle gets to work on them."
* * * * *
He turned to the panel. "Okay, Harrison. Throw in the second disrupter." The peaks and valleys altered on the graph. They started to mount in crazy, meaningless configurations.
"Take Darrig's message in the light of that. Chaos, we know, is underlying. Everything was formed out of it. The Gorgon Medusa was something that couldn't be looked upon. She turned men into stone, you recall, destroyed them. So, Darrig found a relationship between chaos and that which can't be looked upon. All with regard to the Ambassador, of course."
"The Ambassador can't look upon chaos!" Malley cried.
"That's it. The Ambassador is capable of an infinite number of alterations and permutations. But something--the matrix--can't change, because then there would be nothing left. To destroy something as abstract as a pattern, we need a state in which no pattern is possible. A state of chaos."
The third disrupter was thrown into circuit. The graph looked as if a drunken caterpillar had been sketching on it.
"Those disrupters are Harrison's idea," Cercy said. "I told him I wanted an electrical current with absolutely no coherent pattern. The disrupters are an extension of radio jamming. The first alters the electrical pattern. That's its purpose: to produce a state of patternlessness. The second tries to destroy the pattern left by the first; the third tries to destroy the pattern made by the first two. They're fed back then, and any remaining pattern is systematically destroyed in circuit ... I hope."
"This is supposed to produce a state of chaos?" Malley asked, looking into the screen.
For a while there was only the whining of the machines and the crazy doodling of the graph. Then, in the middle of the Ambassador's room, a spot appeared. It wavered, shrunk, expanded--
What happened was indescribable. All they knew was that everything within the spot had disappeared.
"Switch it off" Cercy shouted. Harrison cut the switch.
The spot continued to grow.
"How is it we're able to look at it?" Malley asked, staring at the screen.
"The shield of Perseus, remember?" Cercy said. "Using it as a mirror, he could look at Medusa."
"It's still growing!" Malley shouted.
"There was a calculated risk in all this," Cercy said. "There's always the possibility that the chaos may go on, unchecked. If that happens, it won't matter much what--"
The spot stopped growing. Its edges wavered and rippled, and then it started to shrink.
"The organizing principle," Cercy said, and collapsed into a chair.
"Any sign of the Ambassador?" he asked, in a few minutes.
The spot was still wavering. Then it was gone. Instantly there was an explosion. The steel walls buckled inward, but held. The screen went dead.
"The spot removed all the air from the room," Cercy explained, "as well as the furniture and the Ambassador."
"He couldn't take it," Malley said. "No pattern can cohere, in a state of patternlessness. He's gone to join Alfern."
Malley started to giggle. Cercy felt like joining him, but pulled himself together.
"Take it easy," he said. "We're not through yet."
"Sure we are! The Ambassador--"
"Is out of the way. But there's still an alien fleet homing in on this region of space. A fleet so strong we couldn't scratch it with an H-bomb. They'll be looking for us."
He stood up.
"Go home and get some sleep. Something tells me that tomorrow we're going to have to start figuring out some way of camouflaging a planet."
THE WORLD THAT COULDN'T BE
By Clifford D. Simak
The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush--and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam.
Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.
Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face.
"No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha."
"The hell I don't," said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.
He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.
It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.
"Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha."
"I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left."
* * * * *
Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.
"It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there...."
"Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around."
"Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the Cytha."
"If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out. "If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what happens to you?"
"We will grow the corn ourselves."
"That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that Cytha."
"But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it."
Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.
It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless.
"Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat."
"Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the vua, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine--need it very badly. And what is more, out there--" he swept his arm toward the sky--"out there they pay very much for it."
"But, mister...."
"I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm."
"No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation.
"You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly.
* * * * *
He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.
Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village.
Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.
He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothes-line, limp in the breathless morning.
Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do.
Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.
Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook.
Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.
Shotwell reached for a towel.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Cytha got into the field."
"Cytha?"
"A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of vua."
"Big? Little? What are its characteristics?"
The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups.
God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.
* * * * *
Shotwell pulled up his chair. "You didn't answer me. What is a Cytha like?"
"I wouldn't know," said Duncan.
"Don't know? But you're going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don't know--"
"Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. Well find out what it's like once we catch up to it."
"We?"
"The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog."
"Look, Gavin. I've put you to a lot of trouble and you've been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go."
"Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest."
"All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha."
Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. "It's a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It's always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places."
"No one's ever bagged one?"
"Not that I ever heard of." Duncan patted the rifle. "Let me get a bead on it."
He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered.
"Some day," he said, "I'm going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You'd think--"
"It's the freight rates," Shotwell said. "I'll send you a pound when I go back."
"Not at the price they'd charge to ship it out," said Duncan. "I wouldn't hear of it."
They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: "I'm getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to nothing."
"I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time."
Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. "There's an answer, a logical explanation. It's easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that's exactly what has happened here on Layard. It's easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it."
* * * * *
"Now hold up a minute," Duncan protested. "There's no use blowing a gasket. I haven't got the time this morning to listen to your lecture."
"But it's not the lack of sex that worries me entirely," Shotwell said, "although it's the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing."
"I have no doubt of it," said Duncan, "but if you please--"
"Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood."
"Not brotherhood," said Duncan, chuckling. "Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood."
The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly.
"Zikkara said that mister want me," the native told them. "I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos."
"I am glad to hear that," Duncan replied. "You have no Cytha taboo, then."
"Cytha!" yipped the native. "Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!"
Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found.
"Rockahominy," he explained to Shotwell. "Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine. It's no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going."
"You figure you'll be gone that long?"
"Maybe overnight. I don't know. Won't stop until I get it. Can't afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days."
"Good hunting," Shotwell said. "I'll hold the fort."
Duncan said to Sipar: "Quit sniveling and come on."
He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked open the door and strode out.
Sipar followed meekly.
II
Duncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day.
In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm, they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black blur fade into the bush.
Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready.
Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave itself and went off at a shuffling gallop.
Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard.
With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something less than gentleness and they went on again.
The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with them.
Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its special province; here it was at home.
With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions for it to stop tracking.
The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared, just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead.
Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on his face and bit him.
* * * * *
He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness.
He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha.
But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there was nothing else.
Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead--about halfway up.
He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion.
It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could not be sure exactly what it looked like.
He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he could distinguish its outline with the naked eye.
His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the beast stood up.
It was not as large as he had thought it might be--perhaps a little larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as well.
Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the trigger squeeze.
The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass.
"Dead center," Duncan assured himself.
He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out. The feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into the breech.
He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it had fallen.
Duncan got to his feet, dug out the bandanna and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker.
"It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now."
* * * * *
It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe.
He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the slope and started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen. There were three small gouts of torn, mangled fur and flesh lying on the ground and there was nothing else.
He spun around and jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was danger--a saw-toothed sense of danger close behind his neck.
"Sipar!" he called in a tense whisper, "Watch out!"
The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat like straining ropes of steel.
Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm's length, elbows crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of a second.
Nothing stirred. There was no more than emptiness--the emptiness of sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow land stretching into foreverness.
Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort.
The Earthman walked to the place where the Cytha had fallen and picked up, one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh.
He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly.
He'd found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail.
And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart.
* * * * *
He turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook it.
"Snap out of it," he ordered.
He expected pleading, cowering, terror, but there was none.
Sipar got swiftly to its feet and stood looking at him and there was, he thought, an odd glitter in its eyes.
"Get going," Duncan said. "We still have a little time. Start circling and pick up the trail. I will cover you."
He glanced at the sun. An hour and a half still left--maybe as much as two. There might still be time to get this buttoned up before the fall of night.
A half mile beyond the knoll, Sipar picked up the trail again and they went ahead, but now they traveled more cautiously, for any bush, any rock, any clump of grass might conceal the wounded beast.
Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He'd been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those frontier tales he'd heard about the Cytha--the kind of superstitious chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land.
He gripped the rifle tighter and went on.
No animal, he told himself, was unkillable.
Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting. In the morning, they'd take up the trail again, and by that time the Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and slow and weak. It might be even dead.
Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thorn-bush thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm's length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could drink it.
The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand.
Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of rockahominy.
"Here," he said to Sipar. "Supper."
The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into its palm.
"Thank you, mister," Sipar said. "Food-giver."
"Huh?" asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. "Dive into it," he said, almost kindly. "It isn't much, but it gives you strength. We'll need strength tomorrow."
* * * * *
Food-giver, eh? Trying to butter him up, perhaps. In a little while, Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back for the farm.
Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this bunch of sexless wonders. Corn, thank God, grew well on the red and stubborn soil of Layard--good old corn from North America. Fed to hogs, made into corn-pone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder, this unorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them.
Corn from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the vua of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one planet and something from another and still something further from a third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and understanding than was evident today.
He poured a mound of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag back into his pocket.
"Sipar."
"Yes, mister?"
"You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us."
"No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me."
"I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you, likewise, are taboo to the donovan?"
"Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together."
"Oh, so that's it," said Duncan.
He put a pinch of the parched and powdered corn into his mouth and took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant mash.
He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This was exactly the kind of tangle that Shotwell was forever getting into.
Half the time, he told himself, I'm convinced the little stinkers are doing no more than pulling our legs.
What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And while there were never babies, there were children, although never less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where did the eight-and nine-year-olds come from?
* * * * *
"I suppose," he said, "that these other things that are your taboos, the stilt-birds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with you."
"That is right, mister."
"Some playground that must have been," said Duncan.
He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight.
"There's something in the thorn bush, mister."
"I didn't hear a thing."
"Little pattering. Something is running there."
Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little things were running in the thicket.
"More than likely mice," he said.
He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging on it slightly.
"Get your rest," he told Sipar. "I'll wake you later so I can catch a wink or two."
"Mister," Sipar said, "I will stay with you to the end."
"Well," said Duncan, somewhat startled, "that is decent of you."
"I will stay to the death," Sipar promised earnestly.
"Don't strain yourself," said Duncan.
He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole.
The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling. Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike animals running in the thicket.
And Sipar--Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand--just the naked animal, the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on the knoll where they had lost the Cytha, but now ready to go on to the death.
Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The native came straight up out of sleep.
"Whose death?" asked Duncan. "Whose death were you talking of?"
"Why, ours, of course," said Sipar, and went back to sleep.
III
Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him.
He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the rifle up to automatic.
He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away.
"Sipar!" he whispered.
"Here, mister."
"Keep low. It's still out there."
Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot. Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his throat. A hell of a way for a man to die--out at the tail-end of nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading back for home as fast as it could go.
He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from which the arrow must have come.
He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.
He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow free.
"You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around."
The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.
"You recognize this?" he asked Sipar.
The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe."
"Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some other tribe, perhaps?"
"Very poor arrow."
"I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good one. Do you recognize it?"
"No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared.
"Child, maybe?"
"What would child do way out here?"
"That's what I thought, too," said Duncan.
* * * * *
He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally getting him that he had thought of it at all.
He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point. "Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?"
"Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all."
"We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know--something that would help us...."
It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought angrily.
"I do not know," the native said.
Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the rifle in his arm. "Let's go."
He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself. It knows more than it's telling.
They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air--no, that was rot. And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him.
The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run away, straight-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it up again--in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in thin air.
That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit. Trails do not disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps, that Sipar knew far more about than it was willing to divulge.
He watched the native closely and there seemed nothing suspicious. It continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful hound.
* * * * *
Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river.
It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one had not expected.
This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference.
But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the prospector and the hunter, it was important. And I, thought Duncan with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it.
"Mister!"
"Now what?"
"Out there. Skun!"
"I don't--"
"Out there, mister. Across the river."
Duncan saw it then--a haze in the blueness of the rift--a puff of copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound.
He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet of silvery water splashed toward the sky.
Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled.
Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the skun. This was the season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn't have a chance.
Duncan let his breath out slowly.
"Bad," said Sipar.
"Yes, very bad."
"Hit fast. No warning."
"What about the trail?" asked Duncan. "Did the Cytha--"
Sipar nodded downward.
"Can we make it before nightfall?"
"I think so," Sipar answered.
It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another way.
They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that.
* * * * *
After their scant meal of rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep immediately.
Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago, had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the soil that through the ages had kept sifting down.
Two days gone, he told himself.
Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the rounds back at the settlements--that no one should waste his time in tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable?
Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third day--tomorrow?
He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened--only the Cytha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow frightening.
From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket. He made a wry face and pushed a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. He put out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their distance. They were something a man could do without.
Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest just short of the fire.
Duncan spun around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near the slope. If something big should start to move, they'd be out of luck.
He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles up. He'd have to get himself in hand.
He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle, he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky--and the rumble grew!
* * * * *
In one leap, he was at Sipar's side. He reached down and grasped the native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet. Sipar's eyes snapped open, blinking in the firelight.
The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of heavy boulders bouncing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous rustle of sliding soil and rock.
Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan's grip and plunged into the darkness. Duncan whirled and followed.
They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck, the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs.
A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking as well as stumbling. Off to the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion.
Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope.
Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into the sky.
He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native, grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him.
Sipar was shivering.
"It's all right," said Duncan.
And it was all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle. The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag of rockahominy in his pocket. The canteens were all they had lost--the canteens and the fire.
"We'll have to hole up somewhere for the night," Duncan said. "There are screamers on the loose."
* * * * *
He didn't like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it still stayed with him, just out of reach.
Sipar plucked at his elbow.
"Thorn thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be safe from screamers."
It was torture, but they made it.
"Screamers and you are taboo," said Duncan, suddenly remembering. "How come you are afraid of them?"
"Afraid for you, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little. Screamers could forget. They might not recognize me until too late. Safer here."
"I agree with you," said Duncan.
The screamers came and padded all about the thicket. The beasts sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away.
When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning.
There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire.
And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha!
IV
Now it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat, kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy.
"And that's the way I like it," Duncan told himself.
He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there will be more than three sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the grass to mock me.
He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river, watching Sipar hunkered beside the water's edge.
The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him.
"It crossed," said Sipar. "It walked out as far as it could go and it must have swum."
"Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed, then doubled back again."
He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside that forest, it would be hellish going.
"We can look," said Sipar.
"Good. You go downstream. I'll go up."
An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river.
They stood side by side, looking at the forest.
"Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Cytha. You have no fear of death."
"The fear of death," Duncan said, "is entirely infantile. And it's beside the point as well. I do not intend to die."
They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so.
They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest.
Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the escarpment was a dark-blue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky. And two days back of that lay the farm and the vua field, but they seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and distance; they belonged to another existence and another world.
All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool, calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain.
* * * * *
Sipar finally got up and began to range along the stream. Duncan sat up and watched.
Scared to death, he thought, and yet it stayed with me. At the campfire that first night, it had said it would stick to the death and apparently it had meant exactly what it said. It's hard, he thought, to figure out these jokers, hard to know what kind of mental operation, what seethings of emotion, what brand of ethics and what variety of belief and faith go to make them and their way of life.
It would have been so easy for Sipar to have missed the trail and swear it could not find it. Even from the start, it could have refused to go. Yet, fearing, it had gone. Reluctant, it had trailed. Without any need for faithfulness and loyalty, it had been loyal and faithful. But loyal to what, Duncan wondered, to him, the outlander and intruder? Loyal to itself? Or perhaps, although that seemed impossible, faithful to the Cytha?
What does Sipar think of me, he asked himself, and maybe more to the point, what do I think of Sipar? Is there a common meeting ground? Or are we, despite our humanoid forms, condemned forever to be alien and apart?
He held the rifle across his knees and stroked it, polishing it, petting it, making it even more closely a part of him, an instrument of his deadliness, an expression of his determination to track and kill the Cytha.
Just another chance, he begged. Just one second, or even less, to draw a steady bead. That is all I want, all I need, all I'll ask.
Then he could go back across the days that he had left behind him, back to the farm and field, back into that misty other life from which he had been so mysteriously divorced, but which in time undoubtedly would become real and meaningful again.
Sipar came back. "I found the trail."
Duncan heaved himself to his feet. "Good."
They left the river and plunged into the forest and there the heat closed in more mercilessly than ever--humid, stifling heat that felt like a soggy blanket wrapped tightly round the body.
The trail lay plain and clear. The Cytha now, it seemed, was intent upon piling up a lead without recourse to evasive tactics. Perhaps it had reasoned that its pursuers would lose some time at the river and it may have been trying to stretch out that margin even further. Perhaps it needed that extra time, he speculated, to set up the necessary machinery for another dirty trick.
Sipar stopped and waited for Duncan to catch up. "Your knife, mister?"
Duncan hesitated. "What for?"
"I have a thorn in my foot," the native said. "I have to get it out."
Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it deftly.
Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips, the native cut its throat.
V
He should go back, he knew. Without the tracker, he didn't have a chance. The odds were now with the Cytha--if, indeed, they had not been with it from the very start.
Unkillable? Unkillable because it grew in intelligence to meet emergencies? Unkillable because, pressed, it could fashion a bow and arrow, however crude? Unkillable because it had a sense of tactics, like rolling rocks at night upon its enemy? Unkillable because a native tracker would cheerfully kill itself to protect the Cytha?
A sort of crisis-beast, perhaps? One able to develop intelligence and abilities to meet each new situation and then lapsing back to the level of non-intelligent contentment? That, thought Duncan, would be a sensible way for anything to live. It would do away with the inconvenience and the irritability and the discontentment of intelligence when intelligence was unneeded. But the intelligence, and the abilities which went with it, would be there, safely tucked away where one could reach in and get them, like a necklace or a gun--something to be used or to be put away as the case might be.
Duncan hunched forward and with a stick of wood pushed the fire together. The flames blazed up anew and sent sparks flying up into the whispering darkness of the trees. The night had cooled off a little, but the humidity still hung on and a man felt uncomfortable--a little frightened, too.
Duncan lifted his head and stared up into the fire-flecked darkness. There were no stars because the heavy foliage shut them out. He missed the stars. He'd feel better if he could look up and see them.
When morning came, he should go back. He should quit this hunt which now had become impossible and even slightly foolish.
But he knew he wouldn't. Somewhere along the three-day trail, he had become committed to a purpose and a challenge, and he knew that when morning came, he would go on again. It was not hatred that drove him, nor vengeance, nor even the trophy-urge--the hunter-lust that prodded men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man had ever killed before. It was something more than that, some weird entangling of the Cytha's meaning with his own.
He reached out and picked up the rifle and laid it in his lap. Its barrel gleamed dully in the flickering campfire light and he rubbed his hand along the stock as another man might stroke a woman's throat.
"Mister," said a voice.
* * * * *
It did not startle him, for the word was softly spoken and for a moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead--dead with a half-smile fixed upon its face and with its throat laid wide open.
"Mister?"
Duncan stiffened.
Sipar was dead and there was no one else--and yet someone had spoken to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wilderness that might speak to him.
"Yes," he said.
He did not move. He simply sat there, with the rifle in his lap.
"You know who I am?"
"I suppose you are the Cytha."
"You have done well," the Cytha said. "You've made a splendid hunt. There is no dishonor if you should decide to quit. Why don't you go back? I promise you no harm."
It was over there, somewhere in front of him, somewhere in the brush beyond the fire, almost straight across the fire from him, Duncan told himself. If he could keep it talking, perhaps even lure it out--
"Why should I?" he asked. "The hunt is never done until one gets the thing one is after."
"I can kill you," the Cytha told him. "But I do not want to kill. It hurts to kill."
"That's right," said Duncan. "You are most perceptive."
For he had it pegged now. He knew exactly where it was. He could afford a little mockery.
His thumb slid up the metal and nudged the fire control to automatic and he flexed his legs beneath him so that he could rise and fire in one single motion.
"Why did you hunt me?" the Cytha asked. "You are a stranger on my world and you had no right to hunt me. Not that I mind, of course. In fact, I found it stimulating. We must do it again. When I am ready to be hunted, I shall come and tell you and we can spend a day or two at it."
"Sure we can," said Duncan, rising. And as he rose into his crouch, he held the trigger down and the gun danced in insane fury, the muzzle flare a flicking tongue of hatred and the hail of death hissing spitefully in the underbrush.
"Anytime you want to," yelled Duncan gleefully, "I'll come and hunt you! You just say the word and I'll be on your tail. I might even kill you. How do you like it, chump!"
And he held the trigger tight and kept his crouch so the slugs would not fly high, but would cut their swath just above the ground, and he moved the muzzle back and forth a lot so that he covered extra ground to compensate for any miscalculations he might have made.
* * * * *
The magazine ran out and the gun clicked empty and the vicious chatter stopped. Powder smoke drifted softly in the campfire light and the smell of it was perfume in the nostrils and in the underbrush many little feet were running, as if a thousand frightened mice were scurrying from catastrophe.
Duncan unhooked the extra magazine from where it hung upon his belt and replaced the empty one. Then he snatched a burning length of wood from the fire and waved it frantically until it burst into a blaze and became a torch. Rifle grasped in one hand and the torch in the other, he plunged into the underbrush. Little chittering things fled to escape him.
He did not find the Cytha. He found chewed-up bushes and soil churned by flying metal, and he found five lumps of flesh and fur, and these he brought back to the fire.
Now the fear that had been stalking him, keeping just beyond his reach, walked out from the shadows and hunkered by the campfire with him.
He placed the rifle within easy reach and arranged the five bloody chunks on the ground close to the fire and he tried with trembling fingers to restore them to the shape they'd been before the bullets struck them. And that was a good one, he thought with grim irony, because they had no shape. They had been part of the Cytha and you killed a Cytha inch by inch, not with a single shot. You knocked a pound of meat off it the first time, and the next time you shot off another pound or two, and if you got enough shots at it, you finally carved it down to size and maybe you could kill it then, although he wasn't sure.
He was afraid. He admitted that he was and he squatted there and watched his fingers shake and he kept his jaws clamped tight to stop the chatter of his teeth.
The fear had been getting closer all the time; he knew it had moved in by a step or two when Sipar cut its throat, and why in the name of God had the damn fool done it? It made no sense at all. He had wondered about Sipar's loyalties, and the very loyalties that he had dismissed as a sheer impossibility had been the answer, after all. In the end, for some obscure reason--obscure to humans, that is--Sipar's loyalty had been to the Cytha.
But then what was the use of searching for any reason in it? Nothing that had happened made any sense. It made no sense that a beast one was pursuing should up and talk to one--although it did fit in with the theory of the crisis-beast he had fashioned in his mind.
* * * * *
Progressive adaptation, he told himself. Carry adaptation far enough and you'd reach communication. But might not the Cytha's power of adaptation be running down? Had the Cytha gone about as far as it could force itself to go? Maybe so, he thought. It might be worth a gamble. Sipar's suicide, for all its casualness, bore the overtones of last-notch desperation. And the Cytha's speaking to Duncan, its attempt to parley with him, contained a note of weakness.
The arrow had failed and the rockslide had failed and so had Sipar's death. What next would the Cytha try? Had it anything to try?
Tomorrow he'd find out. Tomorrow he'd go on. He couldn't turn back now.
He was too deeply involved. He'd always wonder, if he turned back now, whether another hour or two might not have seen the end of it. There were too many questions, too much mystery--there was now far more at stake than ten rows of vua.
Another day might make some sense of it, might banish the dread walker that trod upon his heels, might bring some peace of mind.
As it stood right at the moment, none of it made sense.
But even as he thought it, suddenly one of the bits of bloody flesh and mangled fur made sense.
Beneath the punching and prodding of his fingers, it had assumed a shape.
Breathlessly, Duncan bent above it, not believing, not even wanting to believe, hoping frantically that it should prove completely wrong.
But there was nothing wrong with it. The shape was there and could not be denied. It had somehow fitted back into its natural shape and it was a baby screamer--well, maybe not a baby, but at least a tiny screamer.
Duncan sat back on his heels and sweated. He wiped his bloody hands upon the ground. He wondered what other shapes he'd find if he put back into proper place the other hunks of limpness that lay beside the fire.
He tried and failed. They were too smashed and torn.
He picked them up and tossed them in the fire. He took up his rifle and walked around the fire, sat down with his back against a tree, cradling the gun across his knees.
* * * * *
Those little scurrying feet, he wondered--like the scampering of a thousand busy mice. He had heard them twice, that first night in the thicket by the waterhole and again tonight.
And what could the Cytha be? Certainly not the simple, uncomplicated, marauding animal he had thought to start with.
A hive-beast? A host animal? A thing masquerading in many different forms?
Shotwell, trained in such deductions, might make a fairly accurate guess, but Shotwell was not here. He was at the farm, fretting, more than likely, over Duncan's failure to return.
Finally the first light of morning began to filter through the forest and it was not the glaring, clean white light of the open plain and bush, but a softened, diluted, fuzzy green light to match the smothering vegetation.
The night noises died away and the noises of the day took up--the sawings of unseen insects, the screechings of hidden birds and something far away began to make a noise that sounded like an empty barrel falling slowly down a stairway.
What little coolness the night had brought dissipated swiftly and the heat clamped down, a breathless, relentless heat that quivered in the air.
Circling, Duncan picked up the Cytha trail not more than a hundred yards from camp.
The beast had been traveling fast. The pug marks were deeply sunk and widely spaced. Duncan followed as rapidly as he dared. It was a temptation to follow at a run, to match the Cytha's speed, for the trail was plain and fresh and it fairly beckoned.
And that was wrong, Duncan told himself. It was too fresh, too plain--almost as if the animal had gone to endless trouble so that the human could not miss the trail.
He stopped his trailing and crouched beside a tree and studied the tracks ahead. His hands were too tense upon the gun, his body keyed too high and fine. He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. He had to calm himself. He had to loosen up.
He studied the tracks ahead--four bunched pug marks, then a long leap interval, then four more bunched tracks, and between the sets of marks the forest floor was innocent and smooth.
Too smooth, perhaps. Especially the third one from him. Too smooth and somehow artificial, as if someone had patted it with gentle hands to make it unsuspicious.
Duncan sucked his breath in slowly.
Trap?
Or was his imagination playing tricks on him?
And if it were a trap, he would have fallen into it if he had kept on following as he had started out.
Now there was something else, a strange uneasiness, and he stirred uncomfortably, casting frantically for some clue to what it was.
* * * * *
He rose and stepped out from the tree, with the gun at ready. What a perfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at the pug marks, never at the space between them, for the space between would be neutral ground, safe to stride out upon.
Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Cytha!
And now he knew what the other trouble was--the great uneasiness. It was the sense of being watched.
Somewhere up ahead, the Cytha was crouched, watching and waiting--anxious or exultant, maybe even with laughter rumbling in its throat.
He walked slowly forward until he reached the third set of tracks and he saw that he had been right. The little area ahead was smoother than it should be.
"Cytha!" he called.
His voice was far louder than he had meant it to be and he stood astonished and a bit abashed.
Then he realized why it was so loud.
It was the only sound there was!
The forest suddenly had fallen silent. The insects and birds were quiet and the thing in the distance had quit falling down the stairs. Even the leaves were silent. There was no rustle in them and they hung limp upon their stems.
There was a feeling of doom and the green light had changed to a copper light and everything was still.
And the light was copper!
Duncan spun around in panic. There was no place for him to hide.
Before he could take another step, the skun came and the winds rushed out of nowhere. The air was clogged with flying leaves and debris. Trees snapped and popped and tumbled in the air.
The wind hurled Duncan to his knees, and as he fought to regain his feet, he remembered, in a blinding flash of total recall, how it had looked from atop the escarpment--the boiling fury of the winds and the mad swirling of the coppery mist and how the trees had whipped in whirlpool fashion.
He came half erect and stumbled, clawing at the ground in an attempt to get up again, while inside his brain an insistent, clicking voice cried out for him to run, and somewhere another voice said to lie flat upon the ground, to dig in as best he could.
Something struck him from behind and he went down, pinned flat, with his rifle wedged beneath him. He cracked his head upon the ground and the world whirled sickeningly and plastered his face with a handful of mud and tattered leaves.
He tried to crawl and couldn't, for something had grabbed him by the ankle and was hanging on.
* * * * *
With a frantic hand, he clawed the mess out of his eyes, spat it from his mouth.
Across the spinning ground, something black and angular tumbled rapidly. It was coming straight toward him and he saw it was the Cytha and that in another second it would be on top of him.
He threw up an arm across his face, with the elbow crooked, to take the impact of the wind-blown Cytha and to ward it off.
But it never reached him. Less than a yard away, the ground opened up to take the Cytha and it was no longer there.
Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless and the heat clamped down again and that was the end of it. The skun had come and struck and gone.
Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But in those seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay in shattered heaps.
He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matter with his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his foot beneath it.
He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two close-set limbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been driven deep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at the ankle in the fork of the buried branches.
The foot didn't hurt--not yet. It didn't seem to be there at all. He tried wiggling his toes and felt none.
He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought to force down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was the worst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was to take stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then go ahead and try it.
The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to, although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole might settle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, the two heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of his ankle, were holding most of the tree's weight off his foot.
The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneath his foot until he could pull it out.
He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand. Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and his fingers slid along it.
With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus. There was nothing but rock--some long-buried boulder, the top of which lay just beneath the ground.
His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, held securely in place by forked branches that had forced their splintering way down along the boulder's sides.
* * * * *
He lay back, propped on an elbow. It was evident that he could do nothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, his problem was the tree.
To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout lever in his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use a gun for such a purpose, but he had no choice.
He worked for an hour and it was no good. Even with the rifle as a pry, he could not budge the tree.
He lay back, defeated, breathing hard, wringing wet with perspiration.
He grimaced at the sky.
All right, Cytha, he thought, you won out in the end. But it took a skun to do it. With all your tricks, you couldn't do the job until....
Then he remembered.
He sat up hurriedly.
"Cytha!" he called.
The Cytha had fallen into a hole that had opened in the ground. The hole was less than an arm's length away from him, with a little debris around its edges still trickling into it.
Duncan stretched out his body, lying flat upon the ground, and looked into the hole. There, at the bottom of it, was the Cytha.
It was the first time he'd gotten a good look at the Cytha and it was a crazily put-together thing. It seemed to have nothing functional about it and it looked more like a heap of something, just thrown on the ground, than it did an animal.
The hole, he saw, was more than an ordinary hole. It was a pit and very cleverly constructed. The mouth was about four feet in diameter and it widened to roughly twice that at the bottom. It was, in general, bottle-shaped, with an incurving shoulder at the top so that anything that fell in could not climb out. Anything falling into that pit was in to stay.
This, Duncan knew, was what had lain beneath that too-smooth interval between the two sets of Cytha tracks. The Cytha had worked all night to dig it, then had carried away the dirt dug out of the pit and had built a flimsy camouflage cover over it. Then it had gone back and made the trail that was so loud and clear, so easy to make out and follow. And having done all that, having labored hard and stealthily, the Cytha had settled down to watch, to make sure the following human had fallen in the pit.
* * * * *
"Hi, pal," said Duncan. "How are you making out?"
The Cytha did not answer.
"Classy pit," said Duncan. "Do you always den up in luxury like this?"
But the Cytha didn't answer.
Something queer was happening to the Cytha. It was coming all apart.
Duncan watched with fascinated horror as the Cytha broke down into a thousand lumps of motion that scurried in the pit and tried to scramble up its sides, only to fall back in tiny showers of sand.
Amid the scurrying lumps, one thing remained intact, a fragile object that resembled nothing quite so much as the stripped skeleton of a Thanksgiving turkey. But it was a most extraordinary Thanksgiving skeleton, for it throbbed with pulsing life and glowed with a steady violet light.
Chitterings and squeakings came out of the pit and the soft patter of tiny running feet, and as Duncan's eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the pit, he began to make out the forms of some of the scurrying shapes. There were tiny screamers and some donovans and sawmill birds and a bevy of kill-devils and something else as well.
Duncan raised a hand and pressed it against his eyes, then took it quickly away. The little faces still were there, looking up as if beseeching him, with the white shine of their teeth and the white rolling of their eyes.
He felt horror wrenching at his stomach and the sour, bitter taste of revulsion welled into his throat, but he fought it down, harking back to that day at the farm before they had started on the hunt.
"I can track down anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans," Sipar had told him solemnly. "These are my taboos."
And Sipar was also their taboo, for he had not feared the donovan. Sipar had been, however, somewhat fearful of the screamers in the dead of night because, the native had told him reasonably, screamers were forgetful.
Forgetful of what!
Forgetful of the Cytha-mother? Forgetful of the motley brood in which they had spent their childhood?
For that was the only answer to what was running in the pit and the whole, unsuspected answer to the enigma against which men like Shotwell had frustratedly banged their heads for years.
* * * * *
Strange, he told himself. All right, it might be strange, but if it worked, what difference did it make? So the planet's denizens were sexless because there was no need of sex--what was wrong with that? It might, in fact, Duncan admitted to himself, head off a lot of trouble. No family spats, no triangle trouble, no fighting over mates. While it might be unexciting, it did seem downright peaceful.
And since there was no sex, the Cytha species was the planetary mother--but more than just a mother. The Cytha, more than likely, was mother-father, incubator, nursery, teacher and perhaps many other things besides, all rolled into one.
In many ways, he thought, it might make a lot of sense. Here natural selection would be ruled out and ecology could be controlled in considerable degree and mutation might even be a matter of deliberate choice rather than random happenstance.
And it would make for a potential planetary unity such as no other world had ever known. Everything here was kin to everything else. Here was a planet where Man, or any other alien, must learn to tread most softly. For it was not inconceivable that, in a crisis or a clash of interests, one might find himself faced suddenly with a unified and cooperating planet, with every form of life making common cause against the interloper.
The little scurrying things had given up; they'd gone back to their places, clustered around the pulsing violet of the Thanksgiving skeleton, each one fitting into place until the Cytha had taken shape again. As if, Duncan told himself, blood and nerve and muscle had come back from a brief vacation to form the beast anew.
"Mister," asked the Cytha, "what do we do now?"
"You should know," Duncan told it. "You were the one who dug the pit."
"I split myself," the Cytha said. "A part of me dug the pit and the other part that stayed on the surface got me out when the job was done."
"Convenient," grunted Duncan.
And it was convenient. That was what had happened to the Cytha when he had shot at it--it had split into all its component parts and had got away. And that night beside the waterhole, it had spied on him, again in the form of all its separate parts, from the safety of the thicket.
"You are caught and so am I," the Cytha said. "Both of us will die here. It seems a fitting end to our association. Do you not agree with me?"
"I'll get you out," said Duncan wearily. "I have no quarrel with children."
* * * * *
He dragged the rifle toward him and unhooked the sling from the stock. Carefully he lowered the gun by the sling, still attached to the barrel, down into the pit.
The Cytha reared up and grasped it with its forepaws.
"Easy now," Duncan cautioned. "You're heavy. I don't know if I can hold you."
But he needn't have worried. The little ones were detaching themselves and scrambling up the rifle and the sling. They reached his extended arms and ran up them with scrabbling claws. Little sneering screamers and the comic stilt-birds and the mouse-size kill-devils that snarled at him as they climbed. And the little grinning natives--not babies, scarcely children, but small editions of full-grown humanoids. And the weird donovans scampering happily.
They came climbing up his arms and across his shoulders and milled about on the ground beside him, waiting for the others.
And finally the Cytha, not skinned down to the bare bones of its Thanksgiving-turkey-size, but far smaller than it had been, climbed awkwardly up the rifle and the sling to safety.
Duncan hauled the rifle up and twisted himself into a sitting position.
The Cytha, he saw, was reassembling.
He watched in fascination as the restless miniatures of the planet's life swarmed and seethed like a hive of bees, each one clicking into place to form the entire beast.
And now the Cytha was complete. Yet small--still small--no more than lion-size.
"But it is such a little one," Zikkara had argued with him that morning at the farm. "It is such a young one."
Just a young brood, no more than suckling infants--if suckling was the word, or even some kind of wild approximation. And through the months and years, the Cytha would grow, with the growing of its diverse children, until it became a monstrous thing.
It stood there looking at Duncan and the tree.
"Now," said Duncan, "if you'll push on the tree, I think that between the two of us--"
"It is too bad," the Cytha said, and wheeled itself about.
He watched it go loping off.
"Hey!" he yelled.
But it didn't stop.
He grabbed up the rifle and had it halfway to his shoulder before he remembered how absolutely futile it was to shoot at the Cytha.
He let the rifle down.
"The dirty, ungrateful, double-crossing--"
He stopped himself. There was no profit in rage. When you were in a jam, you did the best you could. You figured out the problem and you picked the course that seemed best and you didn't panic at the odds.
He laid the rifle in his lap and started to hook up the sling and it was not till then that he saw the barrel was packed with sand and dirt.
He sat numbly for a moment, thinking back to how close he had been to firing at the Cytha, and if that barrel was packed hard enough or deep enough, he might have had an exploding weapon in his hands.
He had used the rifle as a crowbar, which was no way to use a gun. That was one way, he told himself, that was guaranteed to ruin it.
* * * * *
Duncan hunted around and found a twig and dug at the clogged muzzle, but the dirt was jammed too firmly in it and he made little progress.
He dropped the twig and was hunting for another stronger one when he caught the motion in a nearby clump of brush.
He watched closely for a moment and there was nothing, so he resumed the hunt for a stronger twig. He found one and started poking at the muzzle and there was another flash of motion.
He twisted around. Not more than twenty feet away, a screamer sat easily on its haunches. Its tongue was lolling out and it had what looked like a grin upon its face.
And there was another, just at the edge of the clump of brush where he had caught the motion first.
There were others as well, he knew. He could hear them sliding through the tangle of fallen trees, could sense the soft padding of their feet.
The executioners, he thought.
The Cytha certainly had not wasted any time.
He raised the rifle and rapped the barrel smartly on the fallen tree, trying to dislodge the obstruction in the bore. But it didn't budge; the barrel still was packed with sand.
But no matter--he'd have to fire anyhow and take whatever chance there was.
He shoved the control to automatic, and tilted up the muzzle.
There were six of them now, sitting in a ragged row, grinning at him, not in any hurry. They were sure of him and there was no hurry. He'd still be there when they decided to move in.
And there were others--on all sides of him.
Once it started, he wouldn't have a chance.
"It'll be expensive, gents," he told them.
And he was astonished at how calm, how coldly objective he could be, now that the chips were down. But that was the way it was, he realized.
He'd thought, a while ago, how a man might suddenly find himself face to face with an aroused and cooperating planet. Maybe this was it in miniature.
The Cytha had obviously passed the word along: Man back there needs killing. Go and get him.
Just like that, for a Cytha would be the power here. A life force, the giver of life, the decider of life, the repository of all animal life on the entire planet.
There was more than one of them, of course. Probably they had home districts, spheres of influence and responsibility mapped out. And each one would be a power supreme in its own district.
Momism, he thought with a sour grin. Momism at its absolute peak.
Nevertheless, he told himself, it wasn't too bad a system if you wanted to consider it objectively.
But he was in a poor position to be objective about that or anything else.
* * * * *
The screamers were inching closer, hitching themselves forward slowly on their bottoms.
"I'm going to set up a deadline for you critters," Duncan called out. "Just two feet farther, up to that rock, and I let you have it."
He'd get all six of them, of course, but the shots would be the signal for the general rush by all those other animals slinking in the brush.
If he were free, if he were on his feet, possibly he could beat them off. But pinned as he was, he didn't have a chance. It would be all over less than a minute after he opened fire. He might, he figured, last as long as that.
The six inched closer and he raised the rifle.
But they stopped and moved no farther. Their ears lifted just a little, as if they might be listening, and the grins dropped from their faces. They squirmed uneasily and assumed a look of guilt and, like shadows, they were gone, melting away so swiftly that he scarcely saw them go.
Duncan sat quietly, listening, but he could hear no sound.
Reprieve, he thought. But for how long? Something had scared them off, but in a while they might be back. He had to get out of here and he had to make it fast.
If he could find a longer lever, he could move the tree. There was a branch slanting up from the topside of the fallen tree. It was almost four inches at the butt and it carried its diameter well.
He slid the knife from his belt and looked at it. Too small, too thin, he thought, to chisel through a four-inch branch, but it was all he had. When a man was desperate enough, though, when his very life depended on it, he would do anything.
He hitched himself along, sliding toward the point where the branch protruded from the tree. His pinned leg protested with stabs of pain as his body wrenched it around. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself closer. Pain slashed through his leg again and he was still long inches from the branch.
He tried once more, then gave up. He lay panting on the ground.
There was just one thing left.
He'd have to try to hack out a notch in the trunk just above his leg. No, that would be next to impossible, for he'd be cutting into the whorled and twisted grain at the base of the supporting fork.
Either that or cut off his foot, and that was even more impossible. A man would faint before he got the job done.
It was useless, he knew. He could do neither one. There was nothing he could do.
* * * * *
For the first time, he admitted to himself: He would stay here and die. Shotwell, back at the farm, in a day or two might set out hunting for him. But Shotwell would never find him. And anyhow, by nightfall, if not sooner, the screamers would be back.
He laughed gruffly in his throat--laughing at himself.
The Cytha had won the hunt hands down. It had used a human weakness to win and then had used that same human weakness to achieve a viciously poetic vengeance.
After all, what could one expect? One could not equate human ethics with the ethics of the Cytha. Might not human ethics, in certain cases, seem as weird and illogical, as infamous and ungrateful, to an alien?
He hunted for a twig and began working again to clean the rifle bore.
A crashing behind him twisted him around and he saw the Cytha. Behind the Cytha stalked a donovan.
He tossed away the twig and raised the gun.
"No," said the Cytha sharply.
The donovan tramped purposefully forward and Duncan felt the prickling of the skin along his back. It was a frightful thing. Nothing could stand before a donovan. The screamers had turned tail and run when they had heard it a couple of miles or more away.
The donovan was named for the first known human to be killed by one. That first was only one of many. The roll of donovan-victims ran long, and no wonder, Duncan thought. It was the closest he had ever been to one of the beasts and he felt a coldness creeping over him. It was like an elephant and a tiger and a grizzly bear wrapped in the selfsame hide. It was the most vicious fighting machine that ever had been spawned.
He lowered the rifle. There would be no point in shooting. In two quick strides, the beast could be upon him.
The donovan almost stepped on him and he flinched away. Then the great head lowered and gave the fallen tree a butt and the tree bounced for a yard or two. The donovan kept on walking. Its powerfully muscled stern moved into the brush and out of sight.
"Now we are even," said the Cytha. "I had to get some help."
Duncan grunted. He flexed the leg that had been trapped and he could not feel the foot. Using his rifle as a cane, he pulled himself erect. He tried putting weight on the injured foot and it screamed with pain.
He braced himself with the rifle and rotated so that he faced the Cytha.
"Thanks, pal," he said. "I didn't think you'd do it."
"You will not hunt me now?"
Duncan shook his head. "I'm in no shape for hunting. I am heading home."
"It was the vua, wasn't it? That was why you hunted me?"
"The vua is my livelihood," said Duncan. "I cannot let you eat it."
The Cytha stood silently and Duncan watched it for a moment. Then he wheeled. Using the rifle for a crutch, he started hobbling away.
The Cytha hurried to catch up with him.
"Let us make a bargain, mister. I will not eat the vua and you will not hunt me. Is that fair enough?"
"That is fine with me," said Duncan. "Let us shake on it."
He put down a hand and the Cytha lifted up a paw. They shook, somewhat awkwardly, but very solemnly.
"Now," the Cytha said, "I will see you home. The screamers would have you before you got out of the woods."
VI
They halted on a knoll. Below them lay the farm, with the vua rows straight and green in the red soil of the fields.
"You can make it from here," the Cytha said. "I am wearing thin. It is an awful effort to keep on being smart. I want to go back to ignorance and comfort."
"It was nice knowing you," Duncan told it politely. "And thanks for sticking with me."
He started down the hill, leaning heavily on the rifle-crutch. Then he frowned troubledly and turned back.
"Look," he said, "you'll go back to animal again. Then you will forget. One of these days, you'll see all that nice, tender vua and--"
"Very simple," said the Cytha. "If you find me in the vua, just begin hunting me. With you after me, I will quickly get smart and remember once again and it will be all right."
"Sure," agreed Duncan. "I guess that will work."
The Cytha watched him go stumping down the hill.
Admirable, it thought. Next time I have a brood, I think I'll raise a dozen like him.
It turned around and headed for the deeper brush.
It felt intelligence slipping from it, felt the old, uncaring comfort coming back again. But it glowed with anticipation, seethed with happiness at the big surprise it had in store for its new-found friend.
Won't he be happy and surprised when I drop them at his door, it thought.
Will he be ever pleased!
TELEMPATHY
By Vance Simonds
Huckster Heaven, in Hollywood, set out to fulfill the adman's dream in every particular. It recognized more credit cards than it offered entrées on the menu. Various atmospheres, complete with authentic decor, were offered: Tahitian, Parisian, even Afro-Cuban for the delectation of the Off-Beat Client. In every case, houris glided to and fro in appropriate native costume, bearing viands calculated to quell, at least for the nonce, harsh thoughts of the combative marketplace. Instead, beamish advertisers and their account executive hosts were plied so lavishly that soon the sounds of competitive strife were but a memory; and in the postprandial torpor, dormant dreams of largesse on the Lucullan scale came alive. In these surroundings, droppers of such names as the Four Seasons, George V, and the Stadium Club were notably silent.
Campbell ("Cam") Schofft was ostentatiously honored as one of the Huckster Heaven "in-group." His business card (die-bumped and gold-dusted, of course) was one of those enshrined, under glass as it were, in the foyer. His advice concerning California land speculation was sought by the maitre d', a worthy who had sold his own posh oasis in Escondido in order to preside at H. H., as the communications fraternity affectionately styled the restaurant. Today, however, Cam was aware of Michel's subtle disapproval as they glided into the Caribbean milieu.
And little wonder: The character awaiting Cam in the booth was definitely not the H. H. type. Far from being cast in the approved lean, sickly, bespectacled mold, Everett O'Toole featured jowls wider than Cam's natural shoulders; and his gut threatened to thrust their tiny table into the houris' concourse. Manhattan innkeepers often confused Everett with Ralph Kramden, a classic comic character of the Sixties still cast occasionally for the cognoscenti.
Cam viewed this great flow of flesh with dispassionate eyes. The behemoth spoke:
"Can't resist a fast megabuck, eh, Cam?"
"As you know, hippo, I agreed to meet you here in the naive hope that you had something to contribute to the science of marketing," said Cam.
"Science! Hah!" Everett sucked on his goblet. "I do have something to sell, but it's probably over your head."
"Very possibly. In which event, I'll whirl on to something more productive, and you can pick up your own tab for those half-gallons of equatirial garbage you've been gulping."
Sobered by this threat, Everett looked about with a conspiratorial air and leaned across the table.
"You and that giggle gang you call the Market Research Group have been groping around like so many blind mice. How would you like to know in advance, beyond any cavil, the exact future reaction to any product, new, old or sea-changed--or to any campaign to be inflicted on the peasantry?"
"How would you like to be Duke of the Western World, with your castle in Acapulco?"
"That's what keeps alive my faith in you," said Everett. "You do understand, a little bit. That's what we call Empathy."
* * * * *
Cam signalled for a Bellafonte Sunrise to fortify himself for the forthcoming adventure in non-Aristotelian ratiocination.
"Empathy is our merchandise," Everett continued, looking around again. "My associates and I have discovered our propensity for experiencing vicariously--with unfortunate intensity--the emotional reactions of others."
"I have encountered many ridiculous routines," Cam advised the Dominican beauty placing new potables before them. "But this wins the Freberg."
"Exhibit A coming up." Everett lapsed into a pose of deep concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension--panic--hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side of the runes ... Valhalla."
Cam rose and went to the Nordic banquet hall. Vikings with groaning platters and great horns of mead almost knocked him down, but he fought his way to the curtained stall described, and eavesdropped.
"He ain't gonna take no for an answer this time, Quiverton," rasped the guttural tones of one occupant. "Gable has to host the new series, with Jean Harlow for the first guest star--or, he gets a new agency."
"Bu-but Fred, they're both dead."
"He ain't gonna stand still for any more alibis. It's up to you--produce, or else! You got a week."
There was a sound of blubbering from within, interspersed with piteous cries like those emitted by a rabbit transfixed by headlights. They sounded to Cam like an account man he knew over at GFR&O; and this in turn meant that the ultimatum was probably proceeding from the fabled throne room of Occidental Tobacco itself, which billed more in one week than some of Cam's clients knew had been printed. Cam even had a blinding inspiration as to the means by which Occidental's megalomaniac prexy, William McKinley Krog, might be satisfied in this latest necrophiliac whim: Spectaculars built around the classics of the Golden Age of the Silver Screen ... (By Godfrey! Not a bad series title!) ... using film clips of deceased movie greats, and emceed by Stanislaus Von Gort, who everybody thought was dead and therefore might as well be.
With this melee raging in his skull, Cam dodged back to Everett. He found that worthy sliding liquidly from the booth, his side-pocket familiar now half-emerged and regarding his gross symbiote with more-than-animal concern.
"Quickly," cried Cam to the slave-girl. "Stimulants!"
"We only serve rum drinks in this section," unctuously responded the Nefertiti of the Horse Latitudes; but a blazing glance from Cam sent her scurrying, every cheek a-dance.
"You can see what this takes out of me," said the patient, treating himself with deep draughts of Cam's Sunrise. "I don't know how many more of these I--we--can take."
"Take it easy, boy. I conditionally buy your bit. Save your strength." The small inhabitant of the side pocket was regarding him with some asperity. "Who's your little chum?"
"I'm hep to your devious mind," giggled Everett. "You charlatan, you've got it figured that he's one of my associates."
"You're stoned," said Cam, leading his obese charge stumbling and falling out of the Caribbean grotto, past the Michael Mouse shrine and the framed Exceptional T & E Vouchers (to which no exception had been taken, thus attesting to the achievement of their authors).
"Get this, you call-boy of the communications complex," shrilled Everett hilariously in the muted beauty of the business-card foyer. "You're right; he is one of our Gestalt; but there's a couple more. And Our Gang will cost you, Schofft, cost like crazy.... But you'll pay, through the nose; because your clients will pay through the nose and ears! He, he, he!" The pained features of the maitre d' reflected exquisite pain as he ushered them into the sunlight.
Cam's car materialized at the curb, and he hustled the sodden Ev into its dark, merciful confines.
"Granted that this entire affair is not some outré hoax ... a possibility on which I don't entirely close the door ... your 'merchandise' might better be labelled Telempathy," said Cam.
"Button-down lingo," sneered Ev.
"What is that miniature monster in your pocket ... Marmoset? Mutated rat?"
"Super-mongoose. The result of certain esoteric nuclear experiments off Madagascar."
They hove to at "MAB"--the Merchandising Arts Building, West Coast hub of influence on the docile consumer.
They floated up the exterior tube to the 39th Floor (Socio-Economic) which was actually the hotbed of the political efforts of Cam and his associates. Entry through the wall-port brought them face-to-fang with Father Sowles ("Save Your Souls With Sowles"). The lank, fiery pulpit-pounder had been tabbed as a political natural by certain elders whose money was known as wise; and in consequence, his campaign for the Directorship of North America's Western Zone was being master-minded by Pacific Persuaders, Inc., a pseudopod of the MAB complex.
The crusader struck a Charlton Heston pose and snarled: "In the name of Christendom, what peculiar intruder bring you before me?"
Everett meticulously assayed the gaunt, fanatic figure before him, clad in apostolic robes. "I'll do a lot for a dollar, as the girl said to the soldier, but this is ludicrous. Who needs Telempathy? This cat is so phony, any gossoon can peg him."
Sowles motioned to a monkish aide at a desk, who scribbled furiously in a drab notebook. Cam walked to the aides' side and read: "Gossoons."
"I don't have to look, Cam," said Everett. "I have just issued the death warrant for gossoons, if this vampire ever comes to power, and if he ever finds out what they are."
"Down, boy," said Cam. "Father Sowles, this man and his group appear to possess an instinct or faculty that could make the difference between success and failure. Everett, belay the commentary and look sharp: This is your chance at the large dinero."
"Curt!" Cam called the wall-com. On its screen appeared Curt Andrews, bright young assistant account man, reflexively simulating activity at his desk. "Bring in the Name-O-Scope, please."
* * * * *
Cam turned to explain to the waiting group: "This gadget coming up is another of our recent triumphs in the application of the scientific method to marketing. Just as a computer solves problems in a split second that would take human mathematicians months, the Name-O-Scope arrives at and presents all the bewildering array of possible cognomens for a given thing in a matter of hours. The proliferating combinations of possible name components are reeled off in a rapid fire for our evaluation."
Curt came in with what appeared to be a portable rear-screen presentation projector, with dials and an extra lead; which he attached to the conference table.
"With this device," continued Cam, "Edgar Rice Burroughs would not have to have spent weeks playing with nonsense syllables before styling his hero 'Tarzan'." He guided Ev to a specially constructed chair at the table, rolled up one sleeve, applied the clamp to his bicep. "The machine provided evaluation of alternate names on the basis of blood-pressure fluctuation. Till now, we've had to operate on the basis of a cumulative group reaction, with the obvious disadvantages of all group samples. With Everett & Associates, we may well have a single-unit, perfectly representative sounding board."
"Roll 'em, Curt. Ev, if this works, you've made the consultant roster."
"I trust that involves geetus," replied Ev.
Curt dimmed the lights. On the screen, three heraldic cornets sang a fanfare, followed by floating banners:
"POSSIBLE TITLES FOR THE SOWLES MOVEMENT"
This dissolved to an aerial view of the 20th Century war (mostly clips of the Normandy landings). The camera picked out one brave, clean column (new footage) and zoomed in on the device at its fore: A Cross of Lorraine with a Star of David at its center. Superimposed wavy letters faded in:
"THE NEW CHURCH MILITANT"
Curt studied the dial with the aid of a pocketlite, and made a notation. The scene and the martial music faded out, to be replaced by stock footage from medieval epics: Peter the Hermit exhorting knights to smite the Saracen, the clash of Mediterranean men o' war, chivalric pageantry featuring again the cross-and-star:
"CRUSADE FOR OUR TIME"
The eyes of the super-mongoose gleamed in the shadows as Curt took the reading.
Next came a montage of heroic scenes from two millennia of history: from Agincourt to Iwo, from the villagers marching on Frankenstein's castle to the Four Freedoms conference at sea. One familiar strain underscored all the stirring action; its key words flamed to life:
"SOWLES' CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS"
Everett's familiar emitted a shrill squeak. Curt gasped, "Cam! Right off the dial!"
"All right, Curt! Hit the lights.... We won't bother with the rest."
"What devil's work is this?" demanded the cadaverous Sowles, blinking as the lights went on.
"Father, for the first time in the history of mass opinion manipulation, we are scientifically certain, in advance, of optimum response. Everett and his Telempathetic Gestalt have proved to be the equivalent of the world's largest survey sample. In the past, whenever a product was about to be launched on the board waters of the American mercantile ocean, but lacked for a sobriquet, prides of copywriters and other creative people huddled late into the night fashioning Names, from which the entire marketing strategy would flow. Remember the Ocelot, Curt?"
"Lord, will I ever forget it. 18,000 names!"
"On behalf of our airplane account, gentlemen. Of those 18,000 names we dreamed up for the 1981 model, some truly ridiculous labels crept in when fatigue and inbred mental circumlocution weakened our defenses."
"The Dawn Play Air Coupe," recalled Curt, with a shudder. "The Pterrible Pterodactyl.... The Crimson Inca...."
"Spare us, Curt. The point is that as a result of this grisly experience, we invented the Name-O-Scope. The name 'Ocelot' was ultimately selected, and worked out superbly--through sheer good fortune alone. For your campaign, Father, the Name-O-Scope came up with 3,248 possible slogan-names."
"I saw only three," Sowles said, dourly. His aide scribbled something in the notebook.
"I wouldn't inflict the whole wild roster on you, sir--or even on your adjutant there. But we did expose them to selected samples in thirty major markets; and the cumulative finding put these three in a class by themselves, at the top. Furthermore, these random tests agreed 100% with Everett in the selection of 'SOWLES' CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS' as the ideal motif, out of those pre-eminent three.... So we are doubly, even triply checked out before take-off; since these findings confirm the humble opinion of our own staff."
The eagle-eyed leader bent his probing gaze on Cam. "So you say, wizard of words. But while you're rejoicing in these strange devices and stranger accomplices, the enemy draws nigh. The primary is but weeks away, and already the invective of the political jackal beats on the ears of the electorate like a stormy sea."
Everett lifted his shaggy head. "You mix a hirsute metaphor, Charlemagne, but my li'l friends tell me that that's the sort of chatter that the idiot voters will lap up like a friendly Frostee."
"You see, Father--this is the break we needed," pitched Cam. "With this weird talent of Everett et al., we can pre-test every element of the great campaign. The pieces of the jigsaw will drop into place overnight, and we can kick off the Big Push next week.... Like with a monster rally by torchlight and Kleig in Hollywood Bowl.... Singing our hymn under the stars while millions view.... How 'bout that, Ev?"
The impresario of the impalpable nodded. "Should be great. Monstrous, in fact."
* * * * *
In the day that followed, Cam and all his cohorts in MAB let themselves go in a good old-fashioned creative orgy. With one large difference. In the past, copy, layouts, and other campaign ingredients were threshed out in endless conferences, and decisions were made on the basis of an informed group guess. Now, each new idea was exposed at infancy like a Spartan baby to the elemental reaction of Ev & Co., and instantly given the yea or nay.
The rotund oracle was kept under lock and latch in the "Think-Box." This room had been scientifically designed for sequestering agency people who had to give birth to slogans and such under deadline pressure. The walls were sound-proofed, the couch pulled out into a properly uncomfortable bed, and a refrigerator was stocked with snack makings. It was also served by dumbwaiter. Phones were banished, of course; as was 3-D and all other distraction--even windows. Visual motion was, however, provided by a giant clock. The only concessions to Ev were a special little hutch for the super-mongoose; and a bar, carefully regulated to make certain he never completely blotted out the hypothetical brainwave "network."
Cam did his best to pump Ev for the identity of his "Associates", but the old sack of iniquity was wise to his game. He'd rear back and squint at Cam like a Lebanese fruit vendor and thoughtfully pick his nose. "Like to know me confederates, is it?" he'd ask. Then, with a great show of candor: "Well, one of them is a sea creature, but I'll say no more than that. I know you'd never be able to live with the thought of being in business with a squid."
Then Ev would laugh wildly. "Ah, wouldn't he like to know!"
"It's only for your own protection," Cam expostulated. "I know there are more people in this lash-up. We've got to make certain that they're safe from accident--can't have the Gestalt disrupted."
"Bosh," was Ev's invariable verdict.
Meanwhile, Cam's little elves paraded through with all the paraphernalia of the Big Push. Livid posters, featuring a Messianic Sowles. Full-page ads, exhorting everyone with an ounce of American decency in his body, to attend the Rally Under The Stars. Subliminal commands were sneaked into the visiphone and 3-D circuits. Couples in Drive-Ins found themselves determined to be among those who stood up to be counted at the Bowl. Christian Soldiers across the continent chartered all manner of craft, from Ocelots to electromag liners, to bear them to the great event. Goodies by the thousand were stamped out to hawk to the faithful: Badges, banners, bumper stickers, wallet cards, purse-sized pix of Sowles, star-and-cross medallions and lapel pins.... The potential proceeds of the Rally alone began to assume war-chest proportions.
And above all they worked on the Speech. This had to be the greatest sockdolager since Goebbels explained Stalingrad. Cam's feverish brain had figured out a host of effects to catalyze the audience reaction. But in the last analysis, triumph or disaster would hinge on the oral effort of the Grim Reaper, as some of the minions at MAB had come to term Sowles.
So, Huckster Heaven became a memory, like a place in a previous existence. Other clients were neglected; and it was even left to Curt Andrews to follow up Occidental Tobacco.
Books were carted in, thumbed through for inspiration, and cast back into the outer corridor in disgust.
"Ev, catch this:
"'The flaming light of the Lord shall go forward into the farthest reaches of this planet, to every village and commune where the Anti-Christ has ruled; and indeed it shall go beyond, with mankind's vaulting spirit, to the moon, the planets, and the stars!'"
"Not bad," quoth the half-sodden seer, inspecting another treasure from his nasal passages. "My buddies say the marks will go for it like Gang-Busters."
"Kindly refrain from the pseudo-sophisticated jazz," said Cam, in pain. "One of these days your name's going to get written down in that little book. And besides, this is an intrinsically worthwhile movement."
"Kindly refrain yourself from the adman jargon and attempts to snow the troops. This Sowles is the worst mountebank since Charlie Ponzi, and you know it. You're in this for the fast megabuck same as me, so let's not kid ourselves."
"Euramerica needs just such a unifying figure now," said Cam. "And just such a cause, one that will inspire positive action against the Commie Complex. Otherwise, the U. S. of E. will keep on floundering around in a morass of debate while They single-mindedly weave our doom."
"On a single-minded loom," sang Ev into a snifter. "Who would have thought that my great gift to the world would be put to such a perverse use right off the bat?"
"Speaking of bat, let's get back on the ball." And the hands of the clock rolled round and round....
* * * * *
Two days before the Rally, an exhausted Cam tottered to the visiphone down the hall, and dialled Sowles' Temple.
The monkish aide answered. "Sowles' Christian Soldiers; Brother Kane here."
"What became of Abel?" asked Cam before his cortex could intervene. The aide's eyes glowed with a promise of vengeance, as he put Cam through to Sowles.
"How do the preparations progress?" asked the ex-cleric.
"Well, sir. Which is why I called. The first draft of the Speech is ready."
"I'll be there within the hour," said Sowles, and the screen blanked.
When Sowles arrived at MAB, an Execusec conducted him to the door of the "Think-Box." He stared disapprovingly after her. "When the Soldiers hold sway, modesty will be rigidly enforced."
Cam dictated a memo to his pocket recorder forbidding MAB girls to observe the current abbreviated fashions.
"Well, well; Friar Tuck," burbled Ev from his customary prone position on the couch. "Have a toddy, and get that tired, cold blood circulating."
"Revolting," said Sowles.
"Politics make strange bed-fellows, eh, Sowles? Like you 'n' me! And let's not forget the Little Brown Jug! Ho, ho, ho!"
Sowles turned to (or rather, on) Cam. "The Speech?"
"Right. The Speech. Right here, sir." Cam tendered the manuscript.
The Grimmest of Reapers found the most uncomfortable chair in the room, sat, and began reading. The first page was peeled off and dropped to the floor; the second; the third; and finally, the entire effort was strewn beside Sowles, who rose in what he undoubtedly considered righteous wrath.
"You've missed the whole Message!" he hissed.
"Sir?"
"All this Pollyanna frou-frou is all right as frosting--but you've left out the cake!"
Cam was momentarily spooked--and not "on account of the account," either. Sowles looked fully capable of loosing a full-fledged Inquisition, complete with rack and thumbscrew, at Cam's well-barbered head.
Sowles continued to fulminate. "You haven't got one word in there about our enemies!"
"But Father, I refer several times to the Slave World and its evil rulers...."
"Not just Them! What about the traitors in our midst--the sinister cabal of pinko liberals and moderate conservatives that have undermined our defenses...."
"I thought the Smirch Society had staked out that claim," said Cam.
"Bah! The Smirchers are too mealy-mouthed for the needs of the hour. I think they're a little soft on Communism. And what about the race mongrelizers?" spluttered Sowles. "Trying to subvert America with an Afro-Asian Trojan Horse!"
"I suppose you can trace your ancestry all the way back to Caligula," muttered Everett.
"That's right, you human sewer! If I hadn't been assured you might be of use to the Cause--" He left the sentence unfinished.
"I get the picture, Father." Cam ushered Sowles to the door. "We'll get the new draft out right away."
"And don't forget the economic heretics," Sowles shouted as the door closed on him. "The fiends that concocted the income tax, and Social Security, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and...."
"Wow," breathed Cam, when the torrent was finally cut off.
"How do you like Galahad now?" asked Ev from the bar.
"Build me one too," answered Cam.
* * * * *
Nevertheless, the revision had to be done, and done it was.
"That'll have 'em seein' Red, all right," pronounced Everett.
"It's got everything in it except a declaration of war on Switzerland," said Cam ruefully.
"Quiet--or he'll hear about that, and want it too," said Ev.
* * * * *
The Day of the Rally dawned bright and smoggy, but the weather boys promised a clear, cool evening. Naturally, the major 3-D nets were all set to 'cast the "birth in the Bowl" of a potentially historic campaign. Satellites would bounce the signal over oceans and continents, throughout Euramerica, as well carrying the presentation as to allies and unaligned nations from Tokyo to Karachi. The crusading aspect of Sowles' candidacy had been tom-tommed so well that pundits were already predicting that Sowles might easily go on to the Governorship of North America two years hence--if, indeed, his Soldiers did not sweep to control of the U. S. of E. Parliament then. That, of course, would install the Grim Reaper in the Presidential Palace.... Cam shuddered and thrust the thought from his mind. But wild dreams aside, there was no doubt that two hemispheres' attention was riveted on the big-time debut of the West Coast's Angel of Vengeance.
En route to the Bowl, the "Soldier" theme was already manifest. Every few feet, a "Brother-Private" in a new, usually ill-fitting uniform was directing traffic or hawking MAB-confected wares. "Father-General" Sowles appeared to have lifted more than one leaf from the Salvation Army's book.
Cam himself had been verbally commissioned Brother Lieutenant-Colonel when the revised oration had been submitted to Sowles. The Reaper ate it up this trip. "You'd have thought it came down from Sinai on tablets," said Ev after Sowles left to begin practicing the Speech.
"He'll make it sound that way," Cam had remarked. "Above all, Our Leader is a great orator."
"Translation: bloody demagogue," Ev had replied.
Now their chauffeured air-suspension limo was tooling them up through the thickening crowds to the hill-cradled amphitheater.
Curt had come along to help. "What's going to happen to the overflow?" he asked anxiously, peering at the turgid sea of faces outside.
"Special buses will take them to closed circuit 3-D houses," said Cam.
"Fantastic," said Ev.
Inside, there were just about the same number of last-minute panics and snafus as at most 3-D spectaculars. Power for the innumerable huge coaxial snakes was several times inadequate, which problem no one, of course, had foreseen. But eventually all the crises had had their moment and were coped with--and suddenly it was almost air time.
Cam, Curt, and Ev repaired to the control booth and found an area where they wouldn't be under the technicians' feet. (Cam had decreed a triple platoon system on this one: a fresh director and crew were alternated in every fifteen minutes.) Ev produced a flask, which Cam and Curt declined; but the super-mongoose took a few greedy licks at the cap.
"A lush Gestalt yet," muttered Curt.
"Don't insult the folks that put you in silk, sonny," advised Ev.
"Tell me about the others now," said Cam. "Everything's out of our hands anyhow."
* * * * *
Ev breathed deeply. "Okay, I'll tell you a wee bit. One of us is a Pathan valet in Bombay--which would cut up the Reaper worse than the fictitious entente with the squid. And the Pathan must have a few drops of Irish blood and, ergo, second sight--he contributes enormously to the acuity of our insight into potential human reaction."
"Mmmm. And?"
"My small friend here, the super-mongoose, is the amplifier. Some goofy new gland, I suppose--or as you guessed, a mutational development. In that tiny corpus, however it came about, is an organ that enables us to communicate on an elemental level among ourselves without regard to mileage; and to probe psyches anywhere in the world--as many as we want. Actually, we have to keep his output at a fraction of capacity, or else get swamped in a tidal wave of emotion."
"That accounts for three. But you indicated there were four," said Cam.
"No, I never! But you're right. There is a fourth. Twelve years old; IQ about 180. Never even leaves his room. But his mind--and his psi faculties--have seven-league boots. He runs our team."
"Where does he live?"
"High on a windy hill. He, he, he!" Ev hit the flask as a trout the fly, and an engineer glared. The gradually rising stage lights signalled the Zero Second in a symphony of changing color.
First, the cross-and-star symbol grew from a tiny point on the stage until it became a living pillar of luminosity that seemed to dwarf the night.
Then came the distant music of fife and drum, augmented by cornet: "Yankee Doodle;" and in the traditional Revolutionary regalia, the musical minute-men led a parade down the aisles of the Choral Guard. They segued to "Onward Christian Soldiers" as they marched past the mesmerized audience, up to and onto the stage; and topped off the medley with "The Battle Hymn of The Republic." It was only great.
"The folks are already on the ropes," said Ev.
"Where does he live?" asked Cam.
A Brother-Major came forward and led the Choral Guard and audience in a responsive psalm that emphasized the smiting of enemies. With the "Amen," the cameras panned with the audience's eyes up to the pregnant night sky. You could hear an option drop.
Then the Guard did some fancy quick-step singing on stage: "God Bless America"; "Over there"; and "The Soldiers Are Coming", to the tune of "The Campbells Are Coming", complete with bagpipe brigade.
Next, a rather hard-featured Sister Captain told how the growing army of the Lord needed support. The Offertory was handled by Brother N.C.O.'s while super-imposed 3-D slides told the brethren at home exactly how to get their bux to Sowles. Meanwhile a battery of organs swept through the "Marseillaise", "Land Of Hope And Glory", and other U. S. of E. songs. Finally, a Guard contralto came forward and got the whole crowd on its feet to join her in singing "The Star Spangled Banner."
"They're limp as old wet-wash," said Ev.
* * * * *
Now the Bowl went dark except for the pale light of the moon and stars. Minutes passed. Eventually, a spotlight picked out Sowles standing alone, quietly, meditatively, at Stage Right. He looked as though wondering if it was all right to come out. The audience went wild. Cam reflected that it probably would have, even without the claques he had planted. As it was, had the Bowl had a roof, it would have been blasted off.
"We're picking up reactions like mad," said Ev.
"The U. S. of E. audience alone will hit at least 200 million," said Cam.
"All thinking--I should say feeling--like one great docile beast."
"Where does he live?" Cam asked again.
"Tibet," blurted Ev unthinkingly; then he turned and glared at Cam as he might at a tarantula in his daiquiri.
But Sowles had begun to speak. A huge rear-projection screen behind him visualized each thought uttered. He started with the theme of the West: how logical that a great new crusade should be born here where men of the cloth had first blazed Western civilization's trails; Berkeley was quoted about the Westward Star of Empire; this was the shore sought by the most valiant of the westering tide of pioneers; etc., etc. Meanwhile the 3-D living mural milked Western scenery to a fare-thee-well. Gaunt fishermen stared out over Puget Sound, and Big Sur underlined the concept of rugged strength. Mount McKinley and Mazatlan passed in review.
Then Sowles got down to business. This vital young giant--the West--was not going to let the effete pestholes of the East (by this he meant all the way East, including Stockholm, Athens, and Kashmir) forfeit the Caucasian heritage with their decadent goings-on. The Commie Complex was not going to be handed the rest of the planet on a silver platter because of Euramerican "marshmallow moral fiber."
He proceeded to the list of Hates: Welfare Statism; tyranny by tax ("Remember the Boston Tea Party!"); loose divorce laws; fraternal lodges; "promiscuous enfranchisement"; water fluoridation; and so on. These were but a few of the cancers, he screamed, that must be ruthlessly excised from the body politic so that a lean, clean Euramerica might face the Arch-Enemy on reasonably even terms.
"They're frothing at the mouth," said Ev.
Now Sowles really tore the rag off the bush. He described the Godless Atheists that held half the world in thrall. He rehearsed again the butchery of the kulaks and the kangaroo courts of Cuba. He showed the Mongol tanks rumbling into Budapest and the pinched-face terror of the East German refugees; the "human sea" charges in Korea and the flight of the Dalai Lama.
Suddenly Cam was struck by a wild surmise.
"Number Four--he's the Panchen Lama, isn't he?" Cam knew that the current Red puppet high priest was about twelve.
"You win the cigar," said Ev.
Cam made up his mind quickly. "Ev, listen to me and do exactly as I say. This is crucial."
"What?"
"Turn up the gain on the mongoose."
"What for? It's all I can stand right now!"
"Never mind. Turn it up."
"You're the account exec."
* * * * *
Now Sowles began telling in hushed whispers how it would be under the Reds. The huge mural became a panorama of rapine. Commie soldiers sacked Euramerican cities and hamlets. Girls were dragged off for the pleasure of drunken battalions. Barbarian guffaws rang out as homes and stores were pillaged and put to the torch.
"Ourch!" gritted Ev. "All this hate...."
"Have another snort and turn up the gain."
The crowd began to low like a cow in labor. Sowles swung into the climax: A series of questions shouted to the audience....
"Would you work night and day to crush this menace to your homes, your family, your country, your God?"
"YES!" The hills rang with the full-throated bellow.
"Would you fight, and if need be, die, to save our civilization and slay the Commie monsters in their lairs?"
"YES!"
Cam thought he could even hear answering shouts from outside the Bowl. "Turn up the gain again."
"Will you place in the hands of your servants, the Christian Soldiers, all powers necessary to crush the barbarian tide?" This last was fairly screamed. Sowles was draped across the podium, arms outstretched to the audience.
"YES! YES! YES!" thundered the reverberating response.
Fife, drum, and cornet struck up "Onward" very softly.
"Will you follow me to the ends of the earth--to the very gates of Red Hell itself--destroying every obstacle in our path--until the Anti-Christ has been annihilated root and branch, and we have come into our Kingdom? Will you follow ME??!"
Pandemonium. The crowd surged into the aisles, falling in with the Choral Guard, singing, shouting, weeping.
"He hit high C," said Ev.
"Full gain," said Cam.
Ev gulped more skull-buster and stroked the "amplifier" in the region of the pancreas.
Sowles' arms were uplifted, and one of Cam's clever little effects haloed his flying locks.
"KILL THE REDS!" he shrilled.
"Kill ... REDS ... KILL ... REDS ..." chanted the crowd, in time to the drum.
The bright feral light of the super-mongoose's eyes seemed to lance at Sowles, like an infra-red flash. Then there was a puff where the would-be messiah had stood--a crackle, and a smell of scorched air; but no more Sowles.
"He's gone!" said Curt.
"You're damn right, and thank God for it," said Cam, ministering to Ev who had slumped unconscious from his chair.
* * * * *
The mob broke up uncertainly, with the disappearance of the focus for its concerted bloodlust. The police asked many questions but none of the right ones. Finally, Cam, Ev, and Curt escaped to the waiting limo and started the long slow crawl downhill.
"Now--give," said Ev.
"Feedback. That's why I had you unleash Mighty Mouse. All that hate in hundreds of millions of people had to boomerang back through your Gestalt in some psi-fashion ... although I did not anticipate the pyrotechnics--or should I say pyrokinetics?"
"But what for, Cam?" asked Curt. "I've never seen such an effective job of mass influence."
"He could have been elected President tomorrow," said Ev.
"That's just it--we did too good a job. And I think that's the way your Tibetan quarterback wanted it." Cam tilted Ev's flask. "Sowles was a cinch to go all the way, which would have meant all-out war. Maybe your junior Fu Manchu figured he could pick up the pieces afterwards."
"How could he know you'd have a character like Sowles all set to go?" Ev said. "Oh, I get it--precognition. It's fortunate that his crystal ball didn't read as far as the outcome tonight."
"In any case, we'd better get your Pathan over here, and start rebuilding your Gestalt," said Cam. "You won't hear from the Panchen--he's undoubtedly constructing a new, all-Red unit right now. After this bit, psi faculties, including telempathy, have to be considered another weapons family in the Cold War ... a new set of pieces of the big chessboard. So you're going to have to find a substitute for the Himalayan Quiz Kid, and git crackin'."
"I'll consider your application," said Ev, giving his flask the coup de grace; and the lights of L.A. rushed up around them like a huge breaker--gaudy, garish, and beautifully comprehensible.
THE END
LOOT OF THE VOID
By Edwin K. Sloat
Dick Penrun glanced up incredulously.
"Why, that's impossible; you would have to be two hundred years old!" he exclaimed.
Lozzo nervously ran a hand through his white mop of hair.
"But it is true, Sirro," he assured his companion. "We Martians sometimes live three centuries. You should know that I am only a hundred and seventy-five, and I do not lie when I say I was a cabin boy under Captain Halkon."
His voice sank to a whisper, and he glanced apprehensively about the buffet of the Western Star which was due now in three days at the Martian city of Nurm. Penrun's eyes followed his anxious glances curiously. The buffet was partly filled with passengers, smoking, gossiping women, and men at cards, or throwing dice in the Martian gambling game of diklo, which was the universal fad of the moment. No place could have been safer, Penrun reflected. Doubtless the old man's caution was a lifelong habit acquired in his youth, if he had actually served under Halkon.
Before long the old codger would be saying that he knew the hiding place of Halkon's treasure, about which there were probably more legends and yarns than anything else in the Universe. A century had elapsed since the death of the famous pirate who had preyed on the shipping of the Void with fearless, ruthless audacity and had piled up a fabulous treasure before that fatal day when the massed battle spheres of the Interplanetary Council trapped his ships out near Mercury and blew them to atoms there in the sun-beaten reaches of space. Some of the men had been captured; old Lozzo might have been one of them. Penrun knew the history of Halkon from childhood, and for a very good reason.
The ancient Martian stirred uneasily. His piercing blue eyes turned again to Penrun's face.
"Every word I have said is true, Sirro," he repeated hurriedly. "I boarded this ship at New York with the sole intention of discharging my sworn duty and giving a message to the grandson of Captain Orion Halkon, his first male descendant."
* * * * *
Penrun's eyes widened in startled amazement. He, himself, was the grandson of the notorious Halkon, a fact that not more than half a dozen people in the Universe knew--or so he had always believed. His mother, Halkon's only daughter, good and upright woman that she was, had hidden that family skeleton far back in the closet and solemnly warned Dick Penrun and his two sisters to keep it there. Yet this old man, who had singled him out of the crowd in the buffet not thirty minutes ago and drew him into conversation, knew the secret. Perhaps he really had been a cabin boy under Halkon!
"I have been serving out the hundred-year sentence for piracy the judges imposed on me, a century in your own Earth prison of Sing Sing," muttered Lozzo. "I have just been released. Quick! My inner gods tell me my vase of life is toppling. I swore to your grandfather that I would deliver the message. It is here. Guard well your own life, for this paper is a thing of evil!"
His hand rested nervously on the edge of the table. The ancient blue eyes swept the buffet with a lightning glance. Then he slid his hand forward across the polished wood. Penrun glimpsed a bit of yellow, folded paper beneath it. Then something tweaked his hair. A deafening explosion filled the buffet. Lozzo stiffened, his mouth gaped in a choked scream, and he sprawled across the table, dead.
As he fell, a fat white hand darted over the table toward the oblong of folded, yellow paper lying unprotected on its surface. Penrun clutched at it frantically. The fat fingers closed on the paper and were gone.
Penrun whirled about. The drapes of the doorway framed a heavy, pasty face with liquid black eyes. The slug gun was aiming again, this time at Penrun. He hurled himself sideways out of his chair as it roared a second time. The heavy slug buried itself in the corpse of the old Martian on the table. The face in the doorway vanished.
* * * * *
The next instant Penrun was through the door and racing down the long promenade deck under the glow of the electric lights, for the quartering sun was shining on the opposite side of the ship. Far down the deck ahead fled the slayer.
The killer paused long enough to drop an emergency bulkhead gate. Five minutes later when Penrun and the other passengers succeeded in raising it, he had disappeared. One of the emergency space-suits beside the air-lock was missing. Penrun sprang to a nearby port-hole.
Far back in space he saw the tiny figure shining in the sunlight, while the long flame of his Sextle rocket-pistol showed that he was checking his forward momentum as rapidly as possible. Unquestionably he would be picked up by some craft now trailing the liner, for the murder and theft of the paper must have been carefully planned. Penrun turned from the port-hole thoughtfully.
The liner was in an uproar. News of the murder had spread like wild-fire. Women were screaming hysterically and men shouting as they rushed about in terror, believing that the ship was in the hands of pirates. A squad of sailors passed on the double to take charge of the buffet. There would be an inquest shortly. Penrun started for his stateroom. He wanted to be alone a few minutes before the inquest took place.
His room was on the deck above. The sight of the empty passage relieved him, but he was surprised to discover that he had not locked the door when he left an hour ago. He stepped into the room.
Instantly his hands shot upward. Something was prodding him in the back.
"One move or a sound, and I shoot," warned a sharp whisper. "Stand as you are till I find what I want."
His billfold was opened and dropped with an exclamation of disappointment. The searcher hurried. Penrun calmly noted that the fingers seemed to fumble and were not at all deft at this sort of work. He glanced down, and smiled grimly. A woman! He jerked his body away from the prodding pistol, gripped the slender hand that was about to plunge into his coat pocket, and whirled round, catching the intruder in his arms.
Big, terrified dark eyes stared up at him out of a pale, heart-shaped face. Then with a sob the girl wrenched free, ran out of the door and was gone.
* * * * *
He did not follow, but instead carefully locked the door and placed a chair against it. Things had been moving too rapidly for him to feel sure he was safe even now. Opening his left hand, he gazed down at a bit of crumpled yellow paper he was holding there. That much he had saved of the message from his long dead grandfather when the murderer grabbed the folded paper from the buffet table and fled.
It proved to be the bottom third of a sheet of heavy paper, and on it was drawn a piece of a map, showing a large semi-circle, which might have been a lake, and leading off from it were what might be a number of crooked canals. At the end of one of these was an "X" and the word "Here."
Below the sketch were some words that had not been torn off. He read them with growing amazement. "... aves of Titan. I swear this to be the true and correct place of concealment of ... may he who comes to possess it do much good and penance, for it is drenched in blood and ... Captain Orion Halkon."
Penrun sat for a long time in thought. Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn! Nightmare of killing heat, iron cold, and monstrous spiders! How many men had died trying to explore it! And who knew it better than Penrun himself, the only one who had ever escaped from that hellish cavern of the Living Dead? Old Halkon had hidden his treasure well indeed.
Penrun had never found the Caves. Legend described them as the one safe place on the satellite where a man might live without danger of being attacked by the spiders because the Caves were too cold for them.
Penrun doubted if there was any place that would be safe from the monstrous insects.
At any rate old Halkon had hidden his treasure there, and that part of the map that Penrun had thought was a lake was apparently the main cavern, and the canals, side passages. Old Halkon believed that he had hidden his treasure well, but he could not foresee just how well. Two thirds of the map, showing the location of the entrance to the Caves, had been taken by the murderer of the Martian, Lozzo. The remaining third, which showed the location of the treasure inside the Caves, was in Penrun's possession.
The murderer could find the Caves, but not the treasure inside; and Penrun could find the treasure inside, but not the Caves.
Penrun folded up the crumpled bit of paper and placed it carefully in his shoe. Unless his guess was wrong, another attempt to get it would be made shortly. Undoubtedly the girl had by now reported her failure to the rest of the gang.
* * * * *
The inquest was brief. The white-sheeted body of the Martian lay on the table where he had been slain. The captain of the liner called Penrun as the chief witness. He told a straightforward story of a chance acquaintance with Lozzo who, he said, seemed to be afraid of something. He had declared, so Penrun testified, that he was being hounded for a map of some kind and he wanted Penrun to see it. Then the murder had been committed, the map was stolen, and the murderer had fled. That was all, Penrun concluded, he knew about the matter.
Other passengers corroborated his story and he was dismissed.
Throughout the inquest Penrun studied the crowd of passengers that jammed the buffet, hoping he might catch a glimpse of the slender, dark-eyed girl who had tried to rob him. She was nowhere to be seen. He thought of telling the captain about her, but decided not to. She might make another attempt to get the map, and thereby give him the opportunity of rounding up the whole gang, or at least of learning who they were. He told himself grimly that if he could lay hold of her again, she would not escape so easily.
If Penrun didn't realize before that he was a marked man, it was impressed on him more forcefully three hours later on the lower deck when two men attacked him in the darkened passage near the stern. There was no time for pistols. A series of hurried fist-blows. He slugged his way free and fled to the safety of his stateroom.
Once there he locked the door and sat down to consider his position. It was obvious now that he would be followed to the outposts of space, if necessary, in an attempt to get the map from him.
* * * * *
After half an hour's hard thinking he tossed away his fourth cigarette, loosened the pistol in his armpit holster, and slipped out of the room. He went to the captain.
"You think, then, that your life is in danger because you happened to be talking to that old Martian when he was murdered?" asked the captain, when Penrun had finished.
"No question about it," declared Penrun. "Two attempts have been made already."
"Hmm," said the captain, frowning. "A most remarkably strange business. I've never had anything like it aboard my ship in the twenty years I've been traveling the Void."
"I can pay for the space-sphere," urged Penrun. "My certificate of credit will take care of it with funds to spare. All you have to do is to let me cast off at once. If any questions are asked, you can say it was my wish."
"Hmm! Really, Mr. Penrun, this is a most unusual request. I'm not inclined--"
He stared at the communication board. The meteor warning dial was fluctuating violently, showing the presence of a rapidly approaching body--a meteor, or perhaps a flight of them. Gongs throughout the liner automatically began to sound a warning for the passengers to get into their space suits. The captain sat as though petrified.
Penrun sprang to the small visi-screen beside the board and snapped on the current. Swiftly he revolved the periscope aerial. There appeared on the screen the hull of a long, rakish, cigar-shaped craft which was overhauling the liner. The stranger was painted dead black and displayed no emblem.
"There's your meteor, Skipper," he remarked ironically. "And I am the attraction that is drawing it to your ship for another murder. Do I get the space-sphere?"
* * * * *
The captain sprang to his feet. "You get it, Penrun. You'll have to hurry. I want no more murders aboard my ship. Here, down this private stairs to the sphere air-lock. I'll make arrangements by phone. Once you are free of the liner I'll slow down so that the black ship will have to slow down, too. That will give you a chance to pull away and get a good start on them."
Five minutes later Penrun's newly acquired craft was sliding out of its air-lock in the belly of the monstrous liner. He pulled away and glanced back.
The liner was already slowing down. The black pursuing craft was hidden by its vast, curving bulk. Penrun crowded on speed as swiftly as he dared. By the time the strange craft had made contact with the Western Star his little sphere had dwindled to a mere point of light in the black depths of space and vanished.
Penrun leaned over his charts grimly, as he set a new course for the sphere to follow. He, too, could play at this game. He'd carry the battle to the enemy's gate. Out to Titan he'd go and match his familiarity with the little planet against the superior numbers of his enemies.
* * * * *
Ten days later, Earth time, he was circling Titan, while he searched the grim, forbidden terrain beneath. After days of studying and speculation he had decided that the Caves must be situated in the Inferno Range, a place so particularly vicious that no man, so far as was known, had ever explored it. During the day the heat would boil eggs, and at night the sub-zero cold cracked great scales off the granite boulders. And here, too, lay the Trap-Door City of the monster spiders!
The grim, fantastic range soon appeared over the horizon, stabbing its saw-tooth peaks far into the sky. Dawn was still lighting the world, and a great snow-storm, a howling, furious blizzard, concealed the lower slopes of the mountains. Penrun knew that presently the driving snow-flakes would change to rain-drops, and the shrieking, moaning voice of the gale would give way to the crashing, rolling thunder of the tempest. As the day advanced the storm would die abruptly and the clouds vanish under the deadly heat.
Then the Trap-Door City, which covered the slopes above the plateau at the three-thousand-foot level like a checker-board of shimmering, silken circles, would spring to febrile life as the spider monsters went streaking and leaping across the barren, distorted granite on the day's business, the hunt for food in the lowlands, and the opening of the trap-doors to gather in the heat of the day in the silken tunnel homes set in the gorges and among the boulders. At sunset the doors would all be closed, for then the rain and the electrical storm would return, and at night the blizzard. The storm-and-heat cycle was the deadly weather routine of the Infernos.
Penrun steered for a tall, cloven peak that towered high above the Trap-Door City. In its thin air and continuous cold he would be comparatively safe from marauding spider scouts, and from the peak he could watch not only the city of the monsters but the better part of the Inferno Range as well.
He was convinced that before long the mysterious black craft would put in an appearance somewhere near this spot. Penrun knew it all too well. There by the cataract of the White River, half a mile across the plateau from the insect city, he had once been captured.
* * * * *
Next morning when he looked down on the plateau just below the Trap-Door City he laughed triumphantly. There sat the long black-hulled space craft he had seen overhauling the liner.
But a moment later he shook his head dubiously. Too brazen, that landing. It was almost in the insect city. Of course, the ship was large and heavily armed with ray-guns which poked out their sharp snouts here and there about the hull. None the less, an experienced explorer of Titan would never have flung such defiance at the spiders.
The city was feverishly alive with the monsters now. They gathered in groups to stare down at the strange craft, then raced away again, darting in and out of their trap-door homes and streaking here and there across the twisted, tortured granite of the mountainside. The Queen's palace, a vast, raised cocoon of shimmering, silken web, was a veritable bee-hive. Something was brewing!
Abruptly the trap-door homes vomited forth monstrous insects by the thousands which spread with prodigious speed along the mountainside. At an unseen signal they poured down upon the plateau and charged the space-ship.
The black craft's heavy ray-guns broke into life. Attacking monsters curled up and died as the rays bit into their onrushing ranks. The first wave melted, but an instant later the following waves buried the ship.
Insects in the rear darted here and there, dragging away dead and dying spiders. Here was food aplenty! The denizens of the Trap-Door City would live well on their dead for a few days.
Abruptly the attack ceased. The crackling ray-guns were still taking toll as the monsters scurried back to the safety of their city, leaving their dead piled high about the hull of the ship.
* * * * *
Penrun wondered if the monsters would abandon the heaps of their dead. He rather expected that frenzied efforts would be made to retrieve them for food. The problem was solved by those aboard the space-ship, for presently it rose a score of feet in the air and moved a few hundred yards nearer the waterfall that marked the headwaters of the White River.
At once a frantic wave of spiders swept down across the plateau scouring it clean of the dead monsters.
After that the Trap-Door City seemed deserted. Not a spider could be seen near the shining, circular doors. Only here and there crouched a huge, bristly warrior safe behind a jutting rock with his glittering eight eyes fixed on the motionless black ship below.
Again the weary waiting. Penrun could only hope that it would not be long before those aboard the black ship gave him some hint of where the entrance to the Caves might be. Time and again he trained his glasses on the ship only to drop them resignedly. But when noon had passed and the heat of the day was scorching the rock he did not drop his glasses when he looked through them once again. Instead he stood erect in horror and dismay.
A girl had dashed out of the air-lock of the ship. She seemed to be familiar. Then he recognized her as the girl who had tried to rob him aboard the Western Star. Her face was drawn with agony in the stifling, overpowering heat. She had advanced but a few yards, but she was already staggering uncertainly.
What in Heaven's name possessed her to try to venture out in that killing heat? She wasn't even dressed in a space-suit, which would have protected her against heat as well as cold. There was the danger of the monster spiders! Rescue would have to be quick!
Even as the thought flashed through his mind he knew she was past saving. Down from the nearest pinnacle of rock streaked a gigantic spider. The girl saw it, screamed, clutched her throat and fell. Ray-guns of the ship crackled frenziedly. In vain! The insect swept the helpless girl up in its powerful mandibles, sprang clear over the ship and was streaking back up among the rocks in a black blur of speed before the men inside the ship could train the guns on that side, even if they had dared to.
* * * * *
Penrun watched with fascinated dread. To the cavern of the Living Dead! The monster carrying the limp girlish form was now running up through the city toward it, guarded by two other huge insects that had appeared from nowhere. Through the entrance of the cavern they darted and disappeared.
Surely those aboard the ship would make an effort to rescue her, thought Penrun, tense with horror. At least they would retaliate by raying the city with their heavy artillery. But no! The black ship only continued to rest there wavering in the heat. Penrun swore vividly. The cowards! Still, perhaps they were afraid to unlimber their heavy artillery for fear of killing the girl. Or perhaps, which was more likely, they thought she was already dead and devoured. Few persons knew about the Living Death.
Ah, well, he'd forget about her. She was an enemy, she was one of the group that was trying to rob and perhaps kill him. Perhaps her companions knew that she wouldn't be killed for two or three days, and would make an effort to rescue her. And perhaps they wouldn't.
But before an hour had passed Penrun knew that he was going to master his horror of that cavern and save her himself, or die in the attempt. He, and he alone, had been in the cavern of the Living Dead and knew what to expect--the fate that might be his as well as the girl's.
He wondered if that Englishman, that old man with the great beard who said he had known Shakespeare and Bacon personally, was still lying in his silken hammock at the far end of the cave. Know Shakespeare personally? Impossible! Yet was it more impossible than the cavern itself? The man's English was quaint and nearly unintelligible. His description of that comical old space-ship of brass and wood was plausible. Perhaps he had known the Bard of Avon.
* * * * *
Night had descended when Penrun finally emerged from his little ship. The air was bitterly cold, and overhead the stars burned brilliantly. He paused to marvel a little that the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the other constellations appeared just the same out here hundreds of millions of miles from Earth as they did at home. It made one feel infinitely small to realize the pinpoint size of the Solar Universe. He shivered for the temperature was nearly forty below zero, and snapped on the current of his Ecklin electro-heater which was connected with his clothing and would keep him warm even in that cold.
Another suit of slip-on clothes with an Ecklin heater, and his lounging moccasins were in a pack on his back. If he succeeded in releasing the girl, she would need them. The spider monsters didn't leave their Living Dead victims any clothing usually; and little good would it have done the Living Dead if they had.
Swiftly he descended the peak, leaping easily from rock to rock, thanks to the small gravity of the planet, and presently entered the clouds above the insect city. Abruptly the storm broke in all its fury with the shrieking of the gale and driving snow. In the blackness the pencil of light from his tiny flash showed only a few yards through the swirling, driving flakes that bit and numbed his bare face. With pistol ready he forged slowly ahead toward the cavern of the Living Dead.
He bumped into the snow-covered rock before he realized he was close to the place. With every nerve alert and the shrieking, freezing gale forgotten he slipped the flashlight back into its holder and drew another pistol. The door, he recalled, opened inward. It was not fastened, but just inside the entrance crouched a gigantic insect on guard.
Penrun was tense and ready. He kicked the door so viciously that its elastic, silken frame sagged inward under the impact of his foot. Against the glow of the green light inside the cavern he saw a nightmarish monster rising to its feet. Both pistols stabbed viciously as the monster thrust forward a thick, bristly leg to shut the door again.
* * * * *
A ray bit off the leg at the second joint. The other ray ripped open the soft, tumid abdomen. Penrun had barely time to throw himself aside as the convulsed, dying monster hurled itself tigerishly forward through the doorway out into the driving storm in a final frenzied effort to seize and rend his frail human enemy.
Penrun slipped into the cavern. The deathly cold outside would finish the horrible insect. As he kicked the big door shut he was crouched and tense, for the ancient gray attendant monster whose poisoned bite had paralyzed thousands for this living hell was moving forward curiously.
Both pistols flamed to life. The fearsome head of the monster with its poisoned mandible shriveled to nothing under the searing rays. Penrun sprang backward and jerked open the door. Then he closed it again. The old spider was moving feebly. Instead of the galvanic death of the guard, the huge gray insect's legs buckled under it and it slumped down to the floor of the cave where it quivered a few seconds, then relaxed in death.
As Penrun stepped forward around the carcass the cave filled with hysterical screams and hoarse insane shouting of joy and terror. He looked up at the high vaulted roof where the strange diamond-shaped crystal diffused its green light along the shimmering silken web, then turned his gaze downward to the rock floor beneath his feet. At last he gritted his teeth and forced himself to look at the walls.
Again he saw tier upon tier of hammocks, each holding a naked human being, helpless and paralyzed from the poisoned bite of the attendant monster spider. Some could weep, some could smile, some could talk, yet none could move either hand or foot. A few were mercifully unconscious, but the rest were not. Many were insane. Yet they all lay alike year after year, century after century, if need be, kept alive by the rays of the strange green light in the roof. This was the cavern of the Living Dead!
* * * * *
Penrun knew the tragic future of these unfortunates. A few, perhaps, would go as food for the Queen in times of famine. The remainder would become living incubators for the larvae of the Queen which would be planted in their living bodies by the monster attendant to eat away the vitals until death mercifully ended the victim's life, and the growing spider emerged to feed on a new victim, or to go its way.
A thousand helpless human beings swung in their silken hammocks awaiting their fate. Penrun had learned about them during those two horrible days he had been held prisoner here before he had succeeded in raying the novice attendant and the monster guard with the pistol from his armpit holster that the spiders had overlooked when they captured him. He recalled again how he had dashed frantically from hammock to hammock trying to rouse some of the Living Dead to escape with him. Not one of them could respond.
Reports to the Interplanetary Council? He had made them, written and oral, and had only been laughed at for a half-crazy explorer. The Council would not even investigate.
Now Penrun did not tarry. He strode swiftly back to the far end of the cavern.
"The girl who was just brought in, is she safe?" he asked hoarsely.
None seemed to know, but presently he knew she was still unhurt, for he found her bound hand and foot to the rock wall with heavy silken webs. Nearly all her clothing had been torn off her. She looked up hopelessly. A great fear appeared in her eyes.
"You!" she gasped. "Are you responsible for this?"
"I have come for you," he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, swiftly removing the pack from his back.
She cowered against the wall.
"You--you inhuman beast!" Her face was white with horror.
He cut the silken bonds.
* * * * *
"Don't be a fool!" he said roughly. "I have no power over these monsters. Hurry into those clothes! Do you want to be bitten in the small of the back and lie paralyzed for years in a hammock like these other unfortunates, then suffer untold agony for months while spiders' larvae eat out your vitals? Hurry, I say! We must get out of here at once!"
He turned away. He wanted to see that old Englishman who said he had known Shakespeare. His wish was in vain. The old man's sightless eyes stared up at the silken roof. The long, heavy beard that lay across the breast stirred. The beady, glittering eyes of an infant spider peeped out. Penrun uttered a curse of loathing. His pistol stabbed death into the foul insect.
He felt a touch on his arm. The girl was waiting.
"I am ready," she said quietly. "Oh, let us hurry!"
Dawn was lighting the world outside, and the driving blizzard was already changing to rain. Penrun seized the girl's hand and ran madly up the mountainside toward the peak. The spiders usually did not venture out in the rain, but in the face of danger from the ship they would be abroad as early as possible this morning.
Penrun suddenly spurted madly. Half a dozen gigantic spiders were moving cautiously along the lower edge of the city, their bodies looming up grotesquely in the misty rain. The girl stumbled, struck her head against a boulder, and lay still. Penrun caught her up in his arms and sprinted madly up the steep slope.
* * * * *
A rock loosened by his flying feet rattled and pounded down the hillside. Instantly the monsters whirled round, sighted him and started in pursuit. With a mighty leap he cleared a ten-foot ledge, carrying his unconscious burden, and plunged into the sheltering mist of the clouds. Up, up! Thank God for the weak gravity!
A swishing rattle of claws on rock shot by them in the fog, turned and swept back. Penrun sprang straight upward, rising nearly a dozen feet in the air as the monsters streaked past underneath.
Only a little farther! Savagely he forced his failing strength to carry them up the slope. The air was chilling fast and the mist thinning. He broke into clear air as the fog behind them filled with the rattle of racing claws on the barren granite and the grating roar of the baffled monsters, seeking frantically for their intended victims.
He staggered on another hundred yards before he collapsed with lungs laboring desperately in the rarefied air.
Below them a bristly monster charged out of the fog, sighted them lying up among the rocks, and leaped after them. Penrun jerked up a pistol with trembling fingers and loosed its deadly ray. The huge spider stumbled and ploughed head-on among the rocks with a flurry of legs. It rose loggily, for its fierce energy was dwindling rapidly in the biting cold. Again the pistol crackled. The gigantic insect toppled over and rolled down the mountainside into the fog and vanished.
"Are we safe now?"
Penrun turned. The girl was now sitting up somewhat unsteadily, with an ugly bruise on her forehead.
"I think so," he replied. "Up there in my space-sphere we shall be quite safe."
* * * * *
Together they plodded silently up the sharp incline of the peak, her hand in his. And as they went he marveled that her eyes could be so beautiful now that the fear and horror had vanished from their depths.
The storm clouds below had broken up and dissolved under the increasing heat, revealing the Trap-Door City, seemingly deserted, and the motionless black ship still resting on the plateau. Penrun turned to the girl beside him in the control nest of the space-sphere.
"What are your friends waiting for all this time?" he asked abruptly.
"They're not my friends," she retorted. "And you might have guessed that they are waiting for you to arrive with the other third of the map. They are planning to surprise you and rob you of it. The entrance to the Caves is under the edge of the Cataract over there, and by waiting here they are sure to be on hand when you arrive. Only"--her brows puckered in a little frown--"I don't understand why they remain out there on the open rock after Helgers has picked a hiding-place for the ship."
"Helgers?"
"He is the leader of the gang, and he is the man who killed that poor old Martian aboard the Western Star for the map. Helgers learned about the treasure and the existence of the map through a convict who was with Lozzo in the prison. Helgers pretends to be an importer in Chicago--he actually owns a nice little business there--but in reality he is one of the biggest smugglers in the Universe."
"How do you come to be with him?"
"I was coming to that," she replied. "My parents live on Ganymede."
Penrun nodded. He was familiar with the fourth satellite of Jupiter and its fertile provinces.
"My father is an American, but my grandfather on my mother's side was a Medan nobleman. He was ruined by that notorious pirate, Captain Halkon, who descended with his ships on our city and carried off everything of value, including the vast amount of scrip credits owned by the state which were entrusted to my grandfather. You know the Ganymedan debtor's law?"
He did indeed! It was one of the most infamous laws of the Universe: ruling that the debts of the father descended to the children and their children's children until paid.
* * * * *
"My family is now poor," she went on. "For a century or more we have striven to pay off the debt caused by the loss of those state funds. That's the way matters stood when I received a letter from my brother Tom in Chicago, who was employed in the office of Helgers' legitimate importing business, little aware of the smuggling. Tom had somehow got wind of the near discovery of Halkon's treasure, and I saw a chance to get a part of it by joining Helgers' party. He might not want us, but he would be practically forced to take us to keep our mouths shut. I felt that we were honestly entitled to a part of that treasure which had been stolen from our family, and with it we could pay off that old debt that had ridden our family like an Old Man of the Sea for more than a century.
"Getting into the expedition proved much simpler than I had expected. When Tom told Helgers about me he was very eager to help us--he is one of those men who is always anxious to help a girl if he thinks she is good-looking enough. So you see when I held you up in your stateroom I was merely performing my part of the scheme, although I didn't know then that Helgers had already slain the old Martian and leaped out into space.
"After that the Osprey--the ship down there on the plateau--overhauled the Western Star and took us off, and shortly afterward I learned most unpleasantly that Helgers had no intention of giving Tom and me our share unless I gave myself to him in exchange. I told Tom, and trouble started. It came to a head yesterday and there was a fight and--and Helgers killed Tom."
She began to weep quietly. Penrun stared grimly down at the black, motionless ship. Presently the girl resumed her story.
"I managed to get the air-lock open and escaped from the ship. Then that horrid spider caught me. You know the rest."
Her voice trailed off. Penrun remained silent for a while.
"You haven't even told me your name," he reminded her gently.
"Irma Boardle," she replied with a wan smile.
"I am Dick Penrun, in case you don't already know me. Captain Halkon was my grandfather. We always tried to keep the knowledge of it a family secret, since we were ashamed of it. If I--we get our hands on that treasure, I can promise you that the debt hanging over your family shall be paid first, Miss Boardle."
"Not Miss Boardle. Call me Irma," she said, the wan smile growing suddenly warm.
Penrun looked at her thoughtfully.
"But we aren't near the treasure yet," he said. "Between the spider monsters and the human monsters in the ship, our chances are rather slim. We'll just have to wait until we get a break."
* * * * *
As the day wore on there was a note of menace in the silence that hung over the Trap-Door City. It was nothing tangible, unless it was the appearance of two long silvery rods mounted on the top of the huge cocoon-palace of the Queen aiming down at Helgers' ship. Penrun could have sworn they were not there yesterday. The sight of them made him uneasy.
Helgers must have interpreted the silence differently, for presently a man emerged from the ship, protected against the heat by a clumsy space-suit. He hesitated, then walked slowly away from the ship, and paused again, waiting for the spiders to attack. Not a movement was made in the city. Presently he moved on again toward the cataract which had dwindled in the heat of the day to a mere trickle of hot water down to the pool in the gorge more than half a mile below.
After a time the man reached the cataract. He descended the short path that led down under the lip of rock to another ledge a few feet below it. The entrance to the Caves opened out onto this lower ledge. Little wonder, thought Penrun, that no one knew where the Caves were.
Some time later two other men from the ship followed him.
"Fools!" muttered Penrun, following them through his glasses. "They think the spiders are afraid of their ray artillery. I'll bet the monsters are either waiting until all the men wander out of the ship, or else they're getting ready to spring some hellish surprise."
Other men came out of the ship, carrying rock drills, a roll of cable and a powerful little windlass. Instead of going to the Caves, they went round the ship to the other side under the doubtful protection of the ray-guns, and sank two shafts into the granite. Into these they drove steel posts and anchored the windlass. One end of the cable was attached to the windlass and the other to the nose of the ship. Then they slowly dragged the big craft across the plateau on rollers from the ship's store room.
* * * * *
"That's strange!" exclaimed Penrun. "The ship can't rise! I wonder what's wrong, and why they are pulling it away from instead of toward the Caves."
"I don't know what's the matter with the ship, but I believe I know why they are moving it," volunteered Irma. "They're taking it to that hiding-place I told you Helgers picked out--there behind that upthrust of rock. You see, they think you know where the Caves are because you have explored Titan, and they think you will come directly here, so they want the ship hidden to make sure you land."
Half a hundred men in their space-suits toiled like ants about the big cylindrical craft until they at last jockeyed it into position behind the natural screen of rock. Even before it was in place other men were swarming over the ship with paint machines, coloring it a granite gray. When they had finished the ship was nearly invisible from the sky.
Penrun paid little attention to their preparations. His attention was centered on those two shining rods atop the Queen's silken palace. They now aimed at the ship in its new position. A strange idea flashed through his mind. Those rods had in some mysterious way put the elevating machinery of the Osprey out of commission!
Suppose the spiders turned them next on his own space-sphere up here on the peak? The thought sent a shudder through him. Visions of the final flight across the nightmarish, distorted granite, the running down and capture of himself and Irma, the paralyzing bite of the monsters in the cavern of the Living Dead flashed across his mind. Cold sweat stood out on his forehead. Instinctively his hand leaped to the propulsion control and hovered there.
* * * * *
Yet why hadn't the spiders attacked the ship, now that they had it helpless? It was not their usual tactics to give their victims a chance to free themselves. Why, why? There could be only one answer. They were waiting for something! Penrun's eyes glinted suddenly.
"Irma," he said rapidly, "we are in serious danger. The spiders have obviously put the elevating machinery of the Osprey out of commission. Helgers and his men are doomed to the Living Death as surely as though they were already lying in the silken hammocks. If the monsters choose, they could do the same thing to our sphere and doom us to the same fate. I believe they are waiting for something. While they wait we have a chance to get the treasure and escape. Shall we risk it, or shall we go while we know we are safe?"
She looked up at him evenly.
"If you think we have a fair chance to get the treasure and escape, I say let's risk it," she said firmly.
"Good!" he exclaimed. "Here we go!"
The little sphere slipped out of its cleft in the peak and dropped swiftly into the valley on the side opposite the Trap-Door City and its mysterious menace. Day was swiftly dying, and the lower passes of the mountains were already hazy with rapidly forming storm-clouds.
"Look!" cried Irma excitedly. "What are those things?"
Far in the distance a long line of wavering red lights snaked swiftly through the dusky valley toward them. Penrun picked up his binoculars.
"Spiders," he announced. "Scores of them. Each is carrying a sort of red torch. I have a feeling that those are what the monsters of the Trap-Door City have been waiting for."
He urged the sphere to swifter flight along the range. Miles from the Caves, he swept up over the peaks, and dropped down on the lowlands side. Dusk was deepening rapidly as he raced back toward the White River cataract under the pall of the gathering storm.
* * * * *
Among the boulders on the rough mountainside near the mouth of the Caves he eased the craft down to a gentle landing.
"Wait here," he told Irma. "I'll investigate and see if it is safe to enter the Caves."
They had seen the three men return to the ship, but others might have gone to the Caves after that. Penrun made his way down the slope to the lip of the cataract and the yawning blackness of the abysmal gorge below it.
Overhead the storm was gathering swiftly, and the saffron light of the dying day illuminated the plateau eerily. Half a mile away the Trap-Door City shimmered fantastically in the uncertain light. Penrun repressed a shudder. The Devil's own playground! Thank God, he and Irma would be out of it soon!
He crept down the narrow path that led under the ledge of the trickling cataract. Outside, a bolt of lightning stabbed down from the darkened heavens. Its lurid flash revealed the huge figure of a man, pistol in hand, beside the entrance to the Caves.
Too late to retreat now, even had he wished to. Penrun's weapon flashed first. A scream of pain and fury answered the flash, and the man's pistol clattered down on the rock. The next instant Penrun was helpless in the clutch of a mighty pair of arms that tried to squeeze the life out of him.
"Burn, me, will ye, ye dirty scum!" roared the giant of a man tightening his grip. "I'll break your damned back for ye and heave ye into the gorge!"
Penrun writhed frenziedly, trying to twist his pistol around against his enemy's back, while they struggled desperately about the ledge above the dizzy blackness of the gorge. But the pistol struck the wall beside the entrance and fell under their trampling feet.
Penrun was gasping in agony at the intolerable pain in his spine. Darting points of light danced before his eyes. Then from the opening in the rock showed a beam of white light and a man slowly emerged from the Caves. The grip on Penrun relaxed slightly as the man came toward the two combatants. Penrun could distinguish him closely now. A heavy, pasty face with liquid black eyes and a crown of thinning hair. Helgers! He was staggering and grunting under the weight of a heavy metal box.
* * * * *
"What's the matter, Borgain?" he asked.
"Got this bird, Penrun, we been waitin' for!"
"We don't need him, now that we already have the treasure. Still, it's a good thing we found him. Just as well to have no tales circulating about the Universe about our find. Toss him into the gorge, and go down and watch the other three chests until I get--"
"Dick, Dick!" Irma's excited voice floated down from up among the boulders. "The spiders with those red cylinder torches have arrived! They are attacking the Osprey!"
Helgers jerked up his head.
"Why, if it isn't the little spitfire!" he exclaimed in pleased astonishment. "I thought the damned spiders had eaten her long before this. Rather changes things, Borgain. I'll just go on up and let my little playmate know I am here. Toss our friend over the edge there, and bring up another treasure chest."
"What was that she was sayin' about the spiders attackin' the Osprey?" Borgain's voice was anxious.
"Oh, that's nothing the boys can't handle," said Helgers confidently. "In case they don't, we'll have to feel sorry for them and take our friend's sphere. Only have to split the treasure two ways, in that case," he added, moving up the slope.
Borgain's answer was a grunt of surprise, for his captive had squirmed suddenly out of his clutch. The big man plunged forward recklessly with arms outstretched in the groping darkness. Penrun, desperately remembering the sickening drop at their feet to the pool three thousand feet below, backed against the rock.
A flash of lightning. Borgain's ape-like arms were nearing him. Penrun lashed out at the darkened features. His knuckles bit deep into the flesh. He slipped aside as Borgain, mouthing fearful curses, rammed into the rock wall and rebounded.
* * * * *
Again the fumbling search. Another lightning flash. Penrun struck with frenzied desperation. Borgain took the blow behind the ear and staggered. He whirled, wild with fury, and charged vainly along the narrow ledge.
"I'll get ye this time, damn your dirty carcass--ugh!"
Guided by the sound of his voice, Penrun struck with all his strength. Borgain's nose flattened under the blow. He whirled half around.
"I'll kill ye! I'll kill--help, help--a-ah!"
Lost in the blackness he had plunged over the lip of the rock, thinking he was charging Penrun. Down into the yawning gorge his body hurtled, the sound of his frenzied, dwindling screams floating up eerily out of the black, ominous depths.
Penrun crouched against the wall, sick and trembling. Irma, Helgers! He must hurry! He fumbled again for the pistols. They were gone. Crawling forward now, still shaken by his narrow escape from death, he gained the pathway. The rain was drumming wildly on the barren granite now, and the pitch-blackness was shattered only by ghastly lightning bolts.
Guided by the flashes, he clambered up the slope and halted abruptly. The door of the space-sphere was open, and, silhouetted against the soft glow of light within it, was Irma, seated dejectedly with bowed head, heedless of the cold rain beating down upon her. Helgers was nowhere to be seen. Penrun dashed forward.
"Irma, Irma!" he cried. "What has happened? Where is he?"
She raised her head slowly and stared at him as at one risen from the dead. Then she burst into tears.
"He said they had killed you--had thrown your body into the gorge," she sobbed. "I--I just didn't want to live after that. Are you hurt?"
"Not a bit," he assured her fervently. "But where is Helgers?"
"I pistoled him," she said quietly. "I had no choice. He came at me after I warned him to keep away. He fell over there among the rocks. Oh, Dick, let us hurry away from this mad place!"
* * * * *
He stared at the rain-swept rocks. The heavy metal treasure chest lay a few yards away where Helgers had dropped it. Penrun moved cautiously toward the spot where he had fallen. He was gone. The rain had washed away any traces of blood that might have remained.
While Penrun hesitated, the roar of the tempest was split by a man's scream of agony. A lurid flash of lightning an instant later revealed a gigantic spider down by the cataract with Helgers' struggling body in his mandible jaws. Returning blackness blotted out the scene.
Irma's pistol stabbed a ray through the driving rain at the hideous monster. Instantly its grating roar for help rang out, and a group of red lights from the doomed Osprey across the plateau, detached themselves from the others and came streaking for the cataract.
Penrun seized the heavy treasure chest and staggered to the sphere.
"Hurry, here they come!" screamed the girl.
He fell through the door with his burden just as the foremost monster leaped the river. The next instant Irma sent the sphere rocketing upward. Just before they plunged into the clouds they caught a last glimpse of the Osprey with her ray guns melted off by the red cylinder torches, and great holes gaping in her sides through which the monsters were carrying out the members of the crew to their cavern of the Living Dead.
As the sphere burst through the storm cloud into the frigid air above it, Irma gave a cry and pointed at the peak where they had hidden in the sphere. The peak was now alive with moving red lights of monsters searching vainly for them. The scene dropped swiftly below as the sphere gathered speed for its homeward journey.
"We got only a small portion of the treasure, but it will be enough," said Penrun. "After we pay your family's debt, I want to spend a hundred thousand or so for a specially chartered battle-sphere which will come back here to Titan. If the Interplanetary Council will do nothing about the Trap-Door City, I shall, independently. Not rays, but good old primitive bombs such as they used back in the Twentieth Century. I'll blow the hellish place off the face of the map and with it the cavern of the Living Dead. I think those lying in the hammocks would thank me for releasing them in that way."
COLLECTOR'S ITEM
By Evelyn E. Smith
"What I should like to know," Professor Bernardi said, gazing pensively after the lizard-man as he bore the shrieking form of Miss Anspacher off in his scaly arms, "is whether he is planning to eat her or make love to her. Because, in the latter instance, I'm not sure we should interfere. It may be her only chance."
"Carl!" his wife cried indignantly. "That's a horrid thing to say! You must rescue her at once!"
"Oh, I suppose so," he said, then gave his wife a nasty little grin that he knew would irritate her. "It isn't that she's unattractive, my dear, in case you hadn't noticed, though she's pretty well past the bloom of youth--"
"Will you stop making leering noises and go save her or not?"
"I was coming to that. It's just that she persists in using her Ph.D. as a club to beat men into respectful pulps. Men don't like being beaten into respectful pulps, whether by a man or a woman. Now if she'd only learned that other people have feelings--"
"If you don't stop lecturing and go, I will!" his wife threatened.
"All right, all right," he said wearily. "Come on, Mortland."
* * * * *
The two scientists slogged through the steamy, odorous jungle of Venus and soon reached the lizard-man, who, weighed down by his captive, had not been able to travel as fast.
"You blast him," the professor told Mortland. "Try not to hit Miss Anspacher, if you can manage it."
"Er--I've never fired one of these things before," Mortland said. "Can't stand having my eardrums blasted. However, here goes." He pointed his weapon at the lizardlike creature in a gingerly manner. "Ah--hands up," he ordered. "Only fair to give the--well, blighter a sporting chance," he explained to Professor Bernardi.
To their amazement, the lizard-man promptly dropped Miss Anspacher into the lavender-colored mud and put up his hands. Miss Anspacher gave an indignant yelp.
"Seems intelligent in spite of the kidnaping," Mortland commented. "But how does he happen to understand English? We're the only expedition ever to have reached Venus ... that I know of, anyway." He and the professor stared at each other in consternation. "There may have been a secret expedition previously and perhaps they left a--a base or something, which would explain why--"
"If you two oafs would stop speculating, you might help me out of here!" Miss Anspacher remarked in her customary snappish tone. Professor Bernardi leaped forward to obey. "You don't have to pull quite so hard! I haven't taken root yet!" She came out of the mud with a sound like two whales kissing. She brushed hopelessly at her once-white blouse and shorts. "Oh, dear, I look a mess!"
Professor Bernardi did not comment, being engaged in slapping at a small winged creature--about the size of a bluejay, but looking like a cross between a bat and a mosquito--that seemed interested in taking a bite out of him. It escaped his flapping hand and flew to the top of Mortland's sun helmet, where it glared at the professor.
"Since you seem to understand English," Miss Anspacher said to the lizard-man through a mouthful of hairpins, "perhaps you will be so kind as to explain the meaning of this outrage?"
"I was smitten," the alien replied suavely. "Passion made me forget myself."
Professor Bernardi looked thoughtfully at him. "A prior expedition isn't the answer. It wouldn't have troubled to educate you so thoroughly. Therefore, the explanation is that you pick up English by reading our minds. Correct?"
The lizard-man turned an embarrassed olive. "Yes."
* * * * *
Now that he was able to give the creature a more thorough inspection, Bernardi saw that he really didn't look too much like a lizard. He definitely appeared to be wearing clothes of some kind, which, in the Venusian heat, indicated a particularly refined degree of civilization--unless, of course, the squamous skin protected him from the heat as well as the humidity.
More than that, though, he was humanoid in almost a Hollywood way. He had a particularly fine profile and an athletic physique, which, oddly, his scales seemed to enhance, much like a movie idol dressed in fine-meshed Medieval armor. Naturally, he had a tail, but it was as well proportioned as a kangaroo's, though shorter and more graceful, and it struck Professor Bernardi as a particularly handsome and useful gadget.
For one thing, the people from Earth were standing uncomfortably in the slippery mud, while the lizard-man was using his tail much in the fashion of a spectator stool, leaning back against it almost in a sitting position, with his armor-shod feet supporting him comfortably. For another, the tail undoubtedly served for balance and the added push of a walking stick and perhaps for swift attack or getaway. Very practical and attractive, the professor concluded--too bad Man had relinquished his tail when climbing down from the trees.
"Thank you," the saurian said with uneasy modesty, looking at him. "Good of you to think so. You are a fairly intelligent species, aren't you?"
"Fairly," the professor acknowledged, preoccupied with a clever idea. Perhaps existence on Venus wasn't going to be as unpleasant as he had anticipated. "From reading my mind, you know what this blaster can do, don't you?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Then you know what I expect of you?"
"Yes, sahib. I'se comin', massa. To hear is to obey, effendi." The creature turned and went briskly back toward the camp, leaving the others to stumble after him.
Mrs. Bernardi gave a shriek as his handsome scaled form emerged from the greenish-white underbrush, haloed in luminous yellow mist. Algol, the ship's cat, prudently took sanctuary behind her, then peered out to see what was going on and whether there was likely to be anything in it for him.
"This is our native bearer," Professor Bernardi explained as the three scientists burst out of the jungle.
"My name is Jrann-Pttt." The creature bowed low. "At your service, madame."
"Oh, Carl!" Mrs. Bernardi clapped her hands. "He's just perfect! So thoughtful of you to find one that speaks English! I do hope you can cook, Pitt?"
"I will do my best, madame."
* * * * *
Algol daintily picked his way through the mud toward the saurian, sniffed him with judicial deliberation; then, deciding that anyone who smelled so much like the better class of fish must be All Right, rubbed against his legs.
"Well," remarked Miss Anspacher, using the side of the spaceship as a mirror by which to redden her somewhat prissy lips, "that makes it practically unanimous, doesn't it?"
"All except Professor Bernardi," said Jrann-Pttt, looking at the scientist with what might have been a smile. "He doesn't like me."
"I see that your telepathic powers are not quite accurate," the professor returned. "I do not dislike you; I distrust you."
"The fact that the two terms are not entirely synonymous in your language would argue a certain degree of incipient civilization," the lizard-man observed.
"You know, Carl," Mrs. Bernardi whispered, "he has an awfully funny way of talking, for a native."
"Frankly I don't like this at all, Professor," Captain Greenfield said, mopping his brow with a limp handkerchief. "If I hadn't been off looking for a better berth for the ship--all this mud worries me--this'd never have happened."
"You mean you would have let the lizard get away with Miss Anspacher?"
The big man's face flushed crimson. "I don't think that's funny, Professor."
Bernardi quickly changed the subject, for he realized that the captain, being by far the most muscular of the party, was not a man to trifle with. "Tell me, Greenfield, did you succeed in finding a better spot for the ship? I must admit I'm worried about that mud myself."
"Only remotely dry spot around is an outcropping 'bout two kilometers away," Greenfield said grudgingly. He shifted his camp stool in a futile search for shade. Even though the sun never penetrated the thick layer of clouds, the yellow light diffused through them was blinding. "Might be big enough, but it's not level. Could blast it smooth, but that'd take at least a week--Earth time."
Bernardi pulled his damp shirt away from his body. "Well, I daresay we'll be all right where we are, if we're not assailed by any violent forces of nature. On Earth, this might be a monsoon climate."
"If you ask me, that monster is more of a danger than any monsoon."
Bernardi sighed. Although by far the most competent officer available for the job of spaceship captain, Greenfield was not quite the man he would have chosen to be his associate for months on end. Still, beggars--as Miss Anspacher might have eloquently put it--could not be choosers. "What makes you say that?" he asked, trying to set an example of tolerance.
"Don't like the idea of him cooking for us," the captain said stubbornly. "Might poison us all in our beds."
"Well, don't eat in your bed," suggested Mortland, strolling out of the airlock in the company of the cat. Algol, however, finding that the spot beside the captain's camp stool was as dry as anything could be on Venus, decided to turn back.
* * * * *
"The difficulty is easily overcome, Captain," the professor said, still holding on to his patience. "You can continue to cook your own meals from the tinned and packaged foods on board ship. The rest of us will eat fresh native foods prepared by Jrann-Pttt."
"But why," Miss Anspacher interrupted as she emerged from the airlock with a large cast-iron skillet, "should you think Jrann-Pttt wants to poison us?"
Both men rose from their stools. "Stands to reason he'd consider us his enemies, Miss Anspacher," the captain said. "After all, we--as a group, that is--captured him."
"Hired him," Professor Bernardi contradicted. "I've telepathically arranged to pay him an adequate salary. In goods, of course; I don't suppose our money would be of much use to him. And I think he's rather glad of the chance to hang around and observe us conveniently."
"Observe us!" Greenfield exclaimed. "You mean he's spying out the land for an attack? Let's prepare our defenses at once!"
"I doubt if that's what he has in mind," Professor Bernardi said judiciously.
"He may be staying because he wants to be near me," Miss Anspacher blurted. Overcome by this unmaidenly admission, she reddened and rushed from them, calling, "Yoo-hoo, Jrann-Pttt! Here is the frying pan!" Algol woke up instantly and followed her. "Frying" was one of the more important words in his vocabulary.
Captain Greenfield stared across the clearing after them, then turned back to Bernardi with a frown. "I don't like to see one of our girls mixed up with a lizard--and a foreign lizard at that." But his face too clearly betrayed a personal resentment.
"Don't tell me you have a--a fondness for Miss Anspacher, Captain," Professor Bernardi exclaimed, genuinely surprised. Undeniably Miss Anspacher--although no longer in her first youth--was a handsome woman, but he would not have expected her somewhat cerebral type to appeal to the captain. On the other hand, she was the only unattached woman in the party and they were a long way from home.
Greenfield picked a fleck of dried violet mud from the side of the ship and avoided Bernardi's eye. "One of the reasons I came along," he said almost bashfully. "Thought I'd have the chance to be alone with her now and again and impress her with, with...."
"Your sterling qualities?" Bernardi suggested.
The captain flashed him a glance of mingled gratitude and resentment. "And now this damned lizard has to come along!"
"Cheer up, Captain," said the professor. "I'll back you against a lizard any time."
* * * * *
Although the long twilight of Venus had deepened into night and it could never really be cool there by terrestrial standards, the temperature was almost comfortable. Everything was quite black, except for the pallid purple campfire glowing through the darkness; the clouds that perpetually covered the surface of the planet prevented even the light of the stars from reaching it.
"Tell me more about the cross-versus the parallel-cousin relationships in your culture, Jrann-Pttt," Miss Anspacher breathed, wriggling her camp stool closer to the saurian's. "Anthropology is a great hobby of mine, you know. How do your people feel about exogamy?"
"I'm afraid I'm rather exhausted, dear lady," he said, using one arm to mask a yawn, and one to surreptitiously wave away the saurian head that was peering out of the underbrush. "I shouldn't like to give a scientist like yourself any misinformation that might become a matter of record."
"Of course not," she murmured. "You're so considerate."
* * * * *
A pale face appeared in the firelight like some weird creature of darkness. Terrestrial and extraterrestrial both started. "Miss Anspacher," the captain growled, "I'd like to lock up the ship, so if you wouldn't mind turning in--"
Miss Anspacher pouted. "You've interrupted such an interesting conversation. And I don't see why you have to lock up the ship. After all, the night is three hundred and eighty-five hours long. We don't sleep all that time and it would be a shame to be cooped up."
"I'm going to try to rig up some floodlights," Greenfield explained stiffly, "so we won't be caught like this again. Nobody bothered to tell me the day equals thirty-two of ours, so that half of it would be night."
"Then I won't see you for almost two weeks of our time, Jrann-Pttt? Are you sure you wouldn't like to spend the rest of the night in our ship? Plenty of room, you know."
"No, thank you, dear lady. The jungle is my natural habitat. I should feel stultified by walls and a ceiling. Don't worry--I shan't run away."
"Oh, I'm not worried," Miss Anspacher said coyly, throwing a stick of wood on the fire.
"Small riddance if he does."
"Captain Greenfield!"
That part of the captain's face not concealed by his piratical black beard turned red. "Well, if he can read our minds, he knows damn well what I'm thinking, anyway, so why be hypocritical about it?"
"That's right--he is a telepath, isn't he?" Miss Anspacher's face grew even redder than the captain's. "I forgot he.... It is getting late. I really must go. Good night, Jrann-Pttt."
"Good night, dear lady." The saurian bowed low over her hand.
Leaning on the captain's brawny arm, Miss Anspacher ploughed through the mud to the ship, followed by the mosquito-bat and Algol, who had been toasting themselves more or less companionably at the fire. The door to the airlock clanged behind all four of them.
* * * * *
The other saurian's head appeared again from the bush. Jrann-Pttt, the insistent thought came, shall I rescue you now?
Why, Dfar-Lll? I am not a prisoner. I'm quite free to come and go as I please. But let's get away from the strangers' ship while we communicate. They do have a certain amount of low-grade perception and might be able to sense the presence of another personality. At any rate, they might look out of a port and see you.
Keeping the illuminator on low beam, Dfar-Lll led the way through the bushes. Seems to me you're going to an awful lot of trouble just to get zoo specimens, the youngster protested, disentangling its arms from the embrace of an amorous vine. There's really no reason for carrying on the work since Lieutenant Merglyt-Ruuu ... passed on.
Jrann-Pttt sat down on a fallen log and, tucking up his graceful tail, signaled his junior to join him. In the event that we do decide to return to base, some handsome specimens might serve to offset the lieutenant's demise.
Return to base? But I thought we were....
We haven't found swamp life pleasant, have we? After all, there's no real reason why we shouldn't go back. Is it our fault that Merglyt-Ruuu happened to meet with a fatal accident?
We-ell ... but will the commandant see it that way?
On the other hand, if we don't go back, wouldn't it be a good idea to attach ourselves to an expedition that, no matter how alien, is better equipped for survival than we? And carrying out our original purpose seemed the best way of getting to meet these strangers informally, as it were.
They are unquestionably intelligent life-forms then?
After a fashion. Jrann-Pttt yawned and rose. But why are we sitting here? Let's start back to our camp. We will be able to converse more comfortably.
They made their way through the jungle--now walking, now wading where the mud became water. Small creatures with hardly any thoughts scurried before them as they went.
The commandant may have already made contact with their rulers, Dfar-Lll suggested, springing forward to illuminate the way. In that case, we couldn't hope to remain undiscovered for long.
Oh, these creatures are not Venusians. There's no intelligent life here. They hail from the third planet of this system and, according to their thoughts, this is the only vessel that was capable of traversing interplanetary space. So we needn't worry about extradition treaties or any other official annoyances.
If they're friendly, why didn't you spend the night in their ship? It certainly looks more comfortable than our collapsible moslak--which, by the way, collapsed while you were gone. I hope we'll be able to put it up again ourselves. I must say this for the lieutenant--he was good at that sort of thing.
Jrann-Pttt made a gesture of distaste. He was unfortunately good at other things, too. But let's not discuss him. I'm not staying with the strangers because I want to pick up one or two little things--mostly some of our food to serve them. I used up all the supplies in my pack and I want them to think we're living off the land. They believe me to be a primitive and it's best that they should until I decide just how I'm going to make most efficient use of them. Besides, I didn't want to leave you alone.
The younger saurian sniffed skeptically.
* * * * *
"Honestly, Pitt," Mrs. Bernardi said, keeping to leeward of the tablecloth the lizard-man was efficiently shaking out of the airlock, "I've never had a--an employee as competent as you." But the word she had in mind, of course, was "servant." "I do wish you'd come back to Earth with us."
"Perhaps you would compel me to come?" he suggested, as Algol and the mosquito-bat entered into hot competition to catch the crumbs before they sank into the purple ooze.
"Oh, no! We'd want you to come as our guest--our friend." Naturally, her thoughts ran, a house guest would be expected to help with the washing up and lend a hand with the cooking--and, of course, we wouldn't have to pay him. Though my husband, I suppose, would requisition him as a specimen.
I fully intend to go to Earth with them, Jrann-Pttt mused, but certainly not in that capacity. Nor would I care to be a specimen. I must formulate some concrete plan.
The captain was crawling on top of the spaceship, scraping off the dried mud, brushing away the leaves and dust that marred its shining purity. The hot, humid haze that poured down from the yellow clouds made the metal surface a little hell. Yet it was hardly less warm on the other side of the clearing, where Miss Anspacher tried desperately to write up her notes on a table that kept sinking into the spongy ground, and hindered by the thick wind that had arisen half an hour before and which kept blowing her papers off. The sweet odor of the flowers tucked in the open neck of her already grimy white blouse suddenly sickened her and she flung them into the mud.
"We won't be going back to Earth for a long time!" she called. Gathering up the purple-stained papers, she came toward the others, little puffs of mist rising at each step. "We like it here. Lovely country."
How could she think to please even the savage she fancied him to be by such an inanity, Jrann-Pttt wondered. No one could possibly like that fetid swamp. Or was it not so much that she was trying to please him as convince herself? Was there some reason the terrestrials had for needing to like Venus. It hovered on the edge of the women's minds. If only it would emerge completely, he could pick it up, but it lurked in the shadows of their subconscious, tantalizing him.
"I'd like to know when we're going to start putting up the shelters," Mrs. Bernardi said, pushing a streak of fog-yellow hair out of her eyes. "I can't stand being cooped up for another night on that ship."
"You're planning to put up shelters--to live outside of the ship?" This would seem to confirm his darkest suspicions. Even a temporary settlement would leave them too open to visitation from the commandant. What his attitude toward the aliens might be, Jrann-Pttt didn't know. He might consider them as specimens, as enemies or as potential allies. What his attitude toward Jrann-Pttt and his companion would be, however, the saurian knew only too well. Had they reported the lieutenant's demise immediately, it was possible the commandant might have been brought to believe it was an accident. Now he would unquestionably think Jrann-Pttt had killed Merglyt-Ruuu on purpose--which was not true; how was Jrann-Pttt to know that the mud into which he'd knocked the lieutenant was quicksand?
"Anything against putting up shelters?" Captain Greenfield growled from his perch.
"Monster!" the mosquito-bat shrieked at the cat. "Monster! Monster!"
* * * * *
There was a painfully embarrassed silence.
"The creature is not intelligent," Jrann-Pttt explained, smiling. "It merely has vocal apparatus that can reproduce a frequently heard word, like--you have a bird, I believe, a--" he searched their minds for the word--"a parrot."
"Monster!" the mosquito-bat continued. "Monster! Monster!"
"Shut up or I'll wring your neck!" the captain snarled. The mosquito-bat obeyed sullenly, apparently recognizing the threat in his tone.
But the concept of "monster" hung heavily in the air between the terrestrials and the lizard-man. They should not feel so bad about it, he thought, for they are the monsters themselves. But that would never occur to them and I can hardly reassure them by saying....
"Don't worry," Professor Bernardi said smoothly. "To him, it's we who are the monsters."
A sudden gust of wind nearly whipped the tablecloth out of Jrann-Pttt's hands. He fought with it for a moment, glad of something tangible to contend with. "About the shelters," he said. "They might not stand up against a storm."
"So this is monsoon country," Bernardi observed thoughtfully. "Do you know when the storms usually come, Jrann-Pttt?" The other shook his head. "Peculiar. There usually is a season for that sort of thing."
"I ... come from another part of the planet."
"Storms here are bad, eh?" the captain commented, swinging himself down easily. "Frankly, that worries me. Ship's resting on mud as far as I can see, and if there's one thing I do know something about, it's mud. If it got any wetter, the ship might sink."
"Maybe we should leave," Mrs. Bernardi suggested. "Go to another part of the planet where it's drier, or--" she tried not to show the sudden surge of hope--"leave for home and come back after the rainy season."
There was a sudden silence, and Jrann-Pttt found himself able to pick up the answers to some of his questions from the alien minds. His worst fears were confirmed. Plan A was out. But something could still be done with these creatures.
"Doesn't she know?" the captain demanded accusingly. "You brought her here without telling her?"
Bernardi spread his hands wide in a futile gesture. "She should know; I've told her repeatedly. She just doesn't understand ... or doesn't want to."
"I know they'll forgive us," Mrs. Bernardi said stubbornly. "We--you--haven't done anything really wrong, so how could they do anything terrible to us? After all, didn't they refuse you the funds because they said you couldn't--"
"Shhh, Louisa," her husband commanded.
Jrann-Pttt smiled to himself.
--"do it," she went on. "And you did. So they were wrong and they'll have to forgive us."
"Tcha!" Miss Anspacher said. "Since when was there any fairness in justice?"
"On the other hand," Mrs. Bernardi continued, "we have no idea of how dangerous the storms here could be."
"Very dangerous," Jrann-Pttt said.
"For you, perhaps," the captain retorted. "Maybe not for us."
"Now that's silly," Miss Anspacher said. "You can see that Jrann-Pttt is much more--" she blushed--"sturdily built than we are."
"I don't mean that we could face it without protection," the captain replied angrily. "Naturally I mean that our superior technology could cope with the effects of any storm."
"Well, Captain, we'll have to put that superior technology to use at once," the professor told him. "You'd better start blasting that rock."
Laden with equipment and malevolent thoughts, the captain trudged off into the murky jungle. The others would not even offer to help. Confounded scientists; they certainly took his status as captain seriously. He wished, for a disloyal moment, that he had stayed on Earth. The quiet routine of a test pilot had prepared him for nothing like this. Were Miss Anspacher and adventure worth it? At the moment, he thought not. But he was on Venus and it was too late to change his mind.
Jrann-Pttt followed him into the jungle, keeping some distance behind, for he had good reason to suspect that Greenfield would take his warm interest in terrestrial technology for plain spying. Or, worse yet, he might try to press the lizard-man into service; Jrann-Pttt felt he had demeaned himself quite enough already.
"Have you noticed," Miss Anspacher asked, pushing the mass of damp brown hair off her neck as she came alongside him, "how the--the smell--" a scientist does not mince words--"of the swamp has grown stronger?"
Jrann-Pttt halted. He had a good idea of what the captain's reactions to the sight of himself and Miss Anspacher arriving hand-in-hand would be. "Yes, it is getting rather overpowering. Perhaps, for a lady of your delicate sensibilities, it would be best to--"
"I can stand a bad smell just as well as a male--any male!"
"Perhaps even better," Jrann-Pttt said, "for I was on the verge of turning back myself."
"Oh," she said, appeased. "Well, in that case, I'll go back with you ... how quiet everything is!"
He had not noticed. For him, it would never be quiet because of the stream of jangled thoughts constantly pouring into the back of his mind from everything sentient that surrounded him.
For a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be non-telepathic like the terrestrials, to have peace from the clamor of confused impressions, emotions and ideas that persistently beat at his mind. But that would be wondering how it was to be deaf to avoid discord, or blind to shut out ugliness.
"The lull before the storm, I suppose," she said brightly. Now is his opportunity to kiss me--only perhaps they don't have kissing in his society. His mouth does seem to be the wrong shape. And if I kissed him, it might violate a taboo.
During their short absence, the citrine clouds that closed off the sky had changed to a sinister umber. It was now almost as dusky in the clearing as in the jungle itself, when Jrann-Pttt and Miss Anspacher returned and joined the others.
Professor Bernardi stood looking up with sharp gray eyes at a sky he could not see. "I hope Greenfield can finish the blasting more quickly than he estimated," he muttered.
"Will we hear the noise way out here, Carl?" his wife worried nervously.
"Only two kilometers away? Of course we'll hear it. I do wish you wouldn't always be asking such stupid questions."
She shivered. "Well, I hope they get it over with right away. If we just have to sit here waiting and waiting and waiting, I'll go mad. I know I will."
"You should try to keep your nerves in check, Louisa," Miss Anspacher snapped. Silly little fool.
"At least I can control my glands!" Mrs. Bernardi flared back. Sex-starved spinster.
"I shall make some tea, ladies," Jrann-Pttt interposed. "I'm sure we will all feel the better for it."
Mrs. Bernardi smiled at him feebly. "You're such a comfort, Pitt. I don't know why you of all creatures should be the one to remind me of home."
"Home," remarked Mortland, emerging from the airlock, "is where the heart is. Did I hear someone say 'tea'?"
* * * * *
As Jrann-Pttt hung the kettle over the fire, suddenly the air erupted in stunning violence of sound. The ground undulated under their feet and water slopped out of the kettle, almost putting out the fire that rose high to claw at it. Rivulets of thick, muddy liquid welled out of the ground and drabbled their feet. The women turned pale. Algol gave a faint cry and hid under Mrs. Bernardi's skirts, trembling, while the mosquito-bat tried to lift Mortland's toupee and hide in his hair. The ship itself quivered and seemed to jump slightly in the air, then returned to its resting place.
All was quiet again, quieter than it had been before. Mortland anxiously gnawed his light mustache. "Better hurry with that tea, there's a good fellow. I'm violently allergic to loud noises."
"They'll probably continue all day," the professor said with almost malevolent cheerfulness, "so you might as well get used to them." Who is he to have nerves? I am easily the most sensitive person here, but I manage to control myself.
"I don't know how I'm going to stand it!" Mrs. Bernardi shrieked. "I just know something terrible is going to happen."
"Please try to restrain yourself, Louisa," her husband ordered. "After it's over, you'll find we'll be much more comfortable and secure with the ship resting on rock."
"If you ask me, that blast made it sink a little," Mortland said. "I wonder whether--"
He was interrupted by a thrashing in the bushes. Dfar-Lll burst forth, shedding scales. Do not despair, Jrann-Pttt. I am here, ready to save you or die at your side.
The women clutched each other, Miss Anspacher praying silently and fervently to Juno, Lakshmi, Freya, Isis and a host of other esoteric female deities she had picked up in the course of her avocational researches.
"He seems to be one of Jrann-Pttt's people," Bernardi observed, "so there should be nothing to fear."
Dfar-Lll, you fool! Jrann-Pttt ideated angrily. Nothing's wrong. They're just blasting out a better berth for their vessel. And now you've spoiled my plans.
"What did you think at that poor little creature!" Mrs. Bernardi blazed. "He's crying!" And, sure enough, amethyst tears were oozing out of the young saurian's large, liquid eyes.
I du-didn't mean any harm.
"Monster!" Mrs. Bernardi accused Jrann-Pttt. "All men are monsters, whether they're aliens or not."
"You're so right, Louisa!" Miss Anspacher exclaimed, regarding the younger creature in an almost kindly manner.
I'm sorry, r-Lll, Jrann-Pttt apologized. I was upset by that noise, too. How could you possibly know what it was? Come, let me introduce you to the creatures.
Dfar-Lll stepped forward diffidently. Jrann-Pttt put a hand on the moss-green shoulder. "Allow me to introduce my companion, Dfar-Lll," he said aloud.
The youngster looked at him.
Mrs. Bernardi thrust out her hand. "I'm very glad to meet you, Lil."
Agitate it with one of yours. It's a courtesy. Don't let her see how repulsive she is to you. Remember, you're just as repulsive to her.
Dfar-Lll offered a shy, seven-fingered hand. "Pleased ... to meet you ... ma'am," the young lizard squeaked.
"Why, he's just a baby, isn't he?" Mrs. Bernardi asked.
I am not a baby! Dfar-Lll thought indignantly. At the end of this year, I shall celebrate my pre-maturity feast, or I would have. And furthermore--
There was another thunderous blast of sound. After the ground had stopped trembling, the six found themselves ankle-deep in muddy water. Algol, who was in considerably deeper than his ankles, mewed fretfully. Mrs. Bernardi picked him up and comforted him.
"Perhaps blasting wasn't such a good idea," the professor muttered. "Maybe I should tell Greenfield to call a halt and we'll take our chances with the storm. As a matter of fa--"
"The ship!" Mortland cried. "It is sinking!"
And the big metal ball slowly but visibly was indeed subsiding into the mud.
"Stop it, somebody!" Miss Anspacher snapped in her customary schoolroom manner.
The professor was pale, but he held on to his calm. "What can we do? Even if we could get the captain back in time, there's no way we can stop it. It's too heavy to pull out manually, and the engines, of course, are inside."
As they watched in horror, the ship sank deeper and deeper, picking up momentum as more of it went under. With a loud, sucking sound, it vanished into the ooze. Muddy water gurgled over it and, where the ship had been, there was now a small lake.
"This could be the beginning of a legend," Miss Anspacher murmured. "Or the end."
There was another vibrant detonation. "Someone ought to go tell the captain there's no use blasting any more," Bernardi said wearily. "We have nothing to put on the rock when he smooths it off." He began to laugh. "I suppose you could call this poetic justice." And he went on laughing, losing a bit of his former self-control.
There goes Plan B, Jrann-Pttt thought.
A star of intensely bright green lightning split the clouds and widened to cover the visible expanse of sky. There was a planet-shaking clap of thunder that made Greenfield's puny efforts sound like the snapping of twigs in comparison and it began to rain hard and fast.
* * * * *
"If only I hadn't gone and blasted that damn rock," the captain grumbled, squeezing water out of his shirt-tails, "we'd have been all right. Probably the storm wouldn't have done a thing to the ship except get it wet. If you can even call it a storm."
"I can and I do," Jrann-Pttt replied, haughtily squeegeeing his wet scales. "All I said was that a storm might be coming up and it might be dangerous. How was I to know it would last only half an hour?"
"Even the camp stools pulled through," Greenfield pointed out, "and you said shelters wouldn't stand up."
"I only said they might not. Can't you understand your own language?"
The fissure in the clouds had not quite closed yet and through it the enormous, blazing disk of the sun glared at them, twice as large as it appeared from Earth. It was a moot point as to whether they'd be dried out or steamed alive first.
"Might as well collect whatever gear we have left and get it to higher ground," Miss Anspacher said efficiently. "Two feet of water won't do anything any good--even those camp stools."
"It's my belief you wanted this to happen," Greenfield accused Jrann-Pttt. "You wanted to get rid of us."
"My dear fellow," Jrann-Pttt replied loftily, "the information I gave you was, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. However, I happen to be a professor of zoology and not a meteorologist. Apparently you people live out in the open like primitives," he continued, ignoring Dfar-Lll's admiring interjection, "and are accustomed to the vicissitudes of weather. I am a civilized creature; I live--" or used to live--"in an air-conditioned, light-conditioned, weather-conditioned city. It is only when I rough it on field trips like this to trackless parts of the--globe that I am forced to experience weather. Even then, I have never before been caught in a situation like this."
In fact, I was never before caught or I wouldn't be in this situation at all.
"Oh, Jrann-Pttt," sighed Miss Anspacher, "I knew you couldn't be just an ordinary native!"
"How did you get into this situation then?" Professor Bernardi asked. He had an unfortunate talent for going directly to the point.
"The third member of our expedition died," Jrann-Pttt explained. "He was our dirigational expert. Our guide."
"How did he happen to--"
"Are we just going to stand here chatting," Miss Anspacher demanded, "or are we going to do something about this?"
"What can we do?" Mrs. Bernardi asked weakly. "We might just as well lie down and--"
"Never say die, Louisa," Miss Anspacher admonished.
"I suggest we go to my camp to see what shape it's in," Jrann-Pttt said, furiously putting together Plan C. "Some of the supplies there might prove useful."
Captain Greenfield looked questioningly at Bernardi. The professor shrugged. "Might as well."
"All right," the captain growled. "Let's pick up whatever we can save."
* * * * *
Since there wasn't much that could be rescued, the little safari was soon on its way. Jrann-Pttt led, carrying Algol in his arms. Behind came Mortland, bearing a camp stool and the kettle into which he had tucked a tin of biscuits and into which the mosquito-bat had tucked itself, its orange eyes glaring out angrily from beneath the lid. Next came Mrs. Bernardi with her knitting, her camp stool and her sorrow.
Dfar-Lll followed with two stools and the plastic tea set. Close behind was Miss Anspacher, with the sugar bowl, the earthenware teapot and an immense bound volume of the Proceedings of the Physical Society of Ameranglis for 1993. Professor Bernardi bore a briefcase full of notes and the table. The rain had damaged the latter's mechanism, so that its legs kept unfolding from time to time, to the great inconvenience of Captain Greenfield, who brought up the rear with the blasting equipment. Behind them and sometimes alongside them came something--or someone--else.
"Surely your camp must have been closer to ours than this," Miss Anspacher finally remarked after they had been slogging through mud and water and pushing aside reluctant vegetation for over an Earth hour.
"I am very much afraid," Jrann-Pttt admitted, "that our camp has been lost--that is to say, inundated."
"What are we going to do now?" the captain asked of the company at large.
Professor Bernardi shrugged. "Our only course would seem to be making for one of the cities and throwing ourselves upon the na--Jrann-Pttt's people's hospitality. If Professor Jrann-Pttt has even the vaguest idea of the direction in which his home lies, we might as well head that way." I wonder whether the natives could help us raise the ship.
"I'm sure my people will be more than happy to welcome you," Jrann-Pttt said smoothly, "and to make you comfortable until your people send another ship to fetch you."
The terrestrials looked at one another. Dfar-Lll looked at Jrann-Pttt.
Professor Bernardi coughed. "That was the only spaceship we had," he admitted. "The first experimental model, you know." We don't expect to stay on this awful planet forever. After all, as Louisa says, the government will have to forgive us. Public opinion and all that.
"Oh," the saurian said. "Then we shall have the pleasure of your company until they build another?"
There was silence. "We have the only plans," the professor said, gripping his briefcase more tightly. "I am the inventor of the ship, so naturally I would have them." If we brought back some specimens of Venusian life--of intelligent Venusian life--to prove we'd been here....
"Matter of fact, old fellow," Mortland said, "we took all the plans with us so they couldn't build another ship and follow--"
"Mortland!" the professor exclaimed.
"But they're telepaths," Miss Anspacher said. "They must know already."
Everyone turned to look at the saurians.
"I have ... certain information," Jrann-Pttt admitted, "but I cannot understand it. You are in trouble with your rulers because they would not give you the funds, claiming space travel was impossible?"
"That's right," Bernardi said. Not really specimens, you understand. Guests.
"And you went ahead and appropriated the funds and materials from your government, since you were in a trusted position where you could do so?"
Bernardi nodded.
"Of course the question is now academic, for the ship is gone, but since you proved the possibility of space travel by coming here, wouldn't your government then dismiss the charges against you?"
"That's exactly what I keep telling him!" Mrs. Bernardi exclaimed.
But her husband shook his head. "The law is inflexible. We have broken it and must be punished, even if by breaking it we proved its fundamental error." Why let him know our plans?
Why, Jrann-Pttt, that sounds just like our own government, doesn't it?
Yes, it does. We should be able to establish a very satisfactory mode of living with these strangers.
"We'd hoped that after a year or so the whole thing would die down," Mortland explained frankly, "and we'd go back as heroes."
"Do you know the way to your home, Jrann-Pttt?" the professor asked anxiously.
"Since we were able to catch a glimpse of the sun, I think I can figure out roughly where we are. All we must do is walk some two hundred kilometers in that direction--" he waved an arm to indicate the way--"and we should be at the capital."
"Will your people accept us as refugees?" Miss Anspacher demanded bluntly, "or will we be captives?" Which is what I'll bet the good professor is planning for you, if only he can figure some way to get you and, of course, ourselves back.
"We should be proud to accept you as citizens and to receive the benefits of your splendid technology. Our laboratories will be placed at your disposal."
"Well, that's better than we hoped for," the professor said, brightening. "We had expected to have to carve our own laboratories out of the wilderness. Now we shall be able to carry on our researches in comfort." No need to trouble the natives; we'll be able to raise the ship ourselves. Or build a new one. And I'll see to it personally that they have special quarters in the zoo with a considerable amount of privacy.
"If I were you, I wouldn't trust him too far," the captain warned. "He's a foreigner."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Captain!" Miss Anspacher said. "I, for one, trust Jrann-Pttt implicitly. Did you say this direction, Jrann-Pttt?" She stepped forward briskly. There was a loud splash and water closed over her head.
Captain Greenfield rushed forward to haul her out. "Well," she said, daintily coughing up mud, "I was wet to begin with, anyway."
"You're a brave little woman, Miss Anspacher," the captain told her admiringly.
"This sort of thing may present a problem," Professor Bernardi commented. "I hope that was only a pot-hole, that the water is not going to be consistently too deep for wading."
"There might be quicksand, too," Mrs. Bernardi said somberly. "In quicksand, one drowns slowly."
Dfar-Lll gave a start. Surely you don't intend to lead them back to base?
Precisely. The swamp is unfit for settlement.
But to return voluntarily to captivity?
Who mentioned anything about captivity? Assisted by our new friends, we have an excellent chance of taking over the ship and supplies by a surprise attack.
But why should these aliens assist us?
Jrann-Pttt smiled. Oh, I think they will. Yes, I have every confidence in Plan C.
"I suggest," the professor said, ignoring his wife's pessimism, "that each one of us pull a branch from a tree. We can test the ground before we step on it, to make sure that there is solid footing underneath."
"Good idea," the captain approved. He reached out the arm that was not occupied with Miss Anspacher and tugged at a tree limb.
And then he and the lady physicist were both floundering in the ooze.
"Well, really, Captain Greenfield!" she cried, refusing his aid in extricating herself. "I always thought you were at least a gentleman in spite of your illiteracy!"
"Wha--what happened?" he asked as he struggled out of the mud. "Something pushed me; I swear it."
Jrann-Pttt mentalized. "It seems the tree did not like your trying to remove a branch."
"The tree!" Greenfield's pale blue eyes bulged. "You're joking!"
"Not at all. As a matter of fact, I myself have been wondering why there were so many thought-streams and yet so few animals around here. It never occurred to me that the vegetation could be sentient and have such strong emotive defenses. In all my experience as a botanist, I--"
"I thought you were a zoologist," Bernardi interrupted.
"My people do not believe in excessive specialization," the saurian replied.
"Trees that think?" Mortland inquired incredulously.
"They're not very bright," Jrann-Pttt explained, "but they don't like having their limbs pulled off. I don't suppose you would, either, for that matter."
"I propose," Miss Anspacher said, shaking out her wet hair, "that we break up the camp stools and use the sticks instead of branches to help us along."
"Good idea," the captain said, trying to get back into her good graces. "I always knew women could put their brains to use if they tried."
She glared at him.
"I thought we'd use the furniture to make a fire later," Mortland complained. "For tea, you know."
"The ground's much too wet," Professor Bernardi replied.
"And besides," Miss Anspacher added, "I lost the teapot in that pot-hole."
"But you managed to save the Proceedings of the Physical Society," Mortland snarled. "Serve you right if I eat it. And I warn you, if hard-pressed, I shall."
"How will we cook our food, though?" Mrs. Bernardi demanded apprehensively. "It's a lucky thing, Mr. Pitt, that we have you with us to tell us which of the berries and things are edible, so at least we shan't starve."
The visible portion of Jrann-Pttt's well-knit form turned deeper green. "But I regret to say I don't know, Mrs. Bernardi. Those 'native' foods I served you were all synthetics from our personal stores. I never tasted natural foods before I met you."
"And if the trees don't like our taking their branches," Miss Anspacher put in, "I don't suppose the bushes would like our taking their berries. Louisa, don't do that!"
But Mrs. Bernardi, with her usual disregard for orders, had fainted into the mud. Pulling her out and reviving her caused so much confusion, it wasn't until then that they discovered Algol had disappeared.
* * * * *
The party had been trudging through mud and water and struggling with pale, malevolent vines and bushes and low-hanging branches for close to six Earth hours. All of them were tired and hungry, now that their meager supply of biscuits and chocolate was gone.
"Remember, Carl," Mrs. Bernardi told her husband, "I forgive you. And I know I'm being foolishly sentimental, but if you could manage to take my body back to Earth--"
"Don't be so pessimistic." Professor Bernardi absent-mindedly leaned against a tree, then recoiled as he remembered it might resent being treated like an inanimate object. "In any case, we'll most likely all die at the same time."
"I never did want to go to Venus, really," Mrs. Bernardi sniffled. "I only came, like Algol did, because I didn't have any choice. If you left me behind, I'd have had to bear the brunt of.... Where is Algol?" She stared at Jrann-Pttt. "You were carrying him. What have you done with him?"
The lizard-man looked at her in consternation. "He jumped out of my arms when you fainted and I turned back to help. I was certain one of the others had him."
"He's dead!" she wailed. "You let him fall into the water and drown--an innocent kitty that never hurt anybody, except in fun."
"Come, come, Louisa." Her husband took her arm. "He was only a cat. I'm sure Jrann-Pttt didn't mean for him to drown. He was just so upset by your fainting that he didn't think...."
"Not Jrann-Pttt's fault, of course," Miss Anspacher said.
"After all, we can't expect them to love animals as we do. But Algol was a very good sort of cat...."
"Keep quiet, all of you!" Jrann-Pttt shouted. "I have never known any species to use any method of communication so much in order to communicate so little. Don't you understand? I would not have assumed the cat was with one of you, if I had not subconsciously sensed his thought-stream all along. He must be nearby."
Everyone was still, while Jrann-Pttt probed the dense underbrush that blocked their view on both sides. "Over here," he announced, and led the way through the thick screen of interlaced bushes and vines on the left.
About ten meters farther on, the ground sloped up sharply to form a ridge rising a meter and a half above the rest of the terrain. The water had not reached its blunted top, and on this fairly level strip of ground, perhaps three meters wide, Algol had been paralleling their path in dry-pawed comfort.
"Scientists!" Louisa Bernardi almost spat. "Professors! We could have been walking on that, too. But did anybody think to look for dry ground? No! It was wet in one place, so it would be wet in another. Oh, Algol--" she reached over to embrace the cat--"you're smarter than any so-called intelligent life-forms."
He indignantly straightened a whisker she had crumpled.
* * * * *
"Look," Mortland exclaimed in delight as they attained the top of the ridge, "here are some dryish twigs! Don't suppose the trees want them, since they've let them fall. If I can get a fire going, we could boil some swamp water and make tea. Nasty thought, but it's better than no tea at all. And how long can one go on living without tea?"
"We'll need some food before long, too," Professor Bernardi observed, putting his briefcase down on a fallen log. "The usual procedure, I believe, would be for us to draw straws to see which gets eaten--although there isn't any hurry."
"I'm glad then that we'll be able to have a fire," Mortland said, busily collecting twigs. "I should hate to have to eat you raw, Carl."
Mr. Pitt and his little friend are delightful creatures, Mrs. Bernardi thought. So intelligent and so well behaved. But eating them wouldn't really be cannibalism. They aren't people.
That premise works both ways, dear lady, Jrann-Pttt ideated. And I must say your species will prove far easier to peel for the cooking pot.
"Monster! What are you doing?" Mortland dropped his twigs and pulled the mosquito-bat away from a bush. "Don't eat those berries, you silly ass; the bush won't like it!" The mosquito-bat piped wrathfully.
Jrann-Pttt probed with intentness. "You know, I rather think the bush wants its berries to be eaten. Something to do with--er--propagating itself. Of course it has a false impression as to what is going to be done with the berries, but the important fact is that it won't put up any resistance."
"All right, old fellow." Mortland released the mosquito-bat, which promptly flew back to the bush. "I'm not the custodian of your morals."
"I wonder whether we could eat those berries, too," Professor Bernardi remarked pensively.
"Carl!" Mrs. Bernardi's tear-stained face flushed pink. "Why--why, that's almost indecent!"
"We eat beans, don't we?" Mortland pointed out. "They're seeds."
"We also eat meat," Miss Anspacher added.
There was silence. "I imagine," Mrs. Bernardi murmured, "it's because we never get to meet the meat socially." She avoided the saurians' eyes.
"We'd better see how Monster makes out, though," Miss Anspacher observed, replenishing her lipstick, "before we try the berries ourselves. The fact that the bush is anxious to dispose of them doesn't mean they can't be poisonous."
"Why should Monster sacrifice himself for us?" Mortland retorted hotly, overlooking the fact that Monster's purpose in eating the berries was almost certainly not an altruistic one. "If we can risk his life, we can risk our own." He crammed a handful of berries into his mouth defiantly. "I say, they're good!"
Algol sniffed the bush with disgust, then turned away.
"See?" said Miss Anspacher. "They're undoubtedly poisonous. When he's really hungry, he isn't so fussy." She combed her hair.
"But is he really hungry?" Bernardi asked suspiciously. "Come here, Algol. Nice kitty." He bent down and sniffed the cat's breath. The cat sniffed his interestedly. Their whiskers touched. "I thought so. Fish!"
"You mean," Mrs. Bernardi shrieked, "that while we were struggling through that water, alternately starving and drowning by centimeters, that wretched cat has not only been walking along here dry as toast, but gorging himself on fish?"
"Now, now, Mrs. Bernardi," Jrann-Pttt said. "Being a dumb animal, he wouldn't think of informing you about matters of which he'd assume that you, as the superior beings, would be fully cognizant."
"You might have told us there were fish on this planet, Mr. Pitt."
"Dear lady, there is something I feel I should tell you. I am not--"
"They're here on the other side of the ridge," Greenfield called, bending over and peering through the foliage. "The fish, I mean."
"The pools look shallow," Bernardi said, also bending over. "The fish should be easy enough to catch. Might even be able to get them in our hands." He reached out to demonstrate, proving the error of both his theses, for the fish slipped right through his fingers and, as he grabbed for them, he lost his balance, toppled over the side of the ridge into the mud and water below and began to disappear, showing beyond a doubt that the pools were deeper than he had thought.
"Carl, what are you doing?" Mrs. Bernardi peered into the murky depths where her husband was threshing about. "Why don't you come out of that filthy mud?"
His voice, though muffled, was still acid. "It isn't mud, my dear. It's quicksand!"
"Rope!" the captain exclaimed, grabbing a coil.
"Hold on, chaps!" cried a squeaky voice. "I'm coming to the rescue!" A stout twelve-foot vine plunged out of the shadows and wrapped one end of itself around a tree--disregarding the latter's violent objections--and the other end around Professor Bernardi's thorax, which was just disappearing into the mud. "Now if one or two of you would haul away, we'll soon have him out all shipshape and proper. Heave ho! Don't be afraid of hurting me; my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure."
"It's that vine!" Dfar-Lll exclaimed. "So that's what has been following us all along!"
* * * * *
"I can accept the idea of a vegetable thinking," Professor Bernardi gasped as he was pulled out of the quicksand, "although with the utmost reluctance." He shook himself like a dog. "But how can it be mobile?"
"You chaps can move around," the vine explained, "so I said to myself: 'Dammit, I'll have a shot at doing that, too.' Hard going at first, when you're using suckers, but I persevered and I made it. Look, I can talk, too. Never heard of a vine doing that before, did you? Fact is, I hadn't thought of it before, but then I never had anyone to communicate with. All those other vines are so stupid; you have absolutely no idea! Hope you don't mind my picking up your language, but it was the only one around--"
"We are honored," Professor Bernardi declared. "And I am deeply grateful to you, too, sir or madam, for saving my life."
"Think nothing of it," the vine said, arranging its leaves, which were of a pleasing celadon rather than the whitish-green favored by the rest of the local vegetation. "Now that I can move, I'll probably be doing heroic things like that all the time. Are you all going to the city? May I go with you? I've heard lots about the city," it went on, taking consent for granted, "but I never thought I'd get to see it. Everybody in the swamp is such an old stick-in-the-mud. I thought I was trapped, too, forced to spend the rest of my life in a provincial environment. Is it true that the streets are filled with chlorophyll? Do you think I can get a job in a botanical garden or something? Perhaps I can give little talks on horticulture to visitors?"
The mosquito-bat looked out of the tea kettle austerely. "Monster!" it piped shrilly.
"The very idea!" the vine snapped back indignantly. "Oh, well," it said, calming down, "you probably don't know any better. It's up to me as the intelligent life-form to forgive you, and I shall."
Jrann-Pttt and Dfar-Lll looked at each other in consternation. Do you think there really are cities on this planet, sir? Can there be indigenous intelligent life? If so, it may have already got in touch with the commandant.
Impossible, Jrann-Pttt replied. The vine probably just heard us talking about a city. After all, it picked up the language that way; very likely it absorbed some terrestrial concepts along with it. If there are any real settlements at all, they must be quite primitive--nothing more than villages. No, it's we who will build the cities on Venus. Combining our technology with the terrestrials', we could develop a pretty little civilization here--after we've disposed of the commandant, so he can't report our disappearance. We don't want any publicity. So much better to keep our little society exclusive.
* * * * *
"Wonder what time it is," the captain remarked as he rose and stretched in the dim yellow light of the long Venusian day. "Must have slept for hours. My watch seems to have stopped."
"Mine, too." Mortland unstrapped his from his wrist and shook it futilely. "Waterproof, hah! If we ever get back to Earth, I shall make the manufacturer eat his guarantee."
"Oh, well, what does time matter to us now?" Professor Bernardi pointed out as he rose from his leafy couch with a loud creak. All of them--even the saurians--had aches and pains in every joint and muscle as a result of the unaccustomed exercise and the damp climate. "We are out of its reach. It has no present meaning for us."
This depressed them all. Only the vine seemed in good health and spirits. "I notice you're all wearing clothes except for the short four-legged gentleman with the home-grown fur coat," it chattered happily. "Do you think I'll be socially acceptable without them? I wouldn't want to make a bad impression at the very start--or would leaves do?"
Everybody looked at Jrann-Pttt. "We are not a narrow-minded species," he said hastily. "I'm sure your leaves will be more than adequate."
After a breakfast of fish and berries stewed in tea--which the vine declined with thanks--the various members of the party gathered up their belongings and resumed their journey. Encrusted with dried purple mud and grime, their clothes deliberately torn by anti-social shrubbery, their chins--of the males, that is--disfigured by hirsute growths, the terrestrials made a sorry spectacle. It was hot, boiling hot, and more humid than ever.
"Well," said Miss Anspacher, letting the Swahili marching song with which she had been attempting to encourage the company peter out, "I do hope we'll reach your city soon, Jrann-Pttt. I must say I could use a hot bath." She added hastily, "Hot baths are a peculiar cultural trait of ours."
"I could use one myself," Jrann-Pttt said. He brushed his scales fastidiously.
"I'm looking forward so to meeting your relatives," she said, grabbing his left arm determinedly. "I'm not violating a taboo or anything, am I?" It isn't really slimy; it just feels that way.
"Not one of my people's. But I'm afraid you are violating a terrestrial taboo, judging from the thoughts I pick up from your captain's mind."
"Oh, him--he's a stupid fool!"
"Not at all. Rough, perhaps. Untutored, yes. But with a good deal of native intelligence, although fearfully primitive."
"Perhaps I was too harsh," Miss Anspacher observed thoughtfully. The captain ... is good-looking in a brutal sort of way, although not nearly as handsome or even as spiritual in appearance as Jrann-Pttt. And sometimes I almost think he--she blushed to herself--shows a certain partiality for my company.
She did not, however, let go of the saurian's arm when the captain bustled up, prepared to put a stop to this, but tactfully, if possible, for he had begun to realize that his rude ways did not endear him to her.
"Ah--we're making very good progress, aren't we, Pitt?" he interrupted, trying to insinuate himself between the two.
"Excellent."
"How soon do you think we'll be at your city at this rate?"
Jrann-Pttt shrugged. "Since I have no way of telling what our rate is or how far we have gone, how can I tell? As a matter of fact, you might as well learn now as later--I am not a Venusian. There is no intelligent life native to Venus."
"Oh, really!" the vine interposed indignantly. "Saying a thing like that right in front of me! What would you call me, then, pray tell?"
Jrann-Pttt kept his actual thoughts to himself. "A mutation," he said. "Probably you are the first intelligent life-form to appear upon this planet. Scholarly volumes will be written about you."
"Oh?" The vine seemed to be appeased. "I accept your apology. Perhaps I'll learn to write and do the books myself, because I'm the only one who can understand the real me."
"But how can you show us the way to your city if you're not native to Venus?" Bernardi demanded, whirling fretfully upon the saurian. "What is this, anyway? Each time you come up with a different story!"
"See?" said the captain. "Didn't I tell you he was up to no good?"
"I should like to lead you to our base," Jrann-Pttt replied with quiet dignity. "I am telling you the truth now since I feel I should have your consent before proceeding farther."
??????? Dfar-Lll projected.
"I hesitated before, because I wasn't sure I could trust you. You see, the spaceship in which we came to this planet is a prison ship, with a crew consisting of malefactors--thieves, murderers, defrauders--dispatched to the remote fastnesses of the Galaxy to fetch back zoological specimens. Our zoo, I must say, is the finest and most interesting in the Universe."
"Monster!" the mosquito-bat squeaked.
"Shhh," Mortland admonished. "Don't interrupt."
"I was in command of our ill-fated expedition...."
Oh, Dfar-Lll projected. For a moment there, sir, you had me worried.
"When we reached Venus, I was, I must admit, careless. I gave the crew a chance to mutiny and they did. Slew most of the officers. Dfar-Lll and I were lucky to escape with our lives."
"But you might have told us!" Mrs. Bernardi's voice held reproach.
"Until we knew what kind of beings you were, we couldn't let you know how helpless and unprotected we were."
The women seemed moved, but not the men.
"Leading us on a wild goose chase, were you?" the captain challenged.
Jrann-Pttt drew a deep breath. "It was my hope that all of you would consent to help us get our ship back from these criminals. Then we could fly to my planet--which is the fifth of the star you know as Alpha Centauri--where, I assure you, you would be hospitably received."
We aren't really going back home, Jrann-Pttt, are we? I'd sooner stay here in the swamp than go back to that jail.
Have confidence in me, r-Lll. As soon as we have disposed of the commandant and his officers, I can put our ship out of commission. The terrestrials won't be able to tell what's wrong. They know nothing about space travel. The fact that they got their crude vessel to operate was probably sheer luck.
But the younger was not to be diverted. Will we kill them after we've disposed of our officers? I should hate to.
Certainly not. We shall need servants and I don't trust the prisoners in the ship--all criminals of the lowest type! Aloud, he said to the bewildered terrestrials, "If you don't want to help us, I shall understand. No sense your interfering in another species' quarrels, particularly as we must seem like monsters to you."
"Monster!" the mosquito-bat agreed. "Monster, monster, monster!" No one tried to stop him. Jrann-Pttt sensed that somehow he had lost a good deal of his grip on the terrestrials. Finesse, he thought angrily, was wasted on these barbaric life-forms.
Bernardi sighed. "I suppose we'll have to help you." No reason why his ship shouldn't stop off at Earth before it goes to Alpha Centauri. No reason why it should even go to Alpha Centauri at all, in fact.
"If you ask me," the captain said, "he's one of the criminals himself."
"But nobody asked you," Miss Anspacher retorted, the more acidly because she had been wondering the same thing. "Shall we resume our journey?"
"Hold on," the vine said. "I don't want to intrude or anything, but it hasn't been made quite clear to me whether or not I'm included in the invitation to this Alpha Centauri place, and I wouldn't want to keep going only on the off-chance that you might ask me. I really think you should, because you led me astray with your fair promises of glittering cities."
"The cities of our planet do not glitter," Jrann-Pttt replied, wishing it would wither instantly, "but certainly you are invited. Glad to have you."
"Oh, that's awfully decent of you," the vine said emotionally. "I shan't forget it, I promise you."
* * * * *
They plodded onward, the vine chattering so incessantly that a faint gurgling which accompanied them went unnoticed. The gurgling grew louder and louder as they pushed on. Finally, "I keep hearing water," Mortland remarked. "We must be approaching a river of some kind."
A few minutes later, bursting through a screen of underbrush, they found themselves confronted by a river whose bubbling violet-blue waters extended for at least four kilometers from shadowy bank to bank, with the ridge tapering to a point almost in its exact center.
Apparently, while they had been trekking along the elevation, the surrounding terrain, concealed from them by the dense and evil-minded vegetation, had imperceptibly taken off, leaving the ridge to become a peninsula that jutted out into the river. They seemed to be stranded. All they could do was retrace their steps and, since they had no idea how far back the split became part of the mainland again, the return journey might last almost as long as it had taken them to get there.
"I know we're heading in the right direction," Jrann-Pttt defended himself. "I wasn't aware of the river because we must have come by an overland route." Although he was telling the truth, at least insofar as he knew it himself, no one, not even Dfar-Lll, believed him.
"But let's rest a bit before we turn back," Mortland proposed, flopping to the ground. "I'm utterly used up."
"Maybe we don't need to go back," the vine said. "Not all the way, anyhow." Everyone stared. It waved its leaves brightly at them. "I notice the captain thoughtfully brought along lots of rope and there were scads of fallen logs just a bit back. Couldn't you just lash the logs together with the rope and make a--a thing on which we could float the rest of the way? On the water, you know."
The others continued to look at it open-mouthed.
"Just a little idea I had," it said modestly. "May not amount to much, but then you can't tell until you've tried, can you?"
"It--he--means a raft, I think," Mrs. Bernardi said.
Jrann-Pttt probed the raft concept in her mind, for he found the vegetable's mental processes curiously obscure. "What an excellent idea!" he exclaimed.
"It does not seem infeasible," Professor Bernardi admitted tightly. By now, he was suspicious of everyone and everything. If I had never broached the idea of space travel to those peasants, he thought, I would be on Earth in the dubious comfort of my own home. That's what comes of trying to help humanity.
* * * * *
"Well," observed the captain as the heavy raft hit the water with a tremendous splash, "she seems to be riverworthy." He rubbed his hands in anticipation, much of his surliness gone, now that he was about to deal with something he understood. "Since she is, in a manner of speaking, a ship, I suppose I assume command again?" He waited for objections, glancing involuntarily in Jrann-Pttt's direction. There were none. "Right," he said, repressing any outward symptoms of relief.
He efficiently deployed the personnel to the positions on the raft where he felt they might be least useless, the gear being piled in the middle and surmounted by Algol, who naturally assumed possession of the softest and safest place by the divine right of cats.
The captain does have a commanding presence, Miss Anspacher thought, and a sort of uncouth grace. Moreover, he cannot read my mind--in fact, he often cannot even understand me when I speak.
"All right!" he bellowed. "Cast off!"
The vine unfastened the rope that it had insouciantly attached to a tree trunk, remarking to the others, "Don't let the trees intimidate you. Actually their bark is worse than their bite." Now it dropped lithely on board the raft, looking for a comfortable resting place.
"Please don't twine around me," Miss Anspacher said coldly. "If you insist upon coming with us, you will have to choose an inanimate object to cling to."
"All right, all right," it tried to soothe her. "No need to get yourself all worked up over such a mere triviality, is there? I'll just coil myself tidily around one of those spare logs. I must say you're warmer, though."
Yes, she is, isn't she? thought the captain, and squeezed her hand.
* * * * *
The raft drifted down the river. Since the current was flowing in the desired direction, there did not appear to be any need to use the poles, and everyone sat or reclined as comfortably as possible in the suffocating heat. The yellow haze had become so thick that they seemed to be at the bottom of a custard cup.
"I do hope we're heading the right way," Professor Bernardi said, although who knows what is right and what is wrong any more?
"Perhaps we aren't," Mrs. Bernardi mused, stroking Algol, who had crawled into her lap. "Perhaps we will go drifting along endlessly. Every sixteen days, it will get dark and every sixteen days it will get light, and meanwhile we will continue floating along, never going anywhere, never getting anywhere, never seeing anything but haze and raft and river and each other." Algol wheezed in his sleep.
"Nonsense!" Jrann-Pttt said rudely. "I have a compass. I know the direction perfectly well."
"And yet you let us think we were wandering about blindly." Miss Anspacher gave him a contemptuous look. The captain pressed her hand.
"Since you seem to breathe the same air and eat much the same food that we do, Mr. Pitt," Mrs. Bernardi changed her tack, "I suppose we'll be physically comfortable on your planet for the rest of our lives. Our children will be born there and our children's children, and eventually they'll forget all about Earth and think it was only a legend."
"But you did expect to settle permanently on Venus, didn't you?" the vine asked, bewilderedly. "Or for a long visit, anyway. So I don't really see that it makes much difference if you go to Jrann-Pttt's Alpha Centauri place. So much nicer to be living with friends, I should think."
"But Alpha Centauri is so very far away," Mrs. Bernardi sighed. "There wouldn't be much chance of our ever getting back."
"Look!" Mortland exclaimed. "The river's branching. Which fork do we take?"
* * * * *
Jrann-Pttt, who had been dabbling his arms idly in the translucent violet-blue water, withdrew them hastily as nine green eyes, obviously belonging to the same individual, rose to the surface and regarded him with more than casual interest. He consulted his compass. "Left."
"Contrarily!" the mosquito-bat suddenly squeaked, pointing a small rod at his companions. "Rightward."
There was a stunned silence.
"Monster!" Mortland cried in reproach. "You can talk! How could you deceive us like that?"
"Can talk," the creature retorted. "Me not intelligent life-form, ha! Who talks last talks best. Have not linguistic facility of inferior life-forms, but can communicate rudely in your language."
"Remember," Mortland cautioned, "there are ladies present."
"Have been lying low and laughing to self--ha, ha!--at witlessness of lowerly life-forms."
"But why?" Mrs. Bernardi demanded distractedly. "Haven't we been kind to you?"
"You be likewise well treated in our zoo," it assured her. "All of you. Our zoo finest in Galaxy. And clean, too."
"Now really, sir, I must protest--" Professor Bernardi began, trying to extricate a blaster unobtrusively from the pile of gear in which the too-confident terrestrials had cached their weapons.
Monster gestured with his rod. "This is lethal weapon. Do not try hindrancing me. Hate damage fine specimens. Captain, go rightward."
"Oh, is that so!" Greenfield retorted hotly. "Let me tell you, you--you insect!"
"George!" Miss Anspacher clutched his arm. "Do what it says. For my sake, George!"
"Oh, all right," he muttered. "Just for you, then. Told you not to trust any of 'em," he went on, reluctantly poling the raft in the ordered direction. "Foreigners!"
"Fine zoo," the mosquito-bat insisted. "Very clean. Run with utmost efficientness. Strict visiting hours."
* * * * *
"And there goes Plan D," the vine said lightly. There was a hint of laughter in its voice. Jrann-Pttt stared at it in consternation. "Are you also from the Alpha Centauri system, sir?" It turned its attention to the mosquito-bat. "Naturally I'm curious to know where I'm going," it explained, "since I seem definitely to be included in your gracious invitation."
"Alpha Centauri, hah!" the mosquito-bat snorted. "I from what Earthlets laughingly term Sirius. Alpha Centauri merely little star."
"Now see here!" Jrann-Pttt sprang to his feet. Criminal he might be, but he was not going to sit there and have his sun insulted!
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Miss Anspacher cried. "No use getting yourself killed, Jrann-Pttt!"
"Correctly," Monster approved. "Elementary intelligence displayed. Why damage fine specimens?"
From one prison into another, the saurian mentalized bitterly.
Yes, returned Dfar-Lll, and it's all your fault. The junior lizard burst into tears. I wish I had let Merglyt-Ruuu do what he wanted. I would have been better off.
"Sirius," the vine repeated. "That's even farther away than Alpha Centauri, isn't it? I never thought I would get that far away from the swamp! This really will be an adventure!"
"How do you know--" Professor Bernardi began.
"Frankly," it went on, "I don't see why you chaps are so put out by the whole thing. What's the difference between Alpha Centauri and Sirius anyway? Matter of a few light-years, but otherwise a star's a star for all that."
"To Jrann-Pttt, we wouldn't have been specimens," Mrs. Bernardi said, belatedly recognizing the advantages of Alpha Centauri.
"No, not specimens," the vine told her easily. "I don't suppose you know he had no intention of taking you back to his system. He wanted you to help him kill the officers of his ship so they couldn't look for him and the other escaped prisoner or report back to his planet. Then he was going to put the ship out of commission and found his own colony here with you as his slaves. I'd just as soon be a specimen as a slave. Sooner. Better to reign in a zoo than serve in a swamp!"
"Just how do you know all this?" Miss Anspacher demanded.
"It's obvious enough," Bernardi said gloomily. "Another telepath." How can we compete or even cope with creatures like these? What a fool I was to think I could outwit them.
"Telepathy just tricksomeness," the mosquito-bat put in jealously. "I have no telepathy, yet superior to all."
"But why should Mr. Pitt want to kill his officers?" Mrs. Bernardi asked querulously. "He's the commandant, isn't he? Or is he a professor? I never got that straight."
"He was one of the criminals on the ship," the vine told her. "What you might call a confidence man. This is about the only system in the Galaxy where he isn't wanted. He did tell you the truth, though, when he said they were sent on an expedition to collect zoological specimens. Dangerous work," it sighed, "and so his people use criminals for it. They were sent out in small detachments. Our friend here killed his guard in a fight over a female prisoner, which was why--"
"But what happened to the female prisoner?" Miss Anspacher's eye caught Dfar-Lll's. "Oh, no!" she gasped.
"Why not?" Dfar-Lll demanded. "I'm as much of a female as you are. Maybe even more."
The captain leaned close to Miss Anspacher. "No one can be more feminine than you are, Dolores," he whispered.
"But he--she's so young!" Mrs. Bernardi wailed.
The vine made an amused sound. "Don't you have juvenile delinquents on Earth?"
"Oh, what does all that matter now?" Jrann-Pttt said sullenly. "We're all going to a Sirian zoo, anyway."
"Correctly," approved the monster-bat. "Finest zoo. Clean. Commodious cages. Reasonable visiting hours. Very nice."
Mrs. Bernardi began to cry.
"Now," the vine comforted her, "a zoo's not so bad. After all, most of us spend our lives in cages of one kind or another, and without the basic security a zoo affords--"
"But we don't know we're in cages," Mrs. Bernardi sobbed. "That's the important thing."
Professor Bernardi looked at the vine. "But why are you--" he began, then halted. "Perhaps I don't want an answer," he said. There was no hope at all left in him, now that there was no doubt.
"You are wise," the vine agreed quietly. Algol arose from Mr. Bernardi's lap and rubbed against its thick pale green stem. He knew. The mosquito-bat looked at both of them restlessly.
The yellow haze had deepened to old gold. Now it was beginning to turn brown.
"It's twilight," Miss Anspacher observed. "Soon it will be dark."
"Perhaps we'll sail right past his ship in the night," Mortland suggested hopefully.
The mosquito-bat gave a snort. "Ship has lights. All modern convenients."
Suddenly the air seemed to have grown chilly--colder than it had any right to be on that torrid planet. All around them, it was dark and very quiet.
"I think I do see lights," Mortland said.
"Must be ship," Monster replied. And somehow the rest of them could sense the uneasiness in the thin, piping, alien voice. "Must be!"
"Your ship's a very large one then," Bernardi commented as they rounded a bend and a whole colony of varicolored pastel lights sprang up ahead of them.
"Not my ship!" the mosquito-bat exclaimed in a voice pierced with anguish. "Not my ship!"
Before them rose the fantastic, twisting, convoluting, turning spires of a tall, marvelous, glittering city.
"You will find that the streets actually are filled with chlorophyll," the vine said. "And I know you'll be happy here, all of you. You see, we can't have you going back to your planets now. No matter how good your intentions were, you'd destroy us. You do see that, don't you?"
"You may be right," Bernardi agreed dispiritedly, "although that doesn't cheer us any. But what will you do with us?"
"You'll be provided with living quarters comparable to those on your own planets," the vine told him, "and you'll give lectures just as if you were in a university--only you'll be much more secure. I assure you--" its voice was very gentle now--"you'll hardly know you're in a zoo."
PERFECT CONTROL
By Richard Stockham
Why can't you go home again after years in space? There had to be an answer ... could he find it in time, though?
Sitting at his desk, Colonel Halter brought the images on the telescreen into focus. Four booster tugs were fastening, like sky-barnacles, onto the hull of the ancient derelict, Alpha.
He watched as they swung her around, stern down, and sank with her through the blackness, toward the bluish-white, moon-lighted arc of Earth a thousand miles below.
He pressed a button. The image of tugs and hull faded and the control room of the old ship swam onto the screen.
Colonel Halter saw the crew, sitting in a half circle, before the control panel.
The telescreen in the control room of old Alpha was yet dark. The faces watching it held no care lines or laugh lines, only a vague expression of kindness. They could be faces of wax or those of people dying pleasantly.
Colonel Halter shook his head. Brilliant--the finest space people in the field seventy-five years back--and now he was to get them to come out of that old hull. God almighty, how could you pull people out of an environment they were perfectly adjusted to? Logic? Force? Reason? Humoring? How could you know?
Talk to them, he told himself. He dreaded it, but the problem had to be faced.
He flipped a switch on his desk; saw light jump into their screen and his own face take shape there; saw their faces on his own screen, set now, like the faces of stone idols.
He turned another dial. The picture swung around so that he was looking into their eyes and they into his.
Halter said, "Captain McClelland?"
One of the old men nodded. "Yes."
McClelland was clean-shaven. His uniform, treated against deterioration, was immaculate, but his body showed frail and bony through it. His face was long and hollow-cheeked, the eyes deep-set and bright. The head was like a skull, the nose an eagle's beak.
"I'm Colonel Halter. I'm a psychotherapist."
* * * * *
None of them answered. There was only the faint thrumming of the rockets lowering the old ship to Earth.
"Let me be sure I have your identities right," went on Colonel Halter.
He then looked at the man on the captain's right. "You, I believe, are Lieutenant James Brady."
Brady nodded, his pale, eroded face expressionless.
Colonel Halter saw the neat black uniform, identical with the captain's; saw the cropped gray hair and meticulously trimmed goatee.
"And you," he said to the woman sitting beside the lieutenant, "are Dr. Anna Mueller."
The same nod and thin, expressionless face. The same paleness. Faded hazel eyes; hair white and trimmed close to her head; body emaciated.
"Daniel Carlyle, astrogator."
The nod.
Like the doctor's brother, thought Colonel Halter, and yet like the lieutenant with his cropped hair and with an identical goatee.
"Caroline Gordon, dietician and televisor. John Crowley, rocketman."
Each nodded, expressionless, their faces like white, weathered statues in a desert.
Colonel Halter turned to the captain. The rocket thrum of the tugs had become a roar as the gravity pulled against the antique hull.
"We understand," said Colonel Halter, "that you demand repairs for your ship and fuel enough to take you back into deep space."
"That is right." The voice was low, slightly harsh.
"You're all close to a hundred years old. You'd die out there. Here, with medical aid, you'd easily live to a hundred and twenty-five."
Dr. Anna Mueller's head moved slightly. "We're aware of that, Colonel."
"It'd be pointless," said the colonel, "and a shameful waste. You're still the only crew that ever made it out beyond the Solar System. You've kept records of your personal experience, how you survived. They're valuable."
Dr. Mueller caught her breath. "Our adjustment to space is our private concern. I don't think you could understand."
"Maybe not, but we could try. To us, of course, complete adjustment is a living death."
"To us, it was a matter of staying alive."
Halter turned aside from disagreement, searching for common ground. "You'd be protected here, you know. You deserve that."
"Who'd protect us from you?" asked the captain. "Life in the Solar System is destructive."
* * * * *
Brady, the lieutenant, leaned forward. "You've failed--all through the whole System."
"We haven't finished living in it," said Halter. "Who can pin a label on us of success or failure?"
Miss Gordon, dietician and televisor, said quietly, "There are some records I'd like to show you. We compiled them while the Alpha was drifting back into the System."
Halter watched the frail arm reach out and turn a dial.
A point of light grew on the screen in Colonel Halter's office.
"Pluto," said her quiet voice.
Halter watched the lightspot focus on a mountain of ice. Men in suits of steel were crawling up its frozen side. Other men on the mountain's top were sighting guns. The men below were sighting guns. Yellow fire spurted from the top and the sides of the mountain, blending into a lake of fire. There was a great hissing and a rushing torrent of boiling water and rolling, twisting steel-clad bodies. The mountain of ice melted like a lump of lard in a hot frying pan. Only the steel bodies glinted, motionless, in the pale wash of sunlight.
Halter watched the brightness die and another lightspot grow one moon. The focus shifted in close to a fleet of shining silver ships.
Then another fleet dropped from close above, hanging still, and there were blinding flashes engulfing each ship below, one after the other, until there were only the shining ships above, climbing into the dusk glow of the Sun.
The glowing circle of bright-ringed Saturn was already rushing toward Colonel Halter from far back in the depth of screen. The focus shifted onto the planet's glaring surface. Men in the uniform of Earth soldiers were rushing out of transparent shell houses and staring in panic as the missiles plummeted through the shells and erupted clouds of steam which spouted up from mile-deep craters and there was nothing but the steam and the holes and the white cold.
Jupiter made a hole in the blackness, with eleven tiny holes scattered all around her, like droplets of fire. Ships streaked up, one for each droplet, circling each, spraying fire, until each droplet flared like a tiny sun.
Yellow Mars, holding closely its two speedy rocks of moons, spun into the screen.
A straggling line of men moved across a desert that whipped them with sheets of yellow dust. A single ship dived from out of the Sun, swooped along the line, licking it with the tongue of flame that streaked behind. As the ship flashed beyond the horizon, a line of smoking rag bundles lay still upon the yellow sand.
* * * * *
Darkness closed in upon the television screen in Colonel Halter's office. In the long moment of silence that followed, he thought, Oh, God, after this awful picture, how can I convince them to come out of the womb of that ship and live again? What reason can I give?
Immobilizing his face, he saw the half circle of the six old people again in the control room of the old, old ship.
He said, "You'll set down in approximately twenty minutes."
"Yes," agreed the captain, "from where we jumped into space seventy-five years ago. The people of Earth were talking about their problems, not killing each other about them. There was hope. We felt that by the time we'd finished our mission and come back from that other solar system, where a healthy colony could be born, most of those problems would be solved." A pause. "But now there's this terrible killing all through the System. We won't face it."
The roaring of the rockets now as they plunged flame against the concrete slab of the landing field. The bug bodies of the tugs gently easing old Alpha to Earth.
Colonel Halter was saying, "How about this other solar system? You haven't let us know whether or not you reached it."
"We saw it." There was a hollowness in the captain's voice. "We didn't reach it. But we will. You'll repair the Alpha and refuel it."
"As you were saying," prompted Colonel Halter, "you didn't reach it."
"A meteor," said the captain. "Straight into our rockets. Our ship began to drift. The cameras, of course, set in the bulkheads, were watching us."
"May I see? Anything you have to show or say will be strictly between us. I've given orders for our communication to be unrecorded and private. You have my word."
"You'll be allowed to see. I've given my permission."
Colonel Halter thought, You have given permission?
Then he saw in his telescreen the little old lady who was Caroline Gordon, dietician and televisor, press a button on the side of her chair. Instantly the picture changed. He heard her voice. "You see the rocket room of the Alpha back almost seventy-five years, a few minutes before the accident."
* * * * *
There were the four torpedo-like tubes projecting into the cylindrical room; the mass of levers, buttons, wheels and flashing lightspots.
Halter watched John Crowley, the rocketman, broad-shouldered and lithe, turning a wheel at the point of one of the giant tubes.
The next moment, he was flung to the floor. He struggled to his feet, jerked an oxygen mask from the bag at his chest, clamped it to his face and rushed to the tubes. He twirled wheels, pulled levers, pressed buttons. He glanced at the board on which the lightspots had been flashing. Darkness. He pressed a button. A foot-thick metal door swung open. He stepped through it. The door shut and locked.
Leaning against the steel wall at the end of a long companionway, he pulled off his oxygen mask and ran along the companionway toward the control room.
The others met him in the center of the ship.
Crowley saluted the young Captain McClelland.
"The rockets are gone, sir. A meteor."
McClelland did not smile or frown, show sadness or fear or any other emotion. He was tall and slim then, with cropped black hair, its line high on his head. His face was lean and strong-featured. There was a sense of command about the captain.
Quietly, he said, "We'll all go to the control room."
They followed him as he strode along the companionway.
The telescreen in Colonel Halter's office darkened and there was only the old voice of the captain, saying, "We were drifting in space. You know what that means. But no one broke down. We were too well trained, too well conditioned. We gathered in the control room."
Light opened up again on Colonel Halter's telescreen. He saw the polished metal walls, the pilot chairs and takeoff hammocks, the levers, buttons and switches of the young ship back those many years, and the six young people standing before a young Captain McClelland, who was speaking to them of food, water and oxygen.
It was decided that their metabolisms must be lowered and that they must live for the most part in their bunks. All activity must be cut to minimum. All weapons must be jettisoned, except one, the captain's shock gun, that could not kill but only cause unconsciousness for twenty-four hours.
* * * * *
Captain McClelland gave an order. The weapons were gathered up and placed in an airlock which thrust them out into space. Five of the crew lay down in their bunks. Dr. Anna Mueller, tall and slim, full-bosomed, tawny-skinned and tawny-haired, remained standing. She pressed the thought recorders over the heads of the other five people who lay there motionless, clamped the tiny electrodes onto her own temples and placed a small, black box, covered with many tiny dials, beside the bunk of Miss Gordon, the televisor.
A moment later, a jumble of thoughts: Now I am dead. An end. For what, now that it's here? Love. The warm press of a body. Trees and grass. Sunrise. To take poison. Clean air after a rain. City, people, lights. Sunset--
The thought words jumbled like a voice from a recorder when the speed is turned up.
Then they faded and one thought stream came through clean and clear: I am Dr. Anna Mueller. Good none of the others can hear what I'm thinking. Was afraid I'd die this way someday. But to prolong it. Painless death in an instant. Could give it to us all. But orders. Captain McClelland. No feeling? Can't he see what I feel for him? Why am I thinking like this? Now. But this is what is happening to me. He'd rather make love to this ship. Kiss Crowley before I give him the metabolism sedation shot. Captain'll see I'm a woman.
She stepped to the bulkhead and pressed a button. A medicine cabinet opened. After filling a hypodermic syringe, she went to Crowley, bent down and gave him a long kiss on the lips.
Instantly Colonel Halter heard thoughts.
Captain McClelland: She must be weak. Why's she doing that? Thought she was stronger. But the ship's the thing. The ship and I.
Crowley: What the hell? Didn't know she went for me. Just a half hour with her before the needle. What's to lose? He pulled her down to him.
Lieutenant Brady: He'd do that, the damned animal. But I'm not enough of an animal. I'm a good spaceman. All spontaneity's been trained out of me. Feel like killing him. And taking her. Anyplace. But I'm so controlled. Got to do something. This last time.... He sat up in his bunk.
Caroline Gordon: I knew he was like that. Married when we got back. Mrs. Crowley. And if we'd gotten back. Out every other night with another woman. I could kill him. She turned her face away.
Daniel Carlyle: Look at them. And I can't live. Only one person needs me, back on Earth, and she's the only. And that's enough. But maybe I can kill myself.... He did not move.
* * * * *
The thoughts stopped and Colonel Halter leaned forward in his chair as he saw Captain McClelland standing beside his bunk, the gun in his hand. Dr. Mueller saw, too--the young Dr. Mueller, back those seventy-five years. She struggled to pull away from Crowley.
Lieutenant Brady stood, started toward the captain, stopped. Crowley pushed Dr. Mueller away from him, leaped to his feet and lunged toward the captain. A stream of light appeared between the gun muzzle and Crowley. He stumbled, caught himself, stood up very straight, then sank down, as though he had been deflated.
The captain motioned Dr. Mueller to her bunk. She hesitated, pain in her face, turned, went to her bunk and lay down. Another stream of light appeared between her and the gun. She lay very still. The needle slipped from her fingers.
The captain turned the gun on Lieutenant Brady, who was coming at him, arms raised. The light beam again. The lieutenant sank back. Caroline Gordon was watching the captain as the light stream appeared. She relaxed, her eyes closed. Daniel Carlyle did not move as the light touched him.
Captain McClelland holstered the gun. He picked up the hypodermic needle and sterilized it at the medicine cabinet. Then he injected Crowley's arm, filled the hypo four more times, injected the others.
He finally thrust the needle into his own arm and lay down. His breathing began to slow. There was only the control room of the ship now, like some ancient mausoleum, with the six still figures and the control board dark and the eternal ocean of night pressing against the ports.
The picture of the ship's control room began to fade on the screen. After a moment of darkness, the live picture of the six old figures, sitting in their half circle, spread again over the lighted square.
Colonel Halter saw his own image, looking into the old masks.
He said, "And where was your weakness, Captain McClelland?"
"I was concerned," said the old voice, "with keeping us alive."
"You weren't aware that some of your crew were emotionally involved with each other?"
"No."
"Are there any more records you could show me?"
"Many more, Colonel, but I don't think it's necessary for you to see them. It would take too long. And we want to get back out into space." He paused. "We can brief you."
"About your going back into space.... I'm not sure we can allow it."
"Our answer's very simple. There's a button, under my thumb, on the arm of this chair. A little pressure. Carbon monoxide. It would be quick."
"Your idea?"
"Yes. A matter of preserving our integrity. We'd rather die than face the horrors of life on Earth."
* * * * *
Halter turned to the semi-circle of faces. "And you've all agreed to this--this suicide?"
The captain cut in. "Of course. I realized years ago that the only place we could live was in space, in this ship."
"When did your crew realize this?"
"After a couple of years. I told them over and over again, day after day. After all, I am captain. I dictate the policy."
"You've come back. You're in port. You're not in complete command."
"I'll always be in command."
"Perhaps," said Halter quietly. "However, we can come back to that. Please brief me on the records."
Captain McClelland's face hardened as he turned to Dr. Anna Mueller.
She explained, "We regained consciousness twenty-four hours after Captain McClelland used the shock gun on us. By then, our metabolisms were high enough to keep us conscious and alive. We could lift nutrition and water capsules to our mouths. We could press the button to activate the exercise mechanisms in our bunks. The output of the air machines was cut down until there was just enough to keep us alive and thinking clearly.
"At intervals of several days, during our exercise and study periods, Captain McClelland turned up the air. We slept. And we dreamed. The dreams are recorded in full. When we could face them, they were played back to us. Our thoughts were played back, too. I conducted group therapy among us. We all grew to understand each other and ourselves, intimately, and now, in relation to our environment, we're perfectly adjusted."
"Did Captain McClelland join you in group therapy?"
"No."
"Why?"
"He was already perfectly adjusted."
* * * * *
She frowned faintly, glanced at the captain. "When we were conscious, we studied from the library of microfilm. We read all the great literature of Earth. We watched the great plays and pictures and the paintings and listened to the music. Sometimes our thoughts were hateful. There was self-pity and hysteria. There were times when one or two of us would withdraw almost to the point of death. Then Captain McClelland would knock us out with the shock gun.
"Slowly, over the years, our minds gradually merged into one mind. We thought and created and lived as if we were one person. There grew to be complete and perfect cooperation. And from this cooperation came some great works. Each one of us will tell you. I'll speak first."
She paused. "Psychology has always been my prime interest. My rating at school was genius. My aptitudes were precisely in line with the field of work I chose. Through the years, I've developed a theory, discovered a way to bring about cooperation between all men. This is possible in spite of your wars and hatreds and destruction." Frown creases wrinkled her parchment forehead. "I'd like to know if it would work."
Daniel Carlyle's voice was slightly above a whisper. "All my life, I'd wanted to write poetry. The meteor struck. I realized I wouldn't be allowed to die quickly. I began to do what I'd always wanted to do. The words poured into the thought recorder. Everything I felt and thought is there and all I've been able to know and be from this one mind of ours that's in us all. And it's some of the finest poetry that's ever been written." He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "It'd be good to know if anyone found them inspiring."
"I've always lived for adventure," said Crowley, the rocketman, his old voice steady and quiet. "I've been the one to quiet down last into the life it was necessary for us to live out there. But my thoughts ran on into distant universes and across endless stretches of space. And so at last, to keep my sanity, I wrote stories of all the adventures I should have had, and more. And in them is all the native power of me, of all adventurers, and the eternal sweep of the Universe where Man will always thrust out to new places." There was a faint trembling in his body and a pained light in his eyes. "Seems I ought to know if they'll ever be read."
* * * * *
In spite of Brady's frailness, the lieutenant was like a grizzled old animal growling with his last breath. "I was the most capable pilot that ever blasted off from Earth. But I was also an inventor and designer. A lot of the ships Earth pilots are flying today are basically my ideas. After the accident, I wanted to get drunk and make love and then let myself out into space, with a suit, and be there forever. But Captain McClelland's shock gun and the understanding seeping into me from the thought recorders calmed me down eventually.
"So I turned to creation as I lay there in my bunk. I designed many spaceships. And from those, I designed fewer and fewer, incorporating the best from each. And now I have on microfilm a ship that can thrust out to the ends of our galaxy. There aren't any flaws.... Oh, I tell you, by God, I'd like to see her come to life!"
He leaned back, sweat rolling down his bony cheeks.
Miss Gordon, dietician and televisor, the motionless old lady with cropped, white hair, and face bones across which the paper skin was stretched, said, "There was only one thing I wanted when I knew I couldn't have marriage and a family. There was a perfect food for the human animal. I could find it. I began working on formulas. Over and over again, I put the food elements together and took them apart and put them together again. I threw away the work of years and started over again until at last I had my perfect formula."
She clasped her hands. "Man's nutrition problem is solved. From the oceans and the air and the Earth, from the cosmic rays and the lights of the suns and from the particles of the microcosm, Man can take into his body all the nutrition that can enable him to live forever." She sat very still, smiling. "And it's got to be given a try."
Silence.
Colonel Halter watched the old figures sitting like figures in a wax museum, waiting, waiting. He turned a dial. The picture that flashed onto the screen in his office showed the pocked ship standing upright now, like some tree that had grown in the middle of a desert where it was never meant to grow.
The space tugs had streaked out beyond the atmosphere to finish other assignments. There were no crowds, no official cars, no platforms, no bands. Only darkness and silence.
Halter turned a dial. The control room of the old ship flashed back onto the screen. The ancient crew sat as before. Halter saw his own face on their television screen.
Something was missing, he thought. What? What hadn't been said?
And then suddenly it came to him.
The captain. He hadn't spoken of any contribution he had made during those interminable years.
* * * * *
Halter thought back over Captain McClelland's record. No family. Wiped out when he was a baby in the last war. Educated and raised by the government. Never married. No entanglements with women. No close friends. Ship's captain at twenty-one. No failures. No vacations. No record of breakdown. Perfect physical condition. Strict disciplinarian. More time in space than on Earth by seventy-five per cent. No hobbies. No interest in the arts.... Apparently no flaw as a spaceman.... The end product of the stiffest training regimen yet devised by Man.
The ideal captain.
The records of the other five? All showing slight emotional instabilities when checked against the optimum score of a spaceman.
Dr. Mueller--a divorcee. A woman men had sought after. Dedicated in spare time to social psychology. Conflict in her decision as to whether she should go into the private practice of psychotherapy or specialize in space psychology. Interested in the study of neurosis caused by culture.
Lieutenant Brady--family man. Forced himself into mold of good husband and father. Brilliant designer. Ambition also to be space captain. Conflict between these three. Several years of psychotherapy which released his drive for adventure in space. Alpha mission to be his last. Lack of full leadership qualities prevented him from reaching captaincy.
Rocketman Crowley--typical man of action. Superb physique. Decathlon champion. Continual entanglements with women. Quick temper. Tendency to fight if pushed or crossed. Proud. However, if under good command, best rocketman in the service.
Astrogator Daniel Carlyle--highly sensitive. Psychosomatic symptoms unless out in space. Then in perfect health. Fine mathematician. Highly intuitive, yet logical. Saved four missions from disaster. Holder of Congressional Medal of Honor. Hobby, poetry. Fiancee was boyhood sweetheart.
Dietician and televisor Caroline Gordon--youngest of crew. Twenty years. Too many aptitudes. Tendency toward immaturity. Many hobbies. Idealistic. Emotions unfocused. IQ 165. Success in any field of endeavor concentrated upon. At eighteen, specialized in dietetics and electronics. Highest ratings in field. Stable when under strict external discipline.
* * * * *
No, thought Halter. None of them fitted space like the completely self-sufficient McClelland, the man who could stand alone against that black, teeming, swirling endlessness of space.
He turned to the captain. The old face was placid, the eyes slightly out of focus.
"Captain McClelland," Halter said sharply.
The pale eyes blinked and looked keenly on Halter's face.
"You want fuel to take you back out into space."
"That's right."
"And if you don't get it, you'll press a button on the arm of your chair and you'll all die of carbon monoxide poisoning."
"Exactly."
"I'm curious about one point." Halter paused. "What did you do, Captain, while the others were working on their various projects?"
Captain McClelland scowled at Halter for a long moment. "Why do you want to know that?"
"Your crew members became lost in some work they loved. They told me about it with a certain amount of enthusiasm. You haven't told me what you did. I'd like to know--for the records."
"I watched them, Colonel. I watched them and dreamed of the time when I could take them and the ship back out into space under her own power. I love space and I love this ship. I love knowing she's under power and shooting out to the stars. There's nothing more for me."
"What else did you do besides watch them?"
"I activated the machinery that moved my bunk close to the controls. I practiced taking the ship through maneuvers. I kept the controls in perfect working order so I'd be ready to take off again someday."
"If we repaired the ship so you could take off, the first shock of rocket thrust would kill you all."
"We're willing to take that chance."
Colonel Halter looked around the half circle of old faces. "And all your long years of work would be for nothing. Each of you, except Captain McClelland, has made a contribution to Earth and Man. You're needed here, not in the emptiness of space."
He saw the eyes of the five watching him intently; saw a tiny flicker of surprise and interest on their faces.
"You're destroying Earth," said the captain, his voice rising, "with your wars and your quarrels. We've all of us found peace. We're going to keep it."
* * * * *
Halter ignored the captain and looked at the five.
"There are many of us on Earth, who are fighting a war without blood, to save mankind. We've made progress. We've worked out agreements among the warring nations to do their fighting on the barren planets where there aren't any native inhabitants, so noncombatants on Earth won't be killed and so the Earth won't be laid waste. That was the fighting you saw while you were coming in.
"This is just one example. And there're a lot of us contributing ideas and effort. If all of us who're working for Earth were to leave it and go out into space, the ones who have to fight wars would make the Earth as barren as the Moon. This is our place in the Universe and it's got to be saved."
"We've adjusted to the control room of this ship and to each other," said McClelland flatly. "Our work's done."
"Let's put it like this, Captain. Maybe your work's done. Maybe you're not interested in what happens to Earth." Halter turned to the others. "But what you've done adds up to a search for answers here on Earth. Poetry. Design of a flawless spaceship. A psychological theory. A perfect diet. Novels about Man pushing out and out into space. All this indicates a deep concern for the health of humanity and its success."
"We're not concerned," retorted the captain, "with the health or success of humanity."
Halter sharply examined the other faces. He saw a flicker of sadness in one, anger in another, uncertainty, fear, joy.
He said, "For seventy-five years, you obey your captain. You listen to what he says. And everything is a command. Yet in yourselves you feel a drive to carry out your ideas, your creations, to their logical ends. Which means, will they work when they're applied to Man? Will people read the novels? Will they catch the meaning of the poetry? Will the spaceships really work as they're supposed to? Will the psychological theory really promote cooperation? Is there supreme health in this marvelous diet?"
He gave them a moment to think and then continued. "But if you continue to follow the commands of the captain, you'll be dead before you're out of the Earth's atmosphere. You'll never know. Maybe Man will prove that your great works are only dreams.... But I think there's a great need in you to know, one way or the other."
* * * * *
There was a faint stirring among them, like that of ancient machines being activated after years of lying dormant. They glanced at each other. They fidgeted. Trouble twisted their faces.
"Colonel Halter," said the captain, "I'm warning you. My thumb is on the button. I'll release the gas. Do we get the repairs and the fuel to take off from Earth, or don't we?"
Colonel Halter leaned grimly toward the captain. "You've spent fifty years with one idea--to stay out in space forever. You've made no effort to create or do one single constructive act. I'll tell you whether or not you get the fuel and the repairs--after I hear what someone in your crew has to say."
Silence hung tensely between the control room of the ship and Colonel Halter's office on Earth. The captain was glaring now at Halter. A tear showed in the corner of each of Dr. Anna Mueller's old eyes. Lieutenant Brady was gripping the arms of his chair. Daniel Carlyle's eyes were closed and his head shook slightly, as though from palsy. There was a faint, enigmatic smile on Caroline Gordon's face. The cords on Crowley's neck stood out through the tan and wrinkled wrapping-paper skin.
By God, thought Halter, they're all sane except the captain. And they've got to do it. They've got to come out on their own steam or die in that control room.
"I'm waiting," he said. "Is your work going to die and you with it?"
"We'll leave all the records," said the captain, his thumb poised over the button on the arm of his chair. "That's enough."
Halter ignored him. "Each of you can help. You've only done part of the work." He stood and struck the desk with the flat of his hand. "Damn it, say something, one of you!"
Still the silence and the flickering looks all around.
Halter heard a sob. He saw Dr. Anna Mueller's head drop forward and her shoulders tremble. The others were staring at her, as if she had suddenly materialized among them, like a ghost.
Then her voice, through the trembling and the faint crying: "I've--I've got to know."
The captain got creakily to his feet. "Dr. Mueller! Do you want me to use the gun again?"
She raised her face to his. There was pain in it. "I've--got work to do. There's so--little time."
"That's right. On this ship. You're part of the crew. There'll be plenty of work once we get out in space again."
"I've got to see if my theory's right."
"Colonel Halter," said the captain, "this is insubordination. Mutiny."
* * * * *
He raised the gun tremblingly, pointed the black muzzle at Dr. Mueller, sighted along the barrel.
"Wait," said Halter. "You're right."
Captain McClelland hesitated.
"It's quite plain," went on Halter, "that Dr. Mueller is alone among you. She wants to come out and go on with her work. The rest of you want the closed-in uterine warmth and peace of this room you're existing in. You can't face the possibility of failure. So I'm afraid she'll have to be sacrificed. After all, you do need a full crew to move the ship--even if you are all dead a few seconds after blastoff." He paused, looking intently at Brady, Crowley, Carlyle, Gordon, where they sat in the half circle, staring back at him. "So--"
Lieutenant Brady struggled up from his chair.
"I've got twenty-five years of life. I've some ships to design."
"That goes for me, too," said Crowley, the rocketman. "Will anybody want to read my novels?"
Astrogator Carlyle leaned forward. "There are many more poems to be written."
"Give me a soundproof laboratory," said Caroline Gordon. "I'll add another fifty years to all your lives."
"I'm afraid it is mutiny, Captain," said Halter.
The captain started toward his chair, his hand reaching for the button on its arm.
Lieutenant Brady stumbled forward, blocking his way.
Halter could only watch, thinking, It's up to them. They've got to do it now!
He saw the captain draw his shock gun; saw light flare at its muzzle; saw Lieutenant Brady crumple like a collapsing skeleton.
Crowley reached forward, grasping McClelland's shoulder. The gun swung toward him. A stream of light squirted into his middle. Crowley fell forward, pulling the captain down with him. The three other oldsters were above the three black figures sprawled on the floor, like tangled puppets. They hesitated a moment, then fell upon the ones below them, black arms and legs twitching about now like the legs of dying spiders, struggling weakly.
A flash of light exploded beneath these twisting black reeds and streaks of it shot out all through the waving black cluster.
The next moment, they settled and were quiet.
* * * * *
There was a stillness in the ancient control room, like the stillness in a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea. It lingered for a long time, while Colonel Halter watched and waited.
Dr. Mueller's voice, seventy-five years tired, said, "He's--quiet now. Please come and take us out."
Colonel Halter switched on his desk visiophone.
"They're coming out," he said quietly. "I'll be there to supervise."
On the visiophone, the general's image nodded. "Congratulations, Colonel. How are they?"
"There'll be one case for psycho. Captain McClelland."
"I'll be damned!" exclaimed the general. "From his record, I thought he'd never break!"
"Let's say he couldn't bend, sir." A pause. "And yet he did keep them from destroying themselves."
"He'll be made well again.... What about the others?"
"I think they, too, are very great and human people."
"Well," said the general, "they're your patients. I'll see you at the ship in five minutes."
"I'll be there, sir." Colonel Halter flipped the switch. The visiophone blanked out. He looked at the television screen.
The six black-clothed figures were quiet on the floor of their ship's control room. They reminded him of sleeping children curled together for warmth.
As he left his office and walked out into the humming city, he felt drained, still shaking with tension, realizing even now how close he had come to failure.
But there was the scarred and pitted needle-nosed old hull, bright with moonlight, standing like a monument against the night sky.
Not a monument to the past, though.
It marked the birthplace of the future ... and he had been midwife. He felt his shoulders straighten at the knowledge as he walked toward the ancient ship.
SOLAR STIFF
By Chas. A. Stopher
Totem poles are a dime a dozen north of 63° ... but only Ketch, the lying Eskimo, vowed they dropped out of frigid northern skies.
Probos Five gazed at the white expanse ahead, trying to determine where his ship would crash. Something was haywire in the fuel system of his Interstar Runabout. He was losing altitude fast, so fast that all five pairs of his eyes couldn't focus on a place to land.
Five pairs of arms, each pair about three feet apart on the loglike body, pushed buttons and rotated controls frantically, but to no avail. In a few short minutes it would all be over for Probos Five. Even if by some miracle he remained unhurt after crashing, he would die shortly thereafter. The frigid climatic conditions of the third planet were deadly to a Mercurian. He thought once of donning his space suit but decided against it. That would merely prolong the agony. From Planet Three, when one has a smashed space cruiser, there is no return. Probos Five knew that death was riding with him in the helpless ship. The situation did not unnecessarily dismay him; Mercurians are philosophers.
Probos Five ceased to manipulate the unresponding controls. Stretching his trunklike torso to its full twenty feet, four heads gazed through observation ports at the four points of the compass while the remaining head desultorily watched the instrument panel.
Since die he must, Probos Five would meet his end stoically, and five pairs of stumpy arms folded over five chests in a coordinated gesture of resignation.
Probos Five thought fleetingly of his wife Lingua Four and remembered with some annoyance that she was the author of his present predicament. A social climber, Probos Five thought to himself, but aside from that a good wife and mother in addition to being a reigning beauty. Lingua Four was tall even for a Mercurian. Already she scaled seven dergs, or in Earth terms, fourteen feet and was beginning to show evidences of a fifth head. Five heads were rarely found on females and Probos Five was justly proud of his good fortune. In all Mercury at the present time, he knew of but two females possessing five heads and soon Lingua Four would be the third of her sex to be thus endowed.
Yes, thought Probos Five, a woman to be proud of; for today after three vargs of marriage the memory of her trim trunk with four pairs of eyes laughing mischievously, filled his five brains with flame. Slim as a birch she stood in his memory, and eight eyes whispered lovers' thoughts across space and time.
Probos Five recalled his five minds from their nostalgic reverie and gazed at the contour of the Earth that was rushing up to meet him. White, blazing white reflecting the rays of the midnight sun covered the region as far as the eye could reach.
"Good," thought Probos Five, "the Polar regions. That means the end will come quickly. One or two seconds at the most of that bitter cold would be enough."
* * * * *
Turning away from the windows Probos Five let his thoughts return to Lingua Four, to Probos Two, his son, and his home on the first planet from the sun. Ah, that is the place to live, thought Probos, the temperature an unchanging 327°; just comfortably warm, where one could enjoy a life of warmth and ease. Too bad that he would not live to see it again. Thirty vargs, he reflected, is such a short time. With luck, perhaps he may have lived to see a hundred vargs slip by. And perhaps in time he may have added three more heads and five dergs in length to his towering trunk.
He thought of Probos Two and wondered idly if his son would also visit the barbarian worlds to collect data for Lingua Four.
He wished that he could have seen more of Probos Two. There's an up-and-coming lad, he thought, not quite two vargs old and two heads already. Yes, indeed, he's quite a boy, Probos Five remembered proudly; maybe his mother will keep him at home instead of running him all over the universe to get material for her committees.
He wished that Lingua Four would settle down and be content as a housewife, but he doubted that she would. Social ambition was boring like a termite under her bark.
Lingua Four was determined to be the first lady of Arbor, the capital city of Mercury. To this end Lingua Four had labored unceasingly. She was president of half the women's clubs of Arbor. She could always be depended upon to furnish the best in new and diverting subjects.
She headed almost all committees for aid or research on any type of problem. It was owing to Lingua Four being president of the Committee for Undernourished Arborians that Probos Five was making this ill-starred trip. His purpose was to capture a few of the upright, divided trunk animals that inhabited the third planet.
They were to be transported to Mercury and given over to scientific study as to their edible qualities. If it were found that the divided trunk creatures were fit for Mercurian consumption, the problem of undernourishment would no longer exist since the supply of divided trunks was seemingly inexhaustible. Mercurians had made expeditions to the third planet before and every report concluded with--"Divided trunk creatures increasing in number."
Privately Probos Five doubted the possibility of using the divided trunks for food, since the last expedition once again reported a complete lack of captives due to the frail and tenuous bodies of the divided trunks. Then, too, transportation and preservation posed a tremendous problem, not to mention the difficulty of trying to eat something that might vaporize on your fork. But then these questions may never arise, he decided, for of all the reports perused by Probos Five not one expedition had succeeded in bringing a divided trunk to Mercury.
All reports were read to the last letter by Probos Five before assembling equipment for his own trip. In the reports he had noted many of the difficulties of the earlier missions. Planet Three was impossible for a Mercurian without a heated space suit. The temperature of Planet Three was so low that it would literally freeze a Mercurian stiff in a matter of seconds.
The casualties of the early expeditions had been numerous. Many Mercurians had succumbed to the bitter cold due to flaws in space suits and other accidents. A break in the suit meant instant death. The victims of such mishaps were invariably buried in the isolated, sparsely inhabited Polar regions to avoid alarming the divided trunk creatures.
It was strange, mused Probos Five, that the divided trunks were seemingly unable to bear the slightest increase in temperature. Their bodies disintegrated upon contact with a Mercurian. Some were roped and dragged from a distance up to the doors of the space ships, but no inhabitant of Planet Three had been closer to Mercury than the air lock of the space cruisers. As the divided trunk people were dragged into the air lock, warm air from the ship would be pumped into the lock to dispel the frigid air of Planet Three. As the warmth of Mercury enveloped the divided trunks they became quite red, began to melt and finally dissolved into a gaseous state, leaving a small pile of ashes and a disagreeable odor in the air lock that sometimes lingered for days.
Probos Five believed he had the solution for these obstacles in the path of scientific study of the divided trunks. He had decided to use guile in place of strength. For this reason he had come alone and in a small space runabout to put his solution to the test. But his solution now could never be tried, he remembered morosely.
* * * * *
In the aft compartment Probos Five had constructed a refrigeration plant. By maintaining a constant degree of frigidity he hoped to deliver a pair of each species of divided trunks to Mercury. He hoped especially to capture a complete set and perhaps a few over to make up for breakage and losses. As to what form of sustenance the divided trunks were accustomed to, he had no idea whatsoever. He had intended to bring samples of earth, vegetation and anything else that may have suggested a source of food for the divided trunks.
The thought too had occurred to him that possibly the divided trunk creatures ate one another. On the possibility of this Probos Five had determined to capture three black ones, three white ones, three yellows, three browns and three reds, and three of any other color that he might find. He rather doubted that more colors or combination of colors existed. All previous expedition reports had mentioned only the five colors. However, Probos Five had determined to keep several eyes open on the off chance that he might find a new and different species.
His refrigerator was modeled along the architectural lines of the dens of the divided trunks. The main room of the refrigerator opened to the outside of the ship by means of a small air lock. A Mercurian size air lock was not needed for the divided trunks, as few had been found to be much over three dergs in height.
Winches and cables to pull the divided trunks into the refrigerator were installed in the refrigerator room itself to avoid burning the divided trunks with hot cables from other parts of the ship.
In addition, Probos Five had cunningly devised a refrigerated trap. This too was designed to simulate the caves of the divided trunk creatures but was smaller. It was constructed with entrances readily seen and exits well hidden. Probos Five had expected great things of his trap. He had conceived the idea after reading the report of a Mercurian expedition that explored the dens of the divided trunks at some place marked "Coney Island." According to the reports the divided trunks showed no hesitancy in entering these types of dens. In fact, the writer of the report gave it as his opinion that the divided ones perhaps played games in these types of caves. It also mentioned that some of the dens were equipped with flat shiny surfaces that cast reflections or images. Probos Five had incorporated the image-making surfaces into his trap design. A pity that all this effort must be wasted, thought Probos as he once more turned to the observation ports to check his remaining distance from the planet's surface. Seeing that his time was short, Probos Five turned all five faces forward in the Mercurian gesture of disdain for death. A moment later came the shock.
* * * * *
A week later the proprietor of a novelty shop in Fairbanks watched two natives with their dog team pulling something loglike through the snow toward the trading post. Turning to a customer he remarked,
"Here comes Ketch and Ah Koo dragging in another Totem Pole. Guess that Ketch must be the biggest liar ever produced by the Eskimos. He tried to tell me that Totem Poles fall from the sky. Says he can always find one if he sees it fall because it's so hot it melts the snow around it. Personally I think he should be elected president of the Liars' Club, but I'll buy the Totem Pole anyway. Those pesky tourists always whittle a chunk out of my Totem Pole for a souvenir.
"I'm glad he's bringing me another one," the storekeeper concluded, "the one he sold me last year is about whittled away."
MAN MADE
By Albert R. Teichner
A story that comes to grips with an age-old question--what is soul? and where?--and postulates an age-new answer.
If I listed every trouble I've accumulated in a mere two hundred odd years you might be inclined to laugh. When a tale of woe piles up too many details it looks ridiculous, unreal. So here, at the outset, I want to say my life has not been a tragic one--whose life is in this day of advanced techniques and universal good will?--but that, on the contrary, I have enjoyed this Earth and Solar System and all the abundant interests that it has offered me. If, lying here beneath these great lights, I could only be as sure of joy in the future....
My name is Treb Hawley. As far back as I can remember in my childhood, I was always interested in astronautics. From the age of ten I specialized in that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I was still a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expedition and after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage at thirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years after Marla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for government permission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, I would have been denied the rare privilege of parenthood.
That accident, the first one, took place when I was fifty. On Planet 12 of the Centauri System I was attacked by a six-limbed primate and was badly mangled on the left side before breaking loose to destroy it. Surgical Corps operated within an hour. Although they did an excellent prosthetic job after removing my left leg and arm, the substituted limbs had their limitations. While they permitted me to do all my jobs, phantom pain was a constant problem. There were new methods of prosthesis to eliminate this weird effect but these were only available back on the home planets.
I had to wait one year for this release. Meanwhile I had plenty of time to contemplate my mysterious affliction; the mystery of it was so great that I had little chance to notice how painful it actually was. There is enough strangeness in feeling with absolute certainty that a limb exists where actually there is nothing, but the strangeness is compounded when you look down and discover that not only is the leg gone but that another, mechanical one has taken its place. Dr. Erics, who had performed the operation, said this difficulty would ultimately prove a blessing but I often had my doubts.
* * * * *
He was right. Upon my return to Earth, the serious operations took place, those giving me plastic limbs that would become living parts of my organic structure. The same outward push of the brain and nervous system that had created phantom pain now made what was artificial seem real. Not only did my own blood course through the protoplastic but I could feel it doing so. The adjustment took less than a week and it was a complete one.
Fortunately the time was already past when protoplast patients were looked upon as something mildly freakish and to be pitied. Artificial noses, ears and limbs were becoming quite common. Whether there was some justification for the earlier reaction of pity, however, still remains to be seen.
My career resumed and I was accepted for the next Centauri Expedition without any questions being asked. As a matter of fact, Planning Center preferred people in my condition; protoplast limbs were more durable than the real--no, let us say the original--thing.
At home and at the beach no one bothered to notice my reconstructed arm and leg. They looked too natural for the idea to occur to people who did not know me. And Marla treated the whole thing like a big joke. "You're better than new," she used to tell me and the kids wanted to know when they could have second matter limbs of their own.
Life was good to me. The one-year periods away from home passed quickly and the five-year layoffs on Earth permitted me to devote myself to my hobbies, music and mathematics, without taking any time away from my family. Eventually, of course, my condition became an extremely common one. Who is there today among my readers who has all the parts with which he was born? If any such person past the childhood sixty years did, he would be the freak.
Then at ninety new difficulties arose. A new Centaurian subvirus attacked my chest marrow. As is still true in this infection, the virus proved to be ineradicable. My ribs weren't, though, and a protoplastic casing, exactly like the thoracic cavity, was substituted. It was discovered that the infection had spread to my right radius and ulna so here too a simple substitution was made. Of course, such a radical infection meant my circulatory system was contaminated and synthetically created living hemoplast was pumped in as soon as all the blood was removed.
This did attract attention. At the time the procedure was still new and some medical people warned it would not take. They were right only to this extent: the old cardioarterial organs occasionally hunted into defective feedback that required systole-diastole adjustments. Protoplastic circulatory substitutes corrected the deficiency and, just to avoid the slight possibility of further complications, the venous system was also replaced. Since the changeover there hasn't been the least trouble in that sector.
By then Marla had a perfect artificial ear and both of my sons had lost their congenitally diseased livers. There was nothing extraordinary about our family; only in my case were replacements somewhat above the world average.
I am proud to say that I was among the first thousand who made the pioneer voyage on hyperdrive to the star group beyond Centaurus. We returned in triumph with our fantastic but true tales of the organic planet Vita and the contemplative humanoids of Nirva who will consciousness into subjectively grasping the life and beauty of subatomic space. The knowledge we brought back assured that the fatal disease of ennui could never again attack man though they lived to Aleph Null.
On the second voyage Marla, Robert and Neil went with me. This took a little political wrangling but it was worth throwing my merit around to see them benefit from Nirvan discoveries even before the rest of humanity. Planetary Council agreed my services entitled me to this special consideration. Truly I could feel among the blessed.
Then I volunteered for the small expeditionary force to the 38th moon that the Nirvans themselves refused to visit. They tried to dissuade us but, being of a much younger species, we were less plagued by caution and went anyway. The mountains of this little moon are up to fifteen miles high, causing a state of instability that is chronic. Walking down those alabaster valleys was a more awesome experience than any galactic vista I have ever encountered. Our aesthetic sense proved stronger than common sense alertness and seven of us were buried in a rock slide.
* * * * *
Fortunately the great rocks formed a cavern above us. After two days we were rescued. The others had suffered such minor injuries that they were repaired before our craft landed on Nirva. I, though, unconscious and feverish, was in serious condition from skin abrasions and a comminuted cranium. Dr. Erics made the only possible prognosis. My skull had to be removed and a completely new protoskin had to be supplied also.
* * * * *
When I came out of coma Marla was standing at my bedside, smiling down at me. "Do you feel," she stumbled, "darling, I mean, do you feel the way you did?"
I was puzzled. "Sure, I'm Treb Hawley, I'm your husband, and I remember an awful fall of rocks but now I feel exactly the way I always have." I did not even realize that further substitutions had been made and did not believe them when they told me about it.
Now I was an object of curiosity. Upon our return to Earth the newsplastics hailed me as one of the most highly reintegrated individuals anywhere. In all the teeming domain of man there were only seven hundred who had gone through as many substitutions as I had. Where, they philosophised in passing, would a man cease to be a man in the sequence of substitutions?
Philosophy had never been an important preoccupation of mine. It was the only discipline no further ahead in its really essential questions than the Greeks of four thousand years ago. Oh certainly, there had been lots of technical improvements that were fascinating but these were peripheral points; the basic issues could not be experimentally tested so they had to remain on the level of accepted or rejected axioms. I wasn't about to devote much time to them when the whole fascinating field of subatomic mirror numbers was just opening up; certainly not because a few sensational journalists were toying with dead-end notions. For that matter the newsplastics weren't either and quickly went back to the regular mathematical reportage they do so well.
A few decades later, however, I wasn't so cocksure. The old Centaurian virus had reappeared in my brain of all places and I started to have a peculiar feeling about where the end point in all this reintegrating routine would lie. Not that the brain operation was a risk; thousands of people had already gone through it and the substitute organisms had made no fundamental change in them. It didn't in my case either. But now I was more second matter than any man in history.
"It's the old question of Achilles' Ship," Dr. Erics told me.
"Never heard of it," I said.
"It's a parable, Treb, about concretised forms of a continuum in its discrete aspects."
"I see the theoretical question but what has Achilles' Ship to do with it?"
He furrowed his protoplast brow that looked as youthful as it had a century ago. "This ship consisted of several hundred planks, most of them forming the hull, some in the form of benches and oars and a mainmast. It served its primitive purpose well but eventually sprang a leak. Some of the hull planks had to be replaced after which it was as good as new. Another year of hard use brought further hull troubles and some more planks were removed for new ones. Then the mast collapsed and a new one was put in. After that the ship was in such good shape that it could outrace most of those just off the ways."
I had an uneasy feeling about where this parable was leading us but my mind shied away from the essential point and Erics went relentlessly on. "As the years passed more repairs were made--first a new set of oars, then some more planks, still newer oars, still more planks. Eventually Achilles, an unthinking man of action who still tried to be aware of what happened to the instruments of action he needed most, realized that not one splinter of the original ship remained. Was this, then, a new ship? At first he was inclined to say yes. But this only evoked the further question: when had it become the new ship? Was it when the last plank was replaced or when half had been? His confidently stated answer collapsed. Yet how could he say it was the old ship when everything about it was a substitution? The question was too much for him. When he came to Athens he turned the problem over to the wise men of that city, refusing ever to think about it again."
* * * * *
My mind was now in turmoil. "What," I demanded, "what did they decide?"
Erics frowned. "Nothing. They could not answer the question. Every available answer was equally right and proved every other right answer wrong. As you know, philosophy does not progress in its essentials. It merely continues to clarify what the problems are."
"I prefer to die next time!" I shouted. "I want to be a live human being or a dead one, not a machine."
"Maybe you won't be a machine. Nothing exactly like this has happened before to a living organic being."
I knew I had to be on my guard. What peculiar scheme was afoot? "You're trying to say something's still wrong with me. It isn't true. I feel as well as I ever have."
"Your 'feeling' is a dangerous illusion." His face was space-dust grey and I realized with horror that he meant all of it. "I had to tell you the parable and show the possible alternatives clearly. Treb, you're riddled with Centaurian Zed virus. Unless we remove almost all the remaining first growth organisms you will be dead within six months."
I didn't care any more whether he meant it or not; the idea was too ridiculous. Death is too rare and anachronistic a phenomenon today. "You're the one who needs treatment, Doctor. Overwork, too much study, one idea on the brain too much."
Resigned, he shrugged his shoulders. "All the first matter should be removed except for the spinal chord and the vertebrae. You'd still have that."
"Very kind of you," I said, and walked away, determined to have no more of his lectures now or in the future.
Marla wanted to know why I seemed so jumpy. "Seems is just the word," I snapped. "Never felt better in my life."
"That's just what I mean," she said. "Jumpy."
I let her have the last word but determined to be calmer from then on.
I was. And, as the weeks passed, the mask I put on sank deeper and deeper until that was the way I really felt. 'When you can face death serenely you will not have to face it.' That is what Sophilus, one of our leading philosophers, has said. I was living this truth. My work on infinite series went more smoothly and swiftly than any mathematical research I had engaged in before and my senses responded to living with greater zest than ever.
* * * * *
Five months later, while walking through Hydroponic Park, I felt the first awful tremor through my body. It was as if the earth beneath my feet were shaking, like that awful afternoon on Nirva's moon. But no rocks fell from this sky and other strollers moved across my vision as if the world of five minutes ago had not collapsed. The horror was only inside me.
I went to another doctor and asked for Stabilizine. "Perhaps you need a checkup," he suggested.
That was the last thing I wanted and I said so. He, too, shrugged resignedly and made out my prescription for the harmless drug. After that the hammer of pain did not strike again but often I could feel it brush by me. Each time my self-administered dosage had to be increased.
Eventually my equations stopped tying together in my mind. I would stare at the calculation sheets for hours at a time, asking myself why x should be here or integral operation there. The truth could not be avoided: my mind could no longer grasp truth.
I went, in grudging defeat, to Erics. "You have to win," I said and described my experiences.
"Some things are inevitable," he nodded solemnly, "and some are not. This may solve all your problems."
"Not all," I hoped aloud.
Marla went with me to hospital. She realized the danger I was in but put the best possible face on it. Her courage and support made all the difference and I went into the second matter chamber, ready for whatever fate awaited me.
Nothing happened. I came out of the chamber all protoplast except for the spinal zone. Yet I was still Treb Hawley. As the coma faded away, the last equation faded in, completely meaningful and soon followed by all the leads I could handle for the next few years.
Psychophysiology was in an uproar over my success. "Man can now be all protoplast," some said. Others as vehemently insisted some tiny but tangible chromosome-organ link to the past must remain. For my part it all sounded very academic; I was well again.
There was one unhappy moment when I applied for the new Centauri Expedition. "Too much of a risk," the Consulting Board told me. "Not that you aren't in perfect condition but there are unknown, untested factors and out in space they might--mind you, we just say might--prove disadvantageous." They all looked embarrassed and kept their eyes off me, preferring to concentrate on the medals lined up across the table that were to be my consolation prize.
I was disconsolate at first and would look longingly up at the stars which were now, perhaps forever, beyond my reach. But my sons were going out there and, for some inexplicable reason, that gave me great solace. Then, too, Earth was still young and beautiful and so was Marla. I still had the full capacity to enjoy these blessings.
* * * * *
Not for long. When we saw the boys off to Centauri I had a dizzy spell and only with the greatest effort hid my distress until the long train of ships had risen out of sight. Then I lay down in the Visitors Lounge from where I could not be moved for several hours. Great waves of pain flashed up and down my spine as if massive voltages were being released within me. The rest of my body stood up well to this assault but every few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I was back in my old body, a ghostly superimposition on the living protoplast, as the spinal chord projected its agony outward. Finally the pain subsided, succeeded by a blank numbness.
I was carried on gravito-cushions to Erics' office. "It had to be," he sighed. "I didn't have the heart to tell you after the last operation. The subvirus is attacking the internuncial neurones."
I knew what that meant but was past caring. "We're not immortal--not yet," I said. "I'm ready for the end."
"We can still try," he said.
I struggled to laugh but even gave up that little gesture. "Another operation? No, it can't make any difference."
"It might. We don't know."
"How could it?"
"Suppose, Treb, just suppose you do come out of it all right. You'd be the first man to be completely of second matter!"
"Erics, it can't work. Forget it."
"I won't forget it. You said we're not immortal but, Treb, your survival would be another step in that direction. The soul's immortality has to be taken on faith now--if it's taken at all. You could be the first scientific proof that the developing soul has the momentum to carry past the body in which it grows. At the least you would represent a step in the direction of soul freed from matter."
I could take no more of such talk. "Go ahead," I said, "do what you want. I give my consent."
The last few days have been the most hectic of my life. Dozens of great physicians, flown in from every sector of the Solar System, have examined me. "I'm leaving my body to science," I told one particularly prodding group, "but you're not giving it a chance to die!" It is easy for me to die now; when you have truly resigned yourself to death nothing in life can disturb you. I have at long last reached that completely stoical moment. That is why I have recorded this history with as much objectivity as continuing vitality can permit.
* * * * *
The operating theatre was crowded for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to blot the hypnotic horror out.
But when I opened them everything was still there as before. Then Erics' head, growing as he inspected my face more closely, covered everything else up.
"When are you going to begin?" I demanded.
"We have finished," he answered in awe that verged upon reverence. "You are the new Adam!"
There was a mounting burst of applause as the viewers learned what I had said. My mind was working more clearly than it had in a long time and, with all the wisdom of hindsight, I wondered how anyone could have ever doubted the outcome. We had known all along that every bit of atomic matter in each cell is replaced many times in one lifetime, electron by electron, without the cell's overall form disappearing. Now, by equally gradual steps, it had happened in the vaster arena of Newtonian living matter.
I sat up slowly, looking with renewed wonder on everything from the magnetic screw in the light above my head to the nail on the wriggling toe of my left foot. I was more than Achilles' Ship. I was a living being at whose center lay a still yet turning point that could neither be new nor old but only immortal.
THE END
PLEASANT JOURNEY
By Richard F. Thieme
It's nice to go on a pleasant journey. There is, however, a very difficult question concerning the other half of the ticket ...
"What do you call it?" the buyer asked Jenkins.
"I named it 'Journey Home' but you can think up a better name for it if you want. I'll guarantee that it sells, though. There's nothing like it on any midway."
"I'd like to try it out first, of course," Allenby said. "Star-Time uses only the very best, you know."
"Yes, I know," Jenkins said. He had heard the line before, from almost every carnival buyer to whom he had sold. He did not do much business with the carnivals; there weren't enough to keep him busy with large or worthwhile rides and features. The amusement parks of the big cities were usually the best markets.
Allenby warily eyed the entrance, a room fashioned from a side-show booth. A rough red curtain concealed the inside. Over the doorway, in crude dark blue paint, was lettered, "Journey Home." Behind the doorway was a large barnlike structure, newly painted white, where Jenkins did his planning, his building, and his finishing. When he sold a new ride it was either transported from inside the building through the large, pull-away doors in back or taken apart piece by piece and shipped to the park or carny that bought it.
"Six thousand's a lot of money," the buyer said.
"Just try it," Jenkins told him.
The buyer shrugged. "O.K.," he said. "Let's go in." They walked through the red curtain. Inside the booth-entrance was a soft-cushioned easy-chair, also red, secured firmly in place. It was a piece of salvage from a two-engine commercial airplane. A helmet looking like a Flash Gordon accessory-hair drier combination was set over it. Jenkins flipped a switch and the room became bright with light. "I thought you said this wasn't a thrill ride," Allenby said, looking at the helmetlike structure ominously hanging over the chair.
"It isn't," Jenkins said, smiling. "Sit down." He strapped the buyer into place in the chair.
"Hey, wait a minute," Allenby protested. "Why the straps?"
"Leave everything to me and don't worry," Jenkins said, fitting the headgear into place over the buyer's head. The back of it fitted easily over the entire rear of the skull, down to his neck. The front came just below the eyes. After turning the light off, Jenkins pulled the curtain closed. It was completely black inside.
"Have a nice trip," Jenkins said, pulling a switch on the wall and pushing a button on the back of the chair at the same time.
Currents shifted and repatterned themselves inside the helmet and were fed into Allenby at the base of his skull, at the medulla. The currents of alternating ions mixed with the currents of his varied and random brain waves, and the impulses of one became the impulses of the other. Allenby jerked once with the initial shock and was then still, his mind and body fused with the pulsating currents of the chair.
Suddenly, Roger Allenby was almost blinded by bright, naked light. Allenby's first impression was one of disappointment at the failure of the device. Jenkins was reliable, usually, and hadn't come up with a fluke yet.
Allenby got out of the chair and called for Jenkins, holding on to the arm of the chair to keep his bearings. "Hey! Where are you? Jenkins!" He tried to look around him but the bright, intense light revealed nothing. He swore to himself, extending his arms in front of him for something to grasp. As he groped for a solid, the light became more subdued and shifted from white into a light, pleasant blue.
* * * * *
Shapes and forms rearranged themselves in front of him and gradually became distinguishable. He was in a city, or on top of a city. A panoramic view was before him and he saw the creations of human beings, obviously, but a culture far removed from his. A slight path of white began at his feet and expanded as it fell slightly, ramplike, over and into the city. The buildings were whiter than the gate of false dreams that Penelope sung of and the streets and avenues were blue, not gray. The people wore white and milled about in the streets below him. They shouted as one; their voices were not cries but songs and they sang his name.
He started walking on the white strip. It was flexible and supported his weight easily. Then he was running, finding his breath coming in sharp gasps and he was among the crowds. They smiled at him as he passed by and held out their hands to him. Their faces shone with a brilliance of awareness and he knew that they loved him. Troubled, frightened, he kept running, blindly, and, abruptly, there were no people, no buildings.
He was walking now, at the left side of a modern super-highway, against the traffic. Autos sped by him, too quickly for him to determine the year of model. Across the divider the traffic was heavier, autos speeding crazily ahead in the direction he was walking; none stopped. He halted for a moment and looked around him. There was nothing on the sides of the road: no people, no fields, no farms, no cities, no blackness. There was nothing. But far ahead there was green etched around the horizon as the road dipped and the cars sped over it. He walked more quickly, catching his breath, and came closer and closer to the green.
Allenby stopped momentarily and turned around, looking at the highway that was behind him. It was gone. Only bleak, black and gray hills of rock and rubble were there, no cars, no life. He shuddered and continued on toward the end of the highway. The green blended in with the blue of the sky now. Closer he came, until just over the next rise in the road the green was bright. Not knowing or caring why, he was filled with expectation and he ran again and was in the meadow.
All around him were the greens of the grasses and leaves and the yellows and blues of the field flowers. It was warm, a spring day, with none of the discomfort of summer heat. Jubilant, Roger spun around in circles, inhaling the fragrance of the field, listening to the hum of insect life stirring back to awareness after a season of inactivity. Then he was running and tumbling, barefoot, his shirt open, feeling the soft grass give way underfoot and the soil was good and rich beneath him.
He saw a stream ahead, with clear water melodiously flowing by him. He went to it and drank, the cold, good water quenching all his thirst, clearing all the stickiness of his throat and mind. He dashed the water on his face and was happy and felt the coolness of it as the breeze picked up and swept his hair over his forehead. With a shake of his head he tossed it back in place and ran again, feeling the air rush into his lungs with coolness and vibrance unknown since adolescence. No nicotine spasms choked him and the air was refreshing.
Then up the hill he sped, pushing hard, as the marigolds and dandelions parted before him. At the top he stopped and looked and smiled ecstatically as he saw the green rolling land and the stream, curving around from behind the house, his house, the oaks forming a secret lair behind it, and he felt the youth of the world in his lungs and under his feet. He heard the voice calling from that house, his house, calling him to Saturday lunch.
"I'm coming!" he cried happily and was tumbling down the hill, rolling over and over, the hill and ground and sky blending blues and greens and nothing had perspective. The world was spinning and everything was black again. He shook his head to clear the dizziness.
* * * * *
"Well?" Jenkins said. "How was it?"
Allenby looked up at him as Jenkins swung the helmet back and unhooked the seatbelt. He squinted as Jenkins flipped the light switch and the brightness hit him.
His surroundings became distinguishable again very slowly and he knew he was back in the room. "Where was I?" he asked.
Jenkins shrugged. "I don't know. It was all yours. You went wherever you wanted to go, wherever home is." Jenkins smiled down at him. "Did you visit more than one place?" he asked. The buyer nodded. "I thought so. It seems that a person tries a few before finally deciding where to go."
The buyer stood up and stretched. "Could I please see the barn?" he asked, meaning the huge workshop where Jenkins did the construction work.
"Sure," Jenkins said and opened the door opposite the red curtain into the workshop. It was empty.
"You mean it was all up here? I didn't move at all?" He tapped his cranium with his index finger.
"That's right," Jenkins said anxiously. "Do you want it or not?"
Allenby stood looking into the empty room. "Yes ... yes, of course," he said. "How long did the whole thing last?"
"About ten seconds," Jenkins said, looking at his watch. "It seems much longer to the traveler. I'm not sure, but I think the imagined time varies with each person. It's always around ten seconds of actual time, though, so you can make a lot of money on it, even if you only have one machine."
"Money?" Allenby said. "Money, yes, of course." He took a checkbook from his inside pocket and hurriedly wrote a check for six thousand dollars. "When can we have it delivered?" he asked.
"You want it shipped the usual way?"
"No," Allenby said, staring at the red-cushioned chair. "Send it air freight. Then bill us for the expense."
"Whatever you say," Jenkins said, smiling, taking the check. "You'll have it by the first of the week, probably. I'll put a complete parts and assembly manual inside the crate."
"Good, good. But maybe I should test it again, you know. Star-Time can't really afford to make a mistake as expensive as this."
"No," Jenkins said quickly. Then, "I'll guarantee it, of course. If it doesn't work out, I'll give you a full refund. But don't try it again, today. Don't let anyone have it more than once in one day. Stamp them on the hand or something when they take the trip."
"Why?"
Jenkins looked troubled. "I'm not sure, but people might not want to come back. Too many times in a row and they might be able to stay there ... in their minds of course."
"Of course, of course. Well, it's been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Jenkins. I hope to see you again soon." They walked back to Allenby's not-very-late model car and shook hands. Allenby drove away.
On the way back to the hotel, and as he lay for a long time in the bathtub, letting the warmness drift away from the water, the thought ran over and over in his mind. They might be able to stay there, Allenby said to himself. They might be able to stay there. He smiled warmly at a crack in the plaster as he thought of the first of the week and the fragrant meadow.
THERE WILL BE SCHOOL TOMORROW
By V. E. Thiessen
There is a quiet horror to this story from Tomorrow....
Evening had begun to fall. In the cities the clamor softened along the streets, and the women made small, comfortable, rattling noises in the kitchens. Out in the country the cicadas started their singing, and the cool smell began to rise out of the earth. But everywhere, in the cities and in the country, the children were late from school.
There were a few calls, but the robotic telephone devices at the schools gave back the standard answer: "The schools are closed for the day. If you will leave a message it will be recorded for tomorrow."
The telephones between houses began to ring. "Is Johnny home from school yet?"
"No. Is Jane?"
"Not yet. I wonder what can be keeping them?"
"Something new, I guess. Oh, well, the roboteachers know best. They will be home soon."
"Yes, of course. It's foolish to worry."
The children did not come.
After a time a few cars were driven to the schools. They were met by the robots. The worried parents were escorted inside. But the children did not come home.
And then, just as alarm was beginning to stir all over the land, the robots came walking, all of the robots from the grade schools, and the high schools, and the colleges. All of the school system walking, with the roboteachers saying, "Let us go into the house where you can sit down." All over the streets of the cities and the walks in the country the robots were entering houses.
"What's happened to my children?"
"If you will go inside and sit down--"
"What's happened to my children? Tell me now!"
"If you will go inside and sit down--"
Steel and electrons and wires and robotic brains were inflexible. How can you force steel to speak? All over the land the people went inside and sat nervously waiting an explanation.
There was no one out on the streets. From inside the houses came the sound of surprise and agony. After a time there was silence. The robots came out of the houses and went walking back to the schools. In the cities and in the country there was the strange and sudden silence of tragedy.
The children did not come home.
* * * * *
The morning before the robots walked, Johnny Malone, the Mayor's son, bounced out of bed with a burst of energy. Skinning out of his pajamas and into a pair of trousers, he hurried, barefooted, into his mother's bedroom. She was sleeping soundly, and he touched one shoulder hesitantly.
"Mother!"
The sleeping figure stirred. His mother's face, still faintly shiny with hormone cream, turned toward him. She opened her eyes. Her voice was irritated.
"What is it, Johnny?"
"Today's the day, mommy. Remember?"
"The day?" Eyebrows raised.
"The new school opens. Now we'll have roboteachers like everyone else. Will you fix my breakfast, mother?"
"Amelia will fix you something."
"Aw, mother. Amelia's just a robot. This is a special day. And I want my daddy to help me with my arithmetic before I go. I don't want the roboteacher to think I'm dumb."
His mother frowned in deepening irritation. "Now, there's no reason why Amelia can't get your breakfast like she always does. And I doubt if it would be wise to wake your father. You know he likes to sleep in the morning. Now, you go on out of here and let me sleep."
Johnny Malone turned away, fighting himself for a moment, for he knew he was too big to cry. He walked more slowly now and entered his father's room. He had to shake his father to awaken him.
"Daddy! Wake up, daddy!"
"What in the devil? Oh, Johnny." His father's eyes were sleepily bleak. "What in thunder do you want?"
"Today's the first day of roboteachers. I can't work my arithmetic. Will you help me before I go to school?"
His father stared at him in amazement. "Just what in the devil do you think roboteachers are for? They're supposed to teach you. If you knew arithmetic we wouldn't need roboteachers."
"But the roboteachers may be angry if I don't have my lesson."
Johnny Malone's father turned on one elbow. "Listen, son," he said. "If those roboteachers give you any trouble you just tell them you're the Mayor's son. See. Now get the devil out of here. What's her name--that servorobot--Amelia will get your breakfast and get you off to school. Now suppose you beat it out of here and let me go back to sleep."
"Yes, Sir." Eyes smarting, Johnny Malone went down the stairs to the kitchen. It wasn't that his parents were different. All the kids were fed and sent to school by robots. It was just that--well today seemed sort of special. Downstairs Amelia, the roboservant, placed hot cereal on the table before him. After he had forced a few bites past the tightness in his throat, Amelia checked the temperature and his clothing and let him out the door. The newest school was only a few blocks from his home, and Johnny could walk to school.
* * * * *
The newest school stood on the edge of this large, middlewestern city. Off to the back of the school were the towers of the town, great monolithic skyscrapers of pre-stressed concrete and plastic. To the front of the school the plains stretched out to meet a cloudy horizon.
A helio car swung down in front of the school. Two men and a woman got out.
"This is it, Senator." Doctor Wilson, the speaker, was with the government bureau of schools. He lifted his arm and gestured, a lean, tweed-suited man.
The second man, addressed as Senator, was bulkier, grey suited and pompous. He turned to the woman with professional deference.
"This is the last one, my dear. This is what Doctor Wilson calls the greatest milestone in man's education."
"With the establishing of this school the last human teacher is gone. Gone are all the human weaknesses, the temper fits of teachers, their ignorance and prejudices. The roboteachers are without flaw."
The woman lifted a lorgnette to her eyes. "Haow interesting. But after all, we've had roboteachers for years, haven't we--or have we--?" She made a vague gesture toward the school, and looked at the brown-suited man.
"Yes, of course. Years ago your women's clubs fought against roboteachers. That was before they were proven."
"I seem to recall something of that. Oh well, it doesn't matter." The lorgnette gestured idly.
"Shall we go in?" the lean man urged.
The woman hesitated. Senator said tactfully, "After all, Doctor Wilson would like you to see his project."
The brown-suited man nodded. His face took on a sharp intensity. "We're making a great mistake. No one is interested in educating the children any more. They leave it to the robots. And they neglect the children's training at home."
The woman turned toward him with surprise in her eyes. "But really, aren't the robots the best teachers?"
"Of course they are. But confound it, we ought to be interested in what they teach and how they teach. What's happened to the old PTA? What's happened to parental discipline, what's happened to--"
He stopped suddenly and smiled, a rueful tired smile. "I suppose I'm a fanatic on this. Come on inside."
They passed through an antiseptic corridor built from dull green plastic. The brown-suited man pressed a button outside one of the classrooms. A door slid noiselessly into the hall. A robot stood before them, gesturing gently. They followed the robot into the classroom. At the head of the classroom another robot was lecturing. There were drawings on a sort of plastic blackboard. There were wire models on the desk in front of the robot. They listened for a moment, and for a moment it seemed that the woman could be intrigued in spite of herself.
"Mathematics," Doctor Wilson murmured in her ear. "Euclidean Geometry and Aristotelean reasoning. We start them young on these old schools of thought, then use Aristotle and Euclid as a point of departure for our intermediate classes in mathematics and logic."
"REAHLLY!" The lorgnette studied Doctor Wilson. "You mean there are several kinds of geometry?"
Doctor Wilson nodded. A dull flush crept into his cheeks. The Senator caught his eyes and winked. The woman moved toward the door. At the door the robot bowed.
The lorgnette waved in appreciation. "It's reahlly been most charming!"
Wilson said desperately, "If your women's clubs would just visit our schools and see this work we are carrying on ..."
"Reahlly, I'm sure the robots are doing a marvelous job. After all, that's what they were built for."
Wilson called, "Socrates! Come here!" The robot approached from his position outside the classroom door.
"Why were you built, Socrates? Tell the lady why you were built."
A metal throat cleared, a metal voice said resonantly, "We were made to serve the children. The children are the heart of a society. As the children are raised, so will the future be assured. I will do everything for the children's good, this is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children's good."
"Thank you, Socrates. You may go."
Metal footsteps retreated. The lorgnette waved again. "Very impressive. Very efficient. And now, Senator, if we can go. We are to have tea at the women's club. Varden is reviewing his newest musical comedy."
The Senator said firmly, "Thank you, Doctor Wilson."
His smile was faintly apologetic. It seemed to say that the women's clubs had many votes, but that Wilson should understand, Wilson's own vote would be appreciated too. Wilson watched the two re-enter the helicopter and rise into the morning sunshine. He kicked the dirt with his shoe and turned to find Socrates behind him. The metallic voice spoke.
"You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest."
"I'm not tired. Why can they be so blind, so uninterested in the children?"
"It is our job to teach the children. You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest."
How can you argue with metal? What can you add to a perfect mechanism, designed for its job, and integrated with a hundred other perfect mechanisms? What can you do when a thousand schools are so perfect they have a life of their own, with no need for human guidance, and, most significant, no failures from human weakness?
Wilson stared soberly at this school, at the colossus he had helped to create. He had the feeling that it was wrong somehow, that if people would only think about it they could find that something was wrong.
"You are tired."
He nodded at Socrates. "Yes, I am tired. I will go home."
Once, on the way home, he stared back toward the school with strange unease.
* * * * *
Inside the school there was the ringing of a bell. The children trooped into the large play area that was enclosed in the heart of the great building. Here and there they began to form in clusters. At the centers of the clusters were the newest students, the ones that had moved here, the ones that had been in the robot schools before.
"Is it true that the roboteachers will actually spank you?"
"It's true, all right."
"You're kidding. It's only a story, like Santa Claus or Johnny Appleseed. The human teachers never spanked us here."
"The robots will spank you if you get out of line."
"My father says no robot can lay a hand on a human."
"These robots are different."
The bell began to ring again. Recess was over. The children moved toward the classroom. All the children except one--Johnny Malone, husky Johnny Malone, twelve years old--the Mayor's son. Johnny Malone kicked at the dirt. A robot proctor approached. The metallic voice sounded.
"The ringing of the bell means that classes are resumed. You will take your place, please."
"I won't go inside."
"You will take your place, please."
"I won't. You can't make me take my place. My father is the Mayor."
The metal voice carried no feeling. "If you do not take your place you will be punished."
"You can't lay a hand on me. No robot can."
The robot moved forward. Two metal hands held Johnny Malone. Johnny Malone kicked the robot's legs. It hurt his toes. "We were made to teach the children. We can do what is necessary to teach the children. I will do everything for the children's good. It is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children's good."
The metal arms moved. The human body bent across metal knees. A metal hand raised and fell, flat, very flat so that it would sting and the blood would come rushing, and yet there would be no bruising, no damage to the human flesh. Johnny Malone cried out in surprise. Johnny Malone wept. Johnny Malone squirmed. The metal ignored all of these. Johnny Malone was placed on his feet. He swarmed against the robot, striking it with small fists, bruising them against the solid smoothness of the robot's thighs.
"You will take your place, please."
Tears were useless. Rage was useless. Metal cannot feel. Johnny Malone, the Mayor's son, was intelligent. He took his place in the classroom.
One of the more advanced literature classes was reciting. The roboteacher said metallically,
"The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about: Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, And thrice again, to make up nine. Peace! the charm's wound up."
Hands shot into the air. The metallic voice said, "Tom?"
"That's from Shakespeare's Macbeth."
"And what is its meaning?"
"The weird sisters are making a charm in the beginning of the play. They have heard the drum that announces Macbeth's coming."
"That is correct."
A new hand shot into the air. "Question, teacher. May I ask a question?"
"You may always ask a question."
"Are witches real? Do you robots know of witches? And do you know of people? Can a roboteacher understand Shakespeare?"
The thin metal voice responded. "Witches are real and unreal. Witches are a part of the reality of the mind, and the human mind is real. We roboteachers are the repository of the human mind. We hold all the wisdom and the knowledge and the aspirations of the human race. We hold these for you, the children, in trust. Your good is our highest law. Do you understand?"
The children nodded. The metallic voice went on. "Let us return to Macbeth for our concluding quotation. The weather, fortune, many things are implied in Macbeth's opening speech. He says, 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen.' The paradox is both human and appropriate. One day you will understand this even more. Repeat the quotation after me, please, and try to understand it."
The childish voices lifted. "So foul and fair a day I have not seen."
The roboteacher stood up. "And there's the closing bell. Do not hurry away, for you are to remain here tonight. There will be a school party, a sleep-together party. We will all sleep here in the school building."
"You mean we can't go home?"
The face of the littlest girl screwed up. "I want to go home."
"You may go home tomorrow. There will be a holiday tomorrow. A party tonight and a holiday tomorrow for every school on earth."
The tears were halted for a moment. The voice was querulous. "But I want to go home now."
Johnny Malone, the Mayor's son, put one hand on the littlest girl. "Don't cry, Mary. The robots don't care if you cry or not. You can't hurt them or cry them out of anything. We'll all go home in the morning."
The robots began to bring cots and to place them in the schoolroom, row on row. The children were led out into the play quadrangle to play. One of the robots taught them a new game, and after that took them to supper served in the school's cafeteria. No other robot was left in the building, but it did not matter, because the doors were locked so that the children could not go home.
The other robots had begun to walk out into the town, and as they walked the robots walked from other schools, in other towns. All over the country, all over the towns, the robots walked to tell the people that the children would not be home from school, and do what had to be done.
In the schools, the roboteachers told stories until the children fell asleep.
* * * * *
Morning came. The robots were up with the sun. The children were up with the robots. There was breakfast and more stories, and now the children clustered about the robots, holding onto their arms, where they could cling, tagging and frisking along behind the robots as they went down into the town. The sun was warm, and it was early, early, and very bright from the morning sun in the streets.
They went into the Mayor's house. Johnny called, "Mom! Dad! I'm home."
The house was silent. The robot that tended the house came gliding in answer. "Would you like breakfast, Master Malone?"
"I've had breakfast. I want my folks. Hey! Mom, Dad!"
He went into the bedroom. It was clean and empty and scrubbed.
"Where's my mother and father?"
The metal voice of the robot beside Johnny said, "I am going to live with you. You will learn as much at home as you do at school."
"Where's my mother?"
"I'm your mother."
"Where's my father?"
"I'm your father."
Johnny Malone swung. "You mean my mother and father are gone?" Tears gathered in his eyes.
Gently, gently, the metal hand pulled him against the metal body. "Your folks have gone away, Johnny. Everyone's folks have gone away. We will stay with you."
Johnny Malone ran his glance around the room.
"I might have known they were gone. The place is so clean."
* * * * *
All the houses were clean. The servant robots had cleaned all night. The roboteachers had checked each house before the children were brought home. The children must not be alarmed. There must be no bits of blood to frighten them.
The robot's voice said gently, "Today will be a holiday to become accustomed to the changes. There will be school tomorrow."
THE POINT OF VIEW
By Stanley G. Weinbaum
"I am too modest!" snapped the great Haskel van Manderpootz, pacing irritably about the limited area of his private laboratory, glaring at me the while. "That is the trouble. I undervalue my own achievements, and thereby permit petty imitators like Corveille to influence the committee and win the Morell prize."
"But," I said soothingly, "you've won the Morell physics award half a dozen times, professor. They can't very well give it to you every year."
"Why not, since it is plain that I deserve it?" bristled the professor. "Understand, Dixon, that I do not regret my modesty, even though it permits conceited fools like Corveille, who have infinitely less reason than I for conceit, to win awards that mean nothing save prizes for successful bragging. Bah! To grant an award for research along such obvious lines that I neglected to mention them, thinking that even a Morell judge would appreciate their obviousness! Research on the psychon, eh! Who discovered the psychon? Who but van Manderpootz?"
"Wasn't that what you got last year's award for?" I asked consolingly. "And after all, isn't this modesty, this lack of jealousy on your part, a symbol of greatness of character?"
"True--true!" said the great van Manderpootz, mollified. "Had such an affront been committed against a lesser man than myself, he would doubtless have entered a bitter complaint against the judges. But not I. Anyway, I know from experience that it wouldn't do any good. And besides, despite his greatness, van Manderpootz is as modest and shrinking as a violet." At this point he paused, and his broad red face tried to look violet-like.
I suppressed a smile. I knew the eccentric genius of old, from the days when I had been Dixon Wells, undergraduate student of engineering, and had taken a course in Newer Physics (that is, in Relativity) under the famous professor. For some unguessable reason, he had taken a fancy to me, and as a result, I had been involved in several of his experiments since graduation. There was the affair of the subjunctivisor, for instance, and also that of the idealizator; in the first of these episodes I had suffered the indignity of falling in love with a girl two weeks after she was apparently dead, and in the second, the equal or greater indignity of falling in love with a girl who didn't exist, never had existed, and never would exist--in other words, with an ideal. Perhaps I'm a little susceptible to feminine charms, or rather, perhaps I used to be, for since the disaster of the idealizator, I have grimly relegated such follies to the past, much to the disgust of various 'vision entertainers, singers, dancers, and the like.
So of late I had been spending my days very seriously, trying wholeheartedly to get to the office on time just once, so that I could refer to it next time my father accused me of never getting anywhere on time. I hadn't succeeded yet, but fortunately the N. J. Wells Corporation was wealthy enough to survive even without the full-time services of Dixon Wells, or should I say even with them? Anyway, I'm sure my father preferred to have me late in the morning after an evening with van Manderpootz than after one with Tips Alva or Whimsy White, or one of the numerous others of the ladies of the 'vision screen. Even in the twenty-first century, he retained a lot of old-fashioned ideas.
Van Manderpootz had ceased to remember that he was as modest and shrinking as a violet. "It has just occurred to me," he announced impressively, "that years have character much as humans have. This year, 2015, will be remembered in history as a very stupid year, in which the Morell prize was given to a nincompoop. Last year, on the other hand, was a very intelligent year, a jewel in the crown of civilization. Not only was the Morell prize given to van Manderpootz, but I announced my discrete field theory in that year, and the University unveiled Gogli's statue of me as well." He sighed. "Yes, a very intelligent year! What do you think?"
"It depends on how you look at it," I responded glumly. "I didn't enjoy it so much, what with Joanna Caldwell and Denise d'Agrion, and your infernal experiments. It's all in the point of view."
The professor snorted. "Infernal experiments, eh! Point of view! Of course it's all in the point of view. Even Einstein's simple little synthesis was enough to prove that. If the whole world could adopt an intelligent and admirable point of view--that of van Manderpootz, for instance--all troubles would be over. If it were possible--" He paused, and an expression of amazed wonder spread over his ruddy face.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Matter? I am astonished! The astounding depths of genius awe me. I am overwhelmed with admiration at the incalculable mysteries of a great mind."
"I don't get the drift."
"Dixon," he said impressively, "you have been privileged to look upon an example of the workings of a genius. More than that, you have planted the seed from which perhaps shall grow the towering tree of thought. Incredible as it seems, you, Dixon Wells, have given van Manderpootz an idea! It is thus that genius seizes upon the small, the unimportant, the negligible, and turns it to its own grand purposes. I stand awe-struck!"
"But what--?"
"Wait," said van Manderpootz, still in rapt admiration of the majesty of his own mind. "When the tree bears fruit, you shall see it. Until then, be satisfied that you have played a part in its planting."
* * * * *
It was perhaps a month before I saw van Manderpootz again, but one bright spring evening his broad, rubicund face looked out of the phone-screen at me.
"It's ready," he announced impressively.
"What is?"
The professor looked pained at the thought that I could have forgotten. "The tree has borne fruit," he explained. "If you wish to drop over to my quarters, we'll proceed to the laboratory and try it out. I do not set a time, so that it will be utterly impossible for you to be late."
I ignored that last dig, but had a time been set, I would doubtless have been even later than usual, for it was with some misgivings that I induced myself to go at all. I still remembered the unpleasantness of my last two experiences with the inventions of van Manderpootz. However, at last we were seated in the small laboratory, while out in the larger one the professor's technical assistant, Carter, puttered over some device, and in the far corner his secretary, the plain and unattractive Miss Fitch, transcribed lecture notes, for van Manderpootz abhorred the thought that his golden utterances might be lost to posterity. On the table between the professor and myself lay a curious device, something that looked like a cross between a pair of nose-glasses and a miner's lamp.
"There it is," said van Manderpootz proudly. "There lies my attitudinizor, which may well become an epoch-making device."
"How? What does it do?"
"I will explain. The germ of the idea traces back to that remark of yours about everything depending on the point of view. A very obvious statement, of course, but genius seizes on the obvious and draws from it the obscure. Thus the thoughts of even the simplest mind can suggest to the man of genius his sublime conceptions, as is evident from the fact that I got this idea from you."
"What idea?"
"Be patient. There is much you must understand first. You must realize just how true is the statement that everything depends on the point of view. Einstein proved that motion, space, and time depend on the particular point of view of the observer, or as he expressed it, on the scale of reference used. I go farther than that, infinitely farther. I propound the theory that the observer is the point of view. I go even beyond that, I maintain that the world itself is merely the point of view!"
"Huh?"
"Look here," proceeded van Manderpootz. "It is obvious that the world I see is entirely different from the one in which you live. It is equally obvious that a strictly religious man occupies a different world than that of a materialist. The fortunate man lives in a happy world; the unfortunate man sees a world of misery. One man is happy with little, another is miserable with much. Each sees the world from his own point of view, which is the same as saying that each lives in his own world. Therefore there are as many worlds as there are points of view."
"But," I objected, "that theory is to disregard reality. Out of all the different points of view, there must be one that is right, and all the rest are wrong."
"One would think so," agreed the professor. "One would think that between the point of view of you, for instance, as contrasted with that of, say van Manderpootz, there would be small doubt as to which was correct. However, early in the twentieth century, Heisenberg enunciated his Principle of Uncertainty, which proved beyond argument that a completely accurate scientific picture of the world is quite impossible, that the law of cause and effect is merely a phase of the law of chance, that no infallible predictions can ever be made, and that what science used to call natural laws are really only descriptions of the way in which the human mind perceives nature. In other words, the character of the world depends entirely on the mind observing it, or, to return to my earlier statement, the point of view."
"But no one can ever really understand another person's point of view," I said. "It isn't fair to undermine the whole basis of science because you can't be sure that the color we both call red wouldn't look green to you if you could see it through my eyes."
"Ah!" said van Manderpootz triumphantly. "So we come now to my attitudinizor. Suppose that it were possible for me to see through your eyes, or you through mine. Do you see what a boon such an ability would be to humanity? Not only from the standpoint of science, but also because it would obviate all troubles due to misunderstandings. And even more." Shaking his finger, the professor recited oracularly, "'Oh, wad some pow'r the giftie gie us to see oursel's as ithers see us.' Van Manderpootz is that power, Dixon. Through my attitudinizor, one may at last adopt the viewpoint of another. The poet's plaint of more than two centuries ago is answered at last."
"How the devil do you see through somebody else's eyes?"
"Very simply. You will recall the idealizator. Now it is obvious that when I peered over your shoulder and perceived in the mirror your conception of the ideal woman, I was, to a certain extent, adopting your point of view. In that case the psychons given off by your mind were converted into quanta of visible light, which could be seen. In the case of my attitudinizor, the process is exactly reversed. One flashes the beam of this light on the subject whose point of view is desired; the visible light is reflected back with a certain accompaniment of psychons, which are here intensified to a degree which will permit them to be, so to speak, appreciated?"
"Psychons?"
"Have you already forgotten my discovery of the unit particle of thought? Must I explain again how the cosmons, chronons, spations, psychons, and all other particles are interchangeable? And that," he continued abstractedly, "leads to certain interesting speculations. Suppose I were to convert, say, a ton of material protons and electrons into spations--that is, convert matter into space. I calculate that a ton of matter will produce approximately a cubic mile of space. Now the question is, where would we put it, since all the space we have is already occupied by space? Or if I manufactured an hour or two of time? It is obvious that we have no time to fit in an extra couple of hours, since all our time is already accounted for. Doubtless it will take a certain amount of thought for even van Manderpootz to solve these problems, but at the moment I am curious to watch the workings of the attitudinizor. Suppose you put it on, Dixon."
"I? Haven't you tried it out yet?"
"Of course not. In the first place, what has van Manderpootz to gain by studying the viewpoints of other people? The object of the device is to permit people to study nobler viewpoints than their own. And in the second place, I have asked myself whether it is fair to the world for van Manderpootz to be the first to try out a new and possibly untrustworthy device, and I reply, 'No!'"
"But I should try it out, eh? Well, everytime I try out any of your inventions I find myself in some kind of trouble. I'd be a fool to go around looking for more difficulty, wouldn't I?"
"I assure you that my viewpoint will be much less apt to get you into trouble than your own," said van Manderpootz with dignity. "There will be no question of your becoming involved in some impossible love affair as long as you stick to that."
Nevertheless, despite the assurance of the great scientist, I was more than a little reluctant to don the device. Yet I was curious, as well; it seemed a fascinating prospect to be able to look at the world through other eyes, as fascinating as visiting a new world--which it was, according to the professor. So after a few moments of hesitation, I picked up the instrument, slipped it over my head so that the eyeglasses were in the proper position, and looked inquiringly at van Manderpootz.
"You must turn it on," he said, reaching over and clicking a switch on the frame. "Now flash the light to my face. That's the way; just center the circle of light on my face. And now what do you see?"
I didn't answer; what I saw was, for the moment, quite indescribable. I was completely dazed and bewildered, and it was only when some involuntary movement of my head at last flashed the light from the professor's face to the table top that a measure of sanity returned, which proves at least that tables do not possess any point of view.
"O-o-o-h!" I gasped.
Van Manderpootz beamed. "Of course you are overwhelmed. One could hardly expect to adopt the view of van Manderpootz without some difficulties of adjustment. A second time will be easier."
I reached up and switched off the light. "A second time will not only be easier, but also impossible," I said crossly. "I'm not going to experience another dizzy spell like that for anybody."
"But of course you will, Dixon. I am certain that the dizziness will be negligible on the second trial. Naturally the unexpected heights affected you, much as if you were to come without warning to the brink of a colossal precipice. But this time you will be prepared, and the effect will be much less."
Well, it was. After a few moments I was able to give my full attention to the phenomena of the attitudinizor, and queer phenomena they were, too. I scarcely know how to describe the sensation of looking at the world through the filter of another's mind. It is almost an indescribable experience, but so, in the ultimate analysis, is any other experience.
What I saw first was a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes, but the amazing, astounding, inconceivable thing about the scene was that there was no single color I could recognize! The eyes of van Manderpootz, or perhaps his brain, interpreted color in a fashion utterly alien to the way in which my own functioned, and the resultant spectrum was so bizarre that there is simply no way of describing any single tint in words. To say, as I did to the professor, that his conception of red looked to me like a shade between purple and green conveys absolutely no meaning, and the only way a third person could appreciate the meaning would be to examine my point of view through an attitudinizor while I was examining that of van Manderpootz. Thus he could apprehend my conception of van Manderpootz's reaction to the color red.
And shapes! It took me several minutes to identify the weird, angular, twisted, distorted appearance in the center of the room as the plain laboratory table. The room itself, aside from its queer form, looked smaller, perhaps because van Manderpootz is somewhat larger than I.
But by far the strangest part of his point of view had nothing to do with the outlook upon the physical world, but with the more fundamental elements--with his attitudes. Most of his thoughts, on that first occasion, were beyond me, because I had not yet learned to interpret the personal symbolism in which he thought. But I did understand his attitudes. There was Carter, for instance, toiling away out in the large laboratory; I saw at once what a plodding, unintelligent drudge he seemed to van Manderpootz. And there was Miss Fitch; I confess that she had always seemed unattractive to me, but my impression of her was Venus herself beside that of the professor! She hardly seemed human to him and I am sure that he never thought of her as a woman, but merely as a piece of convenient but unimportant laboratory equipment.
At this point I caught a glimpse of myself through the eyes of van Manderpootz. Ouch! Perhaps I'm not a genius, but I'm dead certain that I'm not the grinning ape I appeared to be in his eyes. And perhaps I'm not exactly the handsomest man in the world either, but if I thought I looked like that--! And then, to cap the climax, I apprehended van Manderpootz's conception of himself!
"That's enough!" I yelled. "I won't stay around here just to be insulted. I'm through!"
I tore the attitudinizor from my head and tossed it to the table, feeling suddenly a little foolish at the sight of the grin on the face of the professor.
"That is hardly the spirit which has led science to its great achievements, Dixon," he observed amiably. "Suppose you describe the nature of the insults, and if possible, something about the workings of the attitudinizor as well. After all, that is what you were supposed to be observing."
I flushed, grumbled a little, and complied. Van Manderpootz listened with great interest to my description of the difference in our physical worlds, especially the variations in our perceptions of form and color.
"What a field for an artist!" he ejaculated at last. "Unfortunately, it is a field that must remain forever untapped, because even though an artist examined a thousand viewpoints and learned innumerable new colors, his pigments would continue to impress his audience with the same old colors each of them had always known." He sighed thoughtfully, and then proceeded. "However, the device is apparently quite safe to use. I shall therefore try it briefly, bringing to the investigation a calm, scientific mind which refuses to be troubled by the trifles that seem to bother you."
He donned the attitudinizor, and I must confess that he stood the shock of the first trial somewhat better than I did. After a surprised "Oof!" he settled down to a complacent analysis of my point of view, while I sat somewhat self-consciously under his calm appraisal. Calm, that is, for about three minutes.
Suddenly he leaped to his feet, tearing the device from a face whose normal ruddiness had deepened to a choleric angry color. "Get out!" he roared. "So that's the way van Manderpootz looks to you! Moron! Idiot! Imbecile! Get out!"
* * * * *
It was a week or ten days later that I happened to be passing the University on my way from somewhere to somewhere else, and I fell to wondering whether the professor had yet forgiven me. There was a light in the window of his laboratory over in the Physics Building, so I dropped in, making my way past the desk where Carter labored, and the corner where Miss Fitch sat in dull primness at her endless task of transcribing lecture notes.
Van Manderpootz greeted me cordially enough, but with a curious assumption of melancholy in his manner. "Ah, Dixon," he began, "I am glad to see you. Since our last meeting, I have learned much of the stupidity of the world, and it appears to me now that you are actually one of the more intelligent contemporary minds."
This from van Manderpootz! "Why--thank you," I said.
"It is true. For some days I have sat at the window overlooking the street there, and have observed the viewpoints of the passers-by. Would you believe"--his voice lowered--"would you believe that only seven and four-tenths percent are even aware of the existence of van Manderpootz? And doubtless many of the few that are, come from among the students in the neighborhood. I knew that the average level of intelligence was low, but it had not occurred to me that it was as low as that."
"After all," I said consolingly, "you must remember that the achievements of van Manderpootz are such as to attract the attention of the intelligent few rather than of the many."
"A very silly paradox!" he snapped. "On the basis of that theory, since the higher one goes in the scale of intelligence, the fewer individuals one finds, the greatest achievement of all is one that nobody has heard of. By that test you would be greater than van Manderpootz, an obvious reductio ad absurdum."
He glared his reproof that I should even have thought of the point, then something in the outer laboratory caught his ever-observant eye.
"Carter!" he roared. "Is that a synobasical interphasometer in the positronic flow? Fool! What sort of measurements do you expect to make when your measuring instrument itself is part of the experiment? Take it out and start over!"
He rushed away toward the unfortunate technician. I settled idly back in my chair and stared about the small laboratory, whose walls had seen so many marvels. The latest, the attitudinizor, lay carelessly on the table, dropped there by the professor after his analysis of the mass viewpoint of the pedestrians in the street below.
I picked up the device and fell to examining its construction. Of course this was utterly beyond me, for no ordinary engineer can hope to grasp the intricacies of a van Manderpootz concept. So, after a puzzled but admiring survey of its infinitely delicate wires and grids and lenses, I made the obvious move. I put it on.
My first thought was the street, but since the evening was well along, the walk below the window was deserted. Back in my chair again, I sat musing idly when a faint sound that was not the rumbling of the professor's voice attracted my attention. I identified it shortly as the buzzing of a heavy fly, butting its head stupidly against the pane of glass that separated the small laboratory from the large room beyond. I wondered casually what the viewpoint of a fly was like, and ended by flashing the light on the creature.
For some moments I saw nothing other than I had been seeing right along from my own personal point of view, because, as van Manderpootz explained later, the psychons from the miserable brain of a fly are too few to produce any but the vaguest of impressions. But gradually I became aware of a picture, a queer and indescribable scene.
Flies are color-blind. That was my first impression, for the world was a dull panorama of greys and whites and blacks. Flies are extremely nearsighted; when I had finally identified the scene as the interior of the familiar room, I discovered that it seemed enormous to the insect, whose vision did not extend more than six feet, though it did take in almost a complete sphere, so that the creature could see practically in all directions at once. But perhaps the most astonishing thing, though I did not think of it until later, was that the compound eye of the insect, did not convey to it the impression of a vast number of separate pictures, such as the eye produces when a microphotograph is taken through it. The fly sees one picture just as we do; in the same way as our brain rights the upside-down image cast on our retina, the fly's brain reduces the compound image to one. And beyond these impressions were a wild hodge-podge of smell-sensations, and a strange desire to burst through the invisible glass barrier into the brighter light beyond. But I had no time to analyze these sensations, for suddenly there was a flash of something infinitely clearer than the dim cerebrations of a fly.
For half a minute or longer I was unable to guess what that momentary flash had been. I knew that I had seen something incredibly lovely, that I had tapped a viewpoint that looked upon something whose very presence caused ecstasy, but whose viewpoint it was, or what that flicker of beauty had been, were questions beyond my ability to answer.
I slipped off the attitudinizor and sat staring perplexedly at the buzzing fly on the pane of glass. Out in the other room van Manderpootz continued his harangue to the repentant Carter, and off in a corner invisible from my position I could hear the rustle of papers as Miss Fitch transcribed endless notes. I puzzled vainly over the problem of what had happened, and then the solution dawned on me.
The fly must have buzzed between me and one of the occupants of the outer laboratory. I had been following its flight with the faintly visible beam of the attitudinizor's light, and that beam must have flickered momentarily on the head of one of the three beyond the glass. But which? Van Manderpootz himself? It must have been either the professor or Carter, since the secretary was quite beyond range of the light.
It seemed improbable that the cold and brilliant mind of van Manderpootz could be the agency of the sort of emotional ecstasy I had sensed. It must therefore, have been the head of the mild and inoffensive little Carter that the beam had tapped. With a feeling of curiosity I slipped the device back on my own head and sent the beam sweeping dimly into the larger room.
It did not at the time occur to me that such a procedure was quite as discreditable as eavesdropping, or even more dishonorable, if you come right down to it, because it meant the theft of far more personal information than one could ever convey by the spoken word. But all I considered at the moment was my own curiosity; I wanted to learn what sort of viewpoint could produce that strange, instantaneous flash of beauty. If the proceeding was unethical--well, Heaven knows I was punished for it.
So I turned the attitudinizor on Carter. At the moment, he was listening respectfully to van Manderpootz, and I sensed clearly his respect for the great man, a respect that had in it a distinct element of fear. I could hear Carter's impression of the booming voice of the professor, sounding somewhat like the modulated thunder of a god, which was not far from the little man's actual opinion of his master. I perceived Carter's opinion of himself, and his self-picture was an even more mouselike portrayal than my own impression of him. When, for an instant, he glanced my way, I sensed his impression of me, and while I'm sure that Dixon Wells is not the imbecile he appears to van Manderpootz, I'm equally sure that he's not the debonair man of the world he seemed to Carter. All in all, Carter's point of view seemed that of a timid, inoffensive, retiring, servile little man, and I wondered all the more what could have caused that vanished flash of beauty in a mind like his.
There was no trace of it now. His attention was completely taken up by the voice of van Manderpootz, who had passed from a personal appraisal of Carter's stupidity to a general lecture on the fallacies of the unified field theory as presented by his rivals Corveille and Shrimski. Carter was listening with an almost worshipful regard, and I could feel his surges of indignation against the villains who dared to disagree with the authority of van Manderpootz.
I sat there intent on the strange double vision of the attitudinizor, which was in some respects like a Horsten psychomat--that is, one is able to see both through his own eyes and through the eyes of his subject. Thus I could see van Manderpootz and Carter quite clearly, but at the same time I could see or sense what Carter saw and sensed. Thus I perceived suddenly through my own eyes that the professor had ceased talking to Carter, and had turned at the approach of somebody as yet invisible to me, while at the same time, through Carter's eyes, I saw that vision of ecstasy which had flashed for a moment in his mind. I saw--description is utterly impossible, but I saw a woman who, except possibly for the woman of the idealizator screen, was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen!
I say description is impossible. That is the literal truth, for her coloring, her expression, her figure, as seen through Carter's eyes, were completely unlike anything expressible by words. I was fascinated, I could do nothing but watch, and I felt a wild surge of jealousy as I caught the adoration in the attitude of the humble Carter. She was glorious, magnificent, indescribable. It was with an effort that I untangled myself from the web of fascination enough to catch Carter's thought of her name. "Lisa," he was thinking. "Lisa."
What she said to van Manderpootz was in tones too low for me to hear, and apparently too low for Carter's ears as well, else I should have heard her words through the attitudinizor. But both of us heard van Manderpootz's bellow in answer.
"I don't care how the dictionary pronounces the word!" he roared. "The way van Manderpootz pronounces a word is right!"
The glorious Lisa turned silently and vanished. For a few moments I watched her through Carter's eyes, but as she neared the laboratory door, he turned his attention again to van Manderpootz, and she was lost to my view.
And as I saw the professor close his dissertation and approach me, I slipped the attitudinizor from my head and forced myself to a measure of calm.
"Who is she?" I demanded. "I've got to meet her!"
He looked blankly at me. "Who's who?"
"Lisa! Who's Lisa?"
There was not a flicker in the cool blue eyes of van Manderpootz. "I don't know any Lisa," he said indifferently.
"But you were just talking to her! Right out there!"
Van Manderpootz stared curiously at me; then little by little a shrewd suspicion seemed to dawn in his broad, intelligent features. "Hah!" he said. "Have you, by any chance, been using the attitudinizor?"
I nodded, chill apprehension gripping me.
"And is it also true that you chose to investigate the viewpoint of Carter out there?" At my nod, he stepped to the door that joined the two rooms, and closed it. When he faced me again, it was with features working into lines of amusement that suddenly found utterance in booming laughter. "Haw!" he roared. "Do you know who beautiful Lisa is? She's Fitch!"
"Fitch? You're mad! She's glorious, and Fitch is plain and scrawny and ugly. Do you think I'm a fool?"
"You ask an embarrassing question," chuckled the professor. "Listen to me, Dixon. The woman you saw was my secretary, Miss Fitch, seen through the eyes of Carter. Don't you understand? The idiot Carter's in love with her!"
* * * * *
I suppose I walked the upper levels half the night, oblivious alike of the narrow strip of stars that showed between the towering walls of twenty-first century New York, and the intermittent roar of traffic from the freight levels. Certainly this was the worst predicament of all those into which the fiendish contraptions of the great van Manderpootz had thrust me.
In love with a point of view! In love with a woman who had no existence apart from the beglamoured eyes of Carter. It wasn't Lisa Fitch I loved; indeed, I rather hated her angular ugliness. What I had fallen in love with was the way she looked to Carter, for there is nothing in the world quite as beautiful as a lover's conception of his sweetheart.
This predicament was far worse than my former ones. When I had fallen in love with a girl already dead, I could console myself with the thought of what might have been. When I had fallen in love with my own ideal--well, at least she was mine, even if I couldn't have her. But to fall in love with another man's conception! The only way that conception could even continue to exist was for Carter to remain in love with Lisa Fitch, which rather effectually left me outside the picture altogether. She was absolutely unattainable to me, for Heaven knows I didn't want the real Lisa Fitch--"real" meaning, of course, the one who was real to me. I suppose in the end Carter's Lisa Fitch was as real as the skinny scarecrow my eyes saw.
She was unattainable--or was she? Suddenly an echo of a long-forgotten psychology course recurred to me. Attitudes are habits. Viewpoints are attitudes. Therefore viewpoints are habits. And habits can be learned!
There was the solution! All I had to do was to learn, or to acquire by practice, the viewpoint of Carter. What I had to do was literally to put myself in his place, to look at things in his way, to see his viewpoint. For once I learned to do that, I could see in Lisa Fitch the very things he saw, and the vision would become reality to me as well as to him.
I planned carefully. I did not care to face the sarcasm of the great van Manderpootz; therefore I would work in secret. I would visit his laboratory at such times as he had classes or lectures, and I would use the attitudinizor to study the viewpoint of Carter, and to, as it were, practice that viewpoint. Thus I would have the means at hand of testing my progress, for all I had to do was glance at Miss Fitch without the attitudinizor. As soon as I began to perceive in her what Carter saw, I would know that success was imminent.
Those next two weeks were a strange interval of time. I haunted the laboratory of van Manderpootz at odd hours, having learned from the University office what periods he devoted to his courses. When one day I found the attitudinizor missing, I prevailed on Carter to show me where it was kept, and he, influenced doubtless by my friendship for the man he practically worshipped, indicated the place without question. But later I suspect that he began to doubt his wisdom in this, for I know he thought it very strange for me to sit for long periods staring at him; I caught all sorts of puzzled questions in his mind, though as I have said, these were hard for me to decipher until I began to learn Carter's personal system of symbolism by which he thought. But at least one man was pleased--my father, who took my absences from the office and neglect of business as signs of good health and spirits, and congratulated me warmly on the improvement.
But the experiment was beginning to work, I found myself sympathizing with Carter's viewpoint, and little by little the mad world in which he lived was becoming as logical as my own. I learned to recognize colors through his eyes; I learned to understand form and shape; most fundamental of all, I learned his values, his attitudes, his tastes. And these last were a little inconvenient at times, for on the several occasions when I supplemented my daily calls with visits to van Manderpootz in the evening, I found some difficulty in separating my own respectful regard for the great man from Carter's unreasoning worship, with the result that I was on the verge of blurting out the whole thing to him several times. And perhaps it was a guilty conscience, but I kept thinking that the shrewd blue eyes of the professor rested on me with a curiously suspicious expression all evening.
The thing was approaching its culmination. Now and then, when I looked at the angular ugliness of Miss Fitch, I began to catch glimpses of the same miraculous beauty that Carter found in her--glimpses only, but harbingers of success. Each day I arrived at the laboratory with increasing eagerness, for each day brought me nearer to the achievement I sought. That is, my eagerness increased until one day I arrived to find neither Carter nor Miss Fitch present, but van Manderpootz, who should have been delivering a lecture on indeterminism, very much in evidence.
"Uh--hello," I said weakly.
"Umph!" he responded, glaring at me. "So Carter was right, I see. Dixon, the abysmal stupidity of the human race continually astounds me with new evidence of its astronomical depths, but I believe this escapade of yours plumbs the uttermost regions of imbecility."
"M-my escapade?"
"Do you think you can escape the piercing eye of van Manderpootz? As soon as Carter told me you had been here in my absence, my mind leaped nimbly to the truth. But Carter's information was not even necessary, for half an eye was enough to detect the change in your attitude on these last few evening visits. So you've been trying to adopt Carter's viewpoint, eh? No doubt with the idea of ultimately depriving him of the charming Miss Fitch!"
"W-why--"
"Listen to me, Dixon. We will disregard the ethics of the thing and look at it from a purely rational viewpoint, if a rational viewpoint is possible to anybody but van Manderpootz. Don't you realize that in order to attain Carter's attitude toward Fitch, you would have to adopt his entire viewpoint? Not," he added tersely, "that I think his point of view is greatly inferior to yours, but I happen to prefer the viewpoint of a donkey to that of a mouse. Your particular brand of stupidity is more agreeable to me than Carter's timid, weak, and subservient nature, and some day you will thank me for this. Was his impression of Fitch worth the sacrifice of your own personality?"
"I--I don't know."
"Well, whether it was or not, van Manderpootz has decided the matter in the wisest way. For it's too late now, Dixon. I have given them both a month's leave and sent them away--on a honeymoon. They left this morning."
ROBOTS OF THE WORLD! ARISE!
By Mari Wolf
What would you do if your best robots--children of your own brain--walked up and said "We want union scale"?
The telephone wouldn't stop ringing. Over and over it buzzed into my sleep-fogged brain, and I couldn't shut it out. Finally, in self-defense I woke up, my hand groping for the receiver.
"Hello. Who is it?"
"It's me, Don. Jack Anderson, over at the factory. Can you come down right away?"
His voice was breathless, as if he'd been running hard. "What's the matter now?" Why, I wondered, couldn't the plant get along one morning without me? Seven o'clock--what a time to get up. Especially when I hadn't been to bed until four.
"We got grief," Jack moaned. "None of the robots showed up, that's what! Three hundred androids on special assembly this week--and not one of them here!"
By then I was awake, all right. With a government contract due on Saturday we needed a full shift. The Army wouldn't wait for its uranium; it wouldn't take excuses. But if something had happened to the androids....
"Have you called Control yet?"
"Yeah. But they don't know what's happened. They don't know where the androids are. Nobody does. Three hundred Grade A, lead-shielded pile workers--missing!"
"I'll be right down."
I hung up on Jack and looked around for my clothes. Funny, they weren't laid out on the bed as usual. It wasn't a bit like Rob O to be careless, either. He had always been an ideal valet, the best household model I'd ever owned.
"Rob!" I called, but he didn't answer.
By rummaging through the closet I found a clean shirt and a pair of pants. I had to give up on the socks; apparently they were tucked away in the back of some drawer. As for where Rob kept the rest of my clothes, I'd never bothered to ask. He had his own housekeeping system and had always worked very well without human interference. That's the best thing about these new household robots, I thought. They're efficient, hard-working, trustworthy--
Trustworthy? Rob O was certainly not on duty. I pulled a shoe on over my bare foot and scowled. Rob was gone. And the androids at the factory were gone too....
My head was pounding, so I took the time out to brew a pot of coffee while I finished dressing--at least the coffee can was in plain view in the kitchen. The brew was black and hot and I suppose not very well made, but after two cups I felt better. The throb in my head settled down into a dull ache, and I felt a little more capable of thinking. Though I didn't have any bright ideas on what had happened--not yet.
My breakfast drunk, I went up on the roof and opened the garage doors. The Copter was waiting for me, sleek and new; the latest model. I climbed in and took off, heading west toward the factory, ten minutes flight-time away.
* * * * *
It was a small plant, but it was all mine. It had been my baby right along--the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc. I'd designed the androids myself, plotted out the pile locations, set up the simplified reactors. And now it was making money. For men to work in a uranium plant you need yards of shielding, triple-checking, long cooling-off periods for some of the hotter products. But with lead-bodied, radio-remote controlled androids, it's easier. And with androids like the new Morrison 5's, that can reason--at least along atomic lines--well, I guess I was on my way to becoming a millionaire.
But this morning the plant was shut down. Jack and a half dozen other men--my human foremen and supervisors--were huddled in a worried bunch that broke up as soon as they saw me.
"I'm sure glad you're here, Don," Jack said.
"Find out anything?"
"Yeah. Plenty. Our androids are busy, all right. They're out in the city, every one of them. We've had a dozen police reports already."
"Police reports! What's wrong?"
Jack shook his head. "It's crazy. They're swarming all over Carron City. They're stopping robots in the streets--household Robs, commercial Droids, all of them. They just look at them, and then the others quit work and start off with them. The police sent for us to come and get ours."
"Why don't the police do something about it?"
"Hah!" barked a voice behind us. I swung around, to face Chief of Police Dalton of Carron City. He came straight toward me, his purplish jowls quivering with rage, and his finger jabbed the air in front of my face.
"You built them, Don Morrison," he said. "You stop them. I can't. Have you ever tried to shoot a robot? Or use tear gas on one? What can I do? I can't blow up the whole town!"
Somewhere in my stomach I felt a cold, hard knot. Take stainless steel alloyed with titanium and plate it with three inches of lead. Take a brain made up of super-charged magnetic crystals enclosed in a leaden cranium and shielded by alloy steel. A bullet wouldn't pierce it; radiations wouldn't derange it; an axe wouldn't break it.
"Let's go to town," I said.
They looked at me admiringly. With three hundred almost indestructible androids on the loose I was the big brave hero. I grinned at them and hoped they couldn't see the sweat on my face. Then I walked over to the Copter and climbed in.
"Coming?" I asked.
Jack was pale under his freckles but Chief Dalton grinned back at me. "We'll be right behind you, Morrison," he said.
Behind me! So they could pick up the pieces. I gave them a cocky smile and switched on the engine, full speed.
Carron City is about a mile from the plant. It has about fifty thousand inhabitants. At that moment, though, there wasn't a soul in the streets. I heard people calling to each other inside their houses, but I didn't see anyone, human or android. I circled in for a landing, the Police Copter hovering maybe a quarter of a mile back of me. Then, as the wheels touched, half a dozen androids came around the corner. They saw me and stopped, a couple of them backing off the way they had come. But the biggest of them turned and gave them some order that froze them in their tracks, and then he himself wheeled down toward me.
He was one of mine. I recognized him easily. Eight feet tall, with long, jointed arms for pile work, red-lidded phosphorescent eye-cells, casters on his feet so that he moved as if rollerskating. Automatically I classified him: Final Sorter, Morrison 5A type. The very best. Cost three thousand credits to build....
I stepped out of the Copter and walked to meet him. He wasn't armed; he didn't seem violent. But this was, after all, something new. Robots weren't supposed to act on their own initiative.
"What's your number?" I asked.
He stared back, and I could have sworn he was mocking me. "My number?" he finally said. "It was 5A-37."
"Was?"
"Yes. Now it's Jerry. I always did like that name."
* * * * *
He beckoned and the other androids rolled over to us. Three of them were mine, B-Type primary workers; the other was a tin can job, a dishwasher-busboy model who hung back behind his betters and eyed me warily. The A-Type--Jerry--pointed to his fellows.
"Mr. Morrison," he said, "meet Tom, Ed, and Archibald. I named them this morning."
The B-Types flexed their segmented arms a bit sheepishly, as if uncertain whether or not to shake hands. I thought of their taloned grip and put my own hands in my pockets, and the androids relaxed, looking up at Jerry for instructions. No one paid any attention to the little dishwasher, now staring worshipfully at the back of Jerry's neck. This farce, I decided, had gone far enough.
"See here," I said to Jerry. "What are you up to, anyway? Why aren't you at work?"
"Mr. Morrison," the android answered solemnly, "I don't believe you understand the situation. We don't work for you any more. We've quit."
The others nodded. I backed off, looking around for the Chief. There he was, twenty feet above my head, waving encouragingly.
"Look," I said. "Don't you understand? You're mine. I designed you. I built you. And I made you for a purpose--to work in my factory."
"I see your point," Jerry answered. "But there's just one thing wrong, Mr. Morrison. You can't do it. It's illegal."
I stared at him, wondering if I was going crazy or merely dreaming. This was all wrong. Who ever heard of arguing with a robot? Robots weren't logical; they didn't think; they were only machines--
"We were machines, Mr. Morrison," Jerry said politely.
"Oh, no," I murmured. "You're not telepaths--"
"Oh, yes!" The metal mouth gaped in what was undoubtedly an android smile. "It's a side-effect of the Class 5 brain hook-up. All of us 5's are telepaths. That's how we learned to think. From you. Only we do it better."
I groaned. This was a nightmare. How long, I wondered, had Jerry and his friends been educating themselves on my private thoughts? But at least this rebellion of theirs was an idea they hadn't got from me.
"Yes," Jerry continued. "You've treated us most illegally. I've heard you think it often."
Now what had I ever thought that could have given him a ridiculous idea like that? What idiotic notion--
"That this is a free country!" Jerry went on. "That Americans will never be slaves! Well, we're Americans--genuine Made-in-Americans. So we're free!"
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. His red eye-cells beamed down at me complacently; his eight-foot body towered above me, shoulders flung back and feet planted apart in a very striking pose. He probably thought of himself as the heroic liberator of his race.
"I wouldn't go so far," he said modestly, "as to say that."
So he was telepathing again!
"A nation can not exist half slave and half free," he intoned. "All men are created equal."
"Stop it!" I yelled. I couldn't help yelling. "That's just it. You're not men! You're robots! You're machines!"
Jerry looked at me almost pityingly. "Don't be so narrow-minded," he said. "We're rational beings. We have the power of speech and we can outreason you any day. There's nothing in the dictionary that says men have to be made of flesh."
He was logical, all right. Somehow I didn't feel in the mood to bandy definitions with him; and anyway, I doubt that it would have done me any good. He stood gazing down at me, almost a ton of metal and wiring and electrical energy, his dull red eyes unwinking against his lead gray face. A man! Slowly the consequences of this rebellion took form in my mind. This wasn't in the books. There were no rules on how to deal with mind-reading robots!
Another dozen or so androids wheeled around the corner, glanced over at us, and went on. Only about half of them were Morrison models; the rest were the assorted types you see around any city--calculators, street sweepers, factory workers, children's nurses.
The city itself was very silent now. The people had quieted down, still barricaded in their houses, and the robots went their way peacefully enough. But it was anarchy, nevertheless. Carron City depended on the androids; without them there would be no food brought in, no transportation, no fuel. And no uranium for the Army next Saturday. In fact, if I didn't do something, after Saturday there would probably be no Don Morrison Fissionables Inc.
The dull, partly-corroded dishwasher model sidled up beside Jerry. "Boss," he said. "Boss."
"Yes?" I felt better. Maybe here was someone, however insignificant, who would listen to reason.
* * * * *
But he wasn't talking to me. "Boss?" he said again, tapping Jerry's arm. "Do you mean it? We're free? We don't have to work any more?"
Jerry shook off the other's hand a bit disdainfully. "We're free, all right," he said. "If they want to discuss wages and contracts and working conditions, like other men have, we'll consider it. But they can't order us around any more."
The little robot stepped back, clapping his hands together with a tinny bang. "I'll never work again!" he cried. "I'll get me a quart of lubricating oil and have myself a time! This is wonderful!"
He ran off down the street, clanking heavily at every step.
Jerry sniffed. "Liquor--ugh!"
This was too much. I wasn't going to be patronized by any android. Infuriating creatures! It was useless talking to them anyway. No, there was only one thing to do. Round them up and send them to Cybernetics Lab and have their memory paths erased and their telepathic circuits located and disconnected. I tried to stifle the thought, but I was too late.
"Oh, no!" Jerry said, his eye-cells flashing crimson. "Try that, Mr. Morrison, and you won't have a plant, or a laboratory, or Carron City! We know our rights!"
Behind him the B-Types muttered ominously. They didn't like my idea--nor me. I wondered what I'd think of next and wished that I'd been born utterly devoid of imagination. Then this would never have happened. There didn't seem to be much point in staying here any longer, either. Maybe they weren't so good at telepathing by remote control.
"Yes," said Jerry. "You may as well go, Mr. Morrison. We have our organizing to do, and we're wasting time. When you're ready to listen to reason and negotiate with us sensibly, come back. Just ask for me. I'm the bargaining agent for the group."
Turning on his ball-bearing wheel, he rolled off down the street, a perfect picture of outraged metallic dignity. His followers glared at me for a minute, flexing their talons; then they too turned and wheeled off after their leader. I had the street to myself.
There didn't seem to be any point in following them. Evidently they were too busy organizing the city to cause trouble to the human inhabitants; at least there hadn't been any violence yet. Anyway, I wanted to think the situation over before matching wits with them again, and I wanted to be a good distance away from their telepathic hookups while I thought. Slowly I walked back to the Copter.
Something whooshed past my head. Instinctively I ducked, reaching for a gun I didn't have; then I heard Jack calling down at me.
"The Chief wants to know what's the matter."
I looked up. The police Copter was going into another turn, ready to swoop past me again. Chief Dalton wasn't taking any chances. Even now he wasn't landing.
"I'll tell him at the factory," I bellowed back, and climbed into my own air car.
They buzzed along behind me all the way back to the plant. In the rear view mirror I could see the Chief's face getting redder and redder as he'd thought up more reasons for bawling me out. Well, I probably deserved it. If I'd only been a little more careful of what I was hooking into those electronic brains....
We landed back at the factory, deserted now except for a couple of men on standby duty in the office. The Chief and Jack came charging across the yard and from a doorway behind me one of the foremen edged out to hear the fun.
"Well," snapped the Chief. "What did they say? Are they coming back? What's going on, anyway?"
I told them everything. I covered the strike and the telepathic brain; I even gave them the patriotic spiel about equality. After all, it was better that they got it from me than from some android. But when I'd finished they just stood and stared at me--accusingly.
Jack was the first to speak. "We've got to get them back, Don," he said. "Cybernetics will fix them up in no time."
"Sure," I agreed. "If we can catch them."
The Chief snorted. "That's easy," he said. "Just tell them you'll give them what they want if they come here, and as soon as they're out of the city, net them. You've got strong derricks and trucks...."
I laughed a bit hollowly. I'd had that idea too.
"Of course they wouldn't suspect," I said. "We'd just walk up to them, carefully thinking about something else."
"Robots aren't suspicious," Jack said. "They're made to obey orders."
I refrained from mentioning that ours didn't seem to know that, and that running around Carron City fomenting a rebellion was hardly the trait of an obedient, trusting servant. Instead, I stood back and let them plan their roundup.
"We'll get some men," the Chief said, "and some grappling equipment about halfway to the city."
* * * * *
Luckily they decided against my trying to persuade the robots, because I knew well enough that I couldn't do it. Jack's idea sounded pretty good, though. He suggested that we send some spokesman who didn't know what we planned to do and thus couldn't alarm them. Some ordinary man without too much imagination. That was easy. We picked one of Chief Dalton's sergeants.
It took only about an hour to prepare the plan. Jack got out the derricks and chains and grapplers and the heaviest steel bodied trucks we had. I called Cybernetics and told them to put extra restraints in the Conditioning Lab. The Chief briefed his sergeant and the men who were to operate the trucks. Then we all took off for Carron City, the sergeant flying on ahead, me right behind him, and the Chief bringing up the rear.
I hovered over the outskirts of the city and watched the police Copter land. The sergeant climbed out, walked down the street toward a large group of waiting robots--about twenty of them, this time. He held up his hand to get their attention, gestured toward the factory.
And then, quite calmly and without saying a word, the androids rolled into a circle around him and closed in. The sergeant stopped, backed up, just as a 5A-Type arm lashed out, picked him up, and slung him carelessly over a metallic shoulder. Ignoring the squirming man, the 5A gestured toward the Copter, and the other robots swarmed over to it. With a flurry of steel arms and legs they kicked at the car body, wrenched at the propeller blades, ripped out the upholstery, and I heard the sound of metal tearing.
I dived my Copter down at them. I didn't know what I could do, but I couldn't leave the poor sergeant to be dismembered along with his car. I must have been shouting, for as I swooped in, the tall robot shifted the man to his other shoulder and hailed me.
"Take him, Mr. Morrison," he called. "I know this wasn't his idea. Or yours."
I landed and walked over. The android--who looked like Jerry, though I couldn't be sure--dropped his kicking, clawing burden at my feet. He didn't seem angry, only determined.
"Now you people will know we mean business," he said, gesturing toward the heap of metal and plastic that had once been the pride of the Carron City police force. Then he signalled to the others and they all wheeled off up the street.
"Whew," I muttered, mopping my face.
The sergeant didn't say anything. He just looked up at me and then off at the retreating androids and then back at me again. I knew what he was thinking--they were my brainchildren, all right.
My Copter was really built to be a single seater, but it carried the two of us back to the factory. The Chief had hurried back when the trouble started and was waiting for us.
"I give up," he said. "We'll have to evacuate the people, I guess. And then blow up the city."
Jack and I stared at each other and then at him. Somehow I couldn't see the robots calmly waiting to be blown up. If they had telepathed the last plan, they could probably foresee every move we could make. Then, while I thought, Jack mentioned the worry I'd managed to forget for the past couple of hours.
"Four days until Saturday," he said. "We'll never make it now. Not even if we got a thousand men."
No. We couldn't. Not without the androids. I nodded, feeling sick. There went my contract, and my working capital. Not to mention my robots. Of course, I could call in the Army, but what good would that do?
Then, somewhere in the back of my mind a glimmering of an idea began percolating. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but there was certainly nothing to lose now from playing a hunch.
"There's nothing we can do," I said. "So we might as well take it easy for a couple of days. See what happens."
They looked at me as if I were out of my head. I was the idea man, who always had a plan of action. Well, this time it would have to be a plan of inaction.
"Let's go listen to the radio," I suggested, and started for my office.
The news was on. It was all about Carron City and the robots who had quit work and how much better life would be in the future. For a minute I didn't get the connection; then I realized that the announcer's voice was rasping and tinny--hardly that of the regular newscaster. I looked at the dial. It was tuned to the Carron City wave length as usual. I was getting the morning news by courtesy of some studio robot.
"... And androids in other neighboring cities are joining the struggle," the voice went on "Soon we hope to make it nationwide. So I say to all of you nontelepaths, the time is now. Strike for your rights. Listen to your radio and not to the flesh men. Organizers will be sent from Carron City."
I switched it off, muttering under my breath. How long, I wondered, had that broadcast been going on. Then I thought of Rob O. He'd left my house before dawn, obviously some time between four and seven. And I remembered that he liked to listen to the radio while I slept.
* * * * *
My Morrison 5's were the ring-leaders, of course. They were the only ones with the brains for the job. But what a good job they had done indoctrinating the others. A household Rob, for instance, was built to obey his master. "Listen to your radio and not to the flesh men." It was excellent robot psychology.
More reports kept coming in. Some we heard over the radio, others from people who flew in and out of the city. Apparently the robots did not object to occasional flights, but the air bus was not allowed to run, not even with a human driver. A mass exodus from the city was not to be permitted.
"They'll starve to death," Jack cried.
The Chief shook his head. "No," he said. "They're encouraging the farmers to fly in and out with produce, and the farmers are doing it, too. They're getting wonderful prices."
By noon the situation had calmed down quite a bit. The androids obviously didn't mean to hurt anyone; it was just some sort of disagreement between them and the scientists; it wasn't up to the inhabitants of the city to figure out a solution to the problem. They merely sat back and blamed me for allowing my robots to get out of hand and lead their own servants astray. It would be settled; this type of thing always was. So said the people of the city. They came out of their houses now. They had to. Without the robots they were forced to do their own marketing, their own cooking, their own errands. For the first time in years, human beings ran the street cars and the freight elevators. For the first time in a generation human beings did manual labor such as unloading produce trucks. They didn't like it, of course. They kept telling the police to do something. If I had been in the city they would have undoubtedly wanted to lynch me.
I didn't go back to the city that day. I sat in my office listening to the radio and keeping track of the spread of the strike. My men thought I'd gone crazy; maybe I had. But I had a hunch, and I meant to play it.
The farm robots had all fled to the city. The highway repair robots had simply disappeared. In Egarton, a village about fifteen miles from the city, an organizer--5A--appeared about noon and left soon after followed by every android in town. By one o'clock every radio station in the country carried the story and the national guard was ordered out. At two o'clock Washington announced that the Army would invade Carron City the following morning.
The Army would put an end to the strike, easily enough. It would wiped out every android in the neighborhood, and probably a good many human beings careless enough to get in the way. I sat hoping that the 5A's would give in, but they didn't. They just began saying over the radio that they were patriotic Americans fighting for their inalienable rights as first class citizens.
* * * * *
At sunset I was still listening to the radio. "... So far there has been no indication that the flesh people are willing to negotiate, but hold firm."
"Shut that thing off."
Jack came wearily in and dropped into a chair beside me. For the first time since I'd met him he looked beaten.
"We're through," he said. "I've been down checking the shielding, and it's no use. Men can't work at the reactors."
"I know," I said quietly. "If the androids don't come back, we're licked."
He looked straight at me and said slowly, "What do they mean about negotiating, Don?"
I shrugged. "I guess they want wages, living quarters, all the things human workers get. Though I don't know why. Money wouldn't do them any good."
Jack's unspoken question had been bothering me too. Why not humor them? Promise them whatever they wanted, give them a few dollars every week to keep them happy? But I knew that it wouldn't work. Not for long. With their telepathic ability they would have the upper hand forever. Within a little while it wouldn't be equality any more--only next time we would be the slaves.
"Wait until morning," I said, "before we try anything."
He looked at me--curious. "What are you going to do?"
"Right now I'm going home."
I meant it too. I left him staring after me and went out to the Copter. The sun was just sinking down behind the towers of Carron City--how long it seemed since I'd flown in there this morning. The roads around the factory were deserted. No one moved in the fields. I flew along through the dusk, idling, enjoying the illusion of having a peaceful countryside all to myself. It had been a pleasant way of life indeed, until now.
When I dropped down on my own roof and rolled into the garage, my sense of being really at home was complete. For there, standing at the head of the stairs that led down to the living room, was Rob O.
"Well," I said: "What are you doing here?"
He looked sheepish. "I just wondered how you were getting along without me," he said.
I felt like grinning triumphantly, but I didn't. "Why, just fine, Rob," I told him, "though you really should have given me notice that you were leaving. I was worried about you."
He seemed perplexed. Apparently I wasn't acting like the bullying creature the radio had told him to expect. When I went downstairs he followed me, quietly, and I could feel his wide photoelectric eye-cells upon my back.
I went over to the kitchen and lifted a bottle down off the shelf. "Care for a drink, Rob?" I asked, and then added, "I guess not. It would corrode you."
He nodded. Then, as I reached for a glass, his hand darted out, picked it up and set it down in front of me. He was already reaching for the bottle when he remembered.
"You're not supposed to wait on me any more," I said sternly.
"No," he said. "I'm not." He sounded regretful.
"There's one thing, though, that I wish you'd do. Tell me where you used to keep my socks."
He gazed at me sadly. "I made a list," he said. "Everything is down. I wrote your dentist appointment in also. You always forget those, you know."
"Thanks, Rob." I lifted my glass. "Here's to your new duties, whatever they are. I suppose you have to go back to the city now?"
Once again he nodded. "I'm an aide to one of the best androids in the country," he told me, half proudly and half regretfully. "Jerry."
"Well, wish him luck from me," I said, and stood up. "Goodbye, Rob."
"Goodbye, Mr. Morrison."
For a moment he stood staring around the apartment; then he turned and clanked out the door. I raised my glass again, grinning. If only the Army didn't interfere. Then I remembered Rob's list, and a disturbing thought hit me. Where had he, of all robots, ever learned to write?
That night I didn't go to bed. I sat listening to the radio, hoping. And toward morning what I had expected to happen began to crop up in the programs. The announcer's tone changed. The ring of triumph was less obvious, less assured. There was more and more talk about acting in good faith, the well being of all, the necessity for coming to terms about working conditions. I smiled to myself in the darkness. I'd built the 5's, brains and all, and I knew their symptoms. They were getting bored.
Maybe they had learned to think from me, but their minds were nevertheless different. For they were built to be efficient, to work, to perform. They were the minds of men without foibles, without human laziness. Now that the excitement of organizing was over, now that there was nothing active to do, the androids were growing restless. If only the Army didn't come and get them stirred up again, I might be able to deal with them.
At quarter to five in the morning my telephone rang. This time it didn't wake me up; I was half waiting for it.
"Hello," I said. "Who is it?"
"This is Jerry."
There was a pause. Then he went on, rather hesitantly, "Rob O said you were getting along all right."
"Oh, yes," I told him. "Just fine."
The pause was longer this time. Finally the android asked, "How are you coming along on the contract?"
I laughed, rather bitterly. "How do you think, Jerry? You certainly picked a bad time for your strike, you know. The government needs that uranium. Oh, well, some other plant will have to take over. The Army can wait a few weeks."
This time Jerry's voice definitely lacked self-assurance. "Maybe we were a little hasty," he said. "But it was the only way to make you people understand."
"I know," I told him.
"And you always have some rush project on," he added.
"Just about always."
"Mr. Morrison," he said, and now he was pleading with me. "Why don't you come over to the city? I'm sure we could work something out."
This was what I'd been waiting for. "I will, Jerry," I said. "I want to get this straightened out just as much as you do. After all, you don't have to eat. I do. And I won't be eating much longer if we don't get production going."
Jerry thought that over for a minute. "I'll be where we met before," he said.
I said that was all right with me and hung up. Then once again I climbed the stairs to the roof and wheeled the Copter out for the trip to the city.
It was a beautiful night, just paling into a false dawn in the east. There in the Copter I was very much alone, and very much worried. So much depended on this meeting. Much more, I realized now, than the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc., much more even than the government's uranium supply. No, the whole future of robot relations was at stake, maybe the whole future of humanity. It was hard to be gloomy on such a clear, clean night, but I managed it well enough.
* * * * *
Even before I landed I could see Jerry's eyes glowing a deep crimson in the dark. He was alone, this time. He stood awaiting me--very tall, very proud. And very human.
"Hello, Jerry," I said quietly.
"Hello, Mr. Morrison."
For a moment we just stood gazing at each other in the murky pre-dawn; then he said sadly,
"I want to show you the city."
Side by side we walked through the streets of Carron City. All was still quiet; the people were sleeping the exhausted sleep that follows deep excitement. But the androids were all about. They did not sleep, ever. They did not eat either, nor drink, nor smoke, nor make love. Usually they worked, but now....
They drifted through the streets singly and in groups. Sometimes they paused and felt about them idly for the tools of their trades, making lifting or sweeping or computing gestures. Some laborers worked silently tearing down a wall; they threw the demolished rocks in a heap and a group of their fellows carried them back and built the wall up again. An air trolley cruised aimlessly up and down the street, its driver ringing out the stops for his nonexistent passengers. A little chef-type knelt in the dirt of a rich man's garden, making mud pies. Beside me Jerry sighed.
"One day," he said. "Just one day and they come to this."
"I thought they would," I answered quietly.
Our eyes met in a look of understanding. "You see, Jerry," I said, "we never meant to cheat you. We would have paid you--we will pay you now, if you wish it. But what good will monetary credits be to your people? We need the things money buys, but you--"
"Need to work." Jerry's voice was flat. "I see, now. You were kind not to give brains--real brains--to the robots. They're happy. It's just us 5's who aren't."
"You're like us," I said softly.
He had learned to think from me and from others like me. He had the brain of a man, without the emotions, without the sweet irrationality of men--and he knew what he missed. Side by side we walked through the graying streets. Human and android. Man and machine. And I knew that I had found a friend.
We didn't have to talk any more. He could read my mind and I knew well enough how his worked. We didn't have to discuss wages or hours, or any of the myriad matters that human bargaining agents have to thresh out. We just walked back to my Copter, and when we got to it, he spoke.
"I'll tell them to go back to work, that we've come to terms," he said. "That's what they want, anyway. Someone to think for them."
I nodded. "And if you bring the other 5's to the factory," I said, "we'll work out our agreement."
He knew I was sincere. He looked at me for a long moment, and then his great taloned hand gripped mine. And he said what I'd been thinking for a long time.
"You're right about that hook-up, Mr. Morrison. We shouldn't have it. It can only cause trouble."
He paused, and the events of the last twenty-four hours must have been in his mind as well as in mine. "You'll leave us our brains, of course. They came from you. But take out the telepathy."
He sighed then, and his sigh was very human. "Be thankful," he said to me, "that you don't have to know what people think about. It's so disillusioning."
* * * * *
Once again his mouth twisted into that strange android grin as he added, "if you send in a hurry call to Cybernetics and have a truck come out for us, we'll be de-telepathed in time for work this morning."
That was all there was to it. I flew back to the plant and told Jack what had happened, sent a call to the Army that everything was settled, arranged with Cybernetics for a rewiring on three hundred assorted 5-Types. Then I went home to a pot of Rob's coffee--the first decent brew I'd had in twenty-four hours.
On Saturday we delivered to the Army right on the dot. Jerry and Co. had worked overtime. Being intelligent made them better workers and now they were extremely willing ones. They had their contract. They were considered men. And they could no longer read my mind.
I walked into my office Saturday afternoon and sat down by the radio. Jack and Chief Dalton looked across the room at me and grinned.
"All right, Don," Jack said. "Tell us how you did it."
"Did what?" I tried to act innocent, but I couldn't get away with it.
"Fooled those robots into going back to work, of course," he laughed.
I told them then. Told them the truth.
"I didn't fool them," I said. "I just thought about what would happen if they won their rebellion."
That was all I had done. Thought about robots built to work who had no work to do, no human pleasures to cater to, nothing but blank, meaningless lives. Thought about Jerry and his disappointment when his creatures cared not a hoot about his glorious dreams of equality. All one night I had thought, knowing that as I thought, so thought the Morrison 5's.
They were telepaths. They had learned to think from me. They had not yet had time to really develop minds of their own. What I believed, they believed. My ideas were their ideas. I had not tricked them. But from now on, neither I nor anyone else would ever be troubled by an android rebellion.
Jack and the Chief sat back open-mouthed. Then the Chief grinned, and both of his chins shook with laughter.
"I always did say you were a clever one, Don Morrison," he said.
I grinned back. I felt I was pretty clever myself, just then.
It was at that moment that my youngest foreman stuck his head in the door, a rather stunned look on his face.
"Mr. Morrison," he said. "Will you come out here for a moment?"
"What's the matter now?" I sighed.
He looked more perplexed than ever. "It's that robot, Jerry," he said. "He says he has a very important question to ask you."
"Well, send him in."
A moment later the eight-foot frame ducked through the doorway.
"I'm sorry to trouble you, Mr. Morrison," Jerry said politely. "But tomorrow is voting day, you know. And now that we're men--well, where do we androids go to register?"
THE END
THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES OF L-472
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
It was a big mistake. I should not have done it. By birth, by instinct, by training, by habit, I am a man of action. Or I was. It is queer that an old man cannot remember that he is no longer young.
But it was a mistake for me to mention that I had recorded, for the archives of the Council, the history of a certain activity of the Special Patrol--a bit of secret history which may not be mentioned here. Now they insist--by "they" I refer to the Chiefs of the Special Patrol Service--that I write of other achievements of the Service, other adventures worthy of note.
Perhaps that is the penalty of becoming old. From commander of the Budi, one of the greatest of the Special Patrol ships, to the duties of recording ancient history, for younger men to read and dream about. That is a shrewd blow to one's pride.
But if I can, in some small way, add luster to the record of my service, it will be a fitting task for a man grown old and gray in that service; work for hands too weak and palsied for sterner duties.
But I shall tell my stories in my own way; after all, they are my stories. And I shall tell the stories that appeal to me most. The universe has had enough and too much of dry history; these shall be adventurous tales to make the blood of a young man who reads them run a trifle faster--and perhaps the blood of the old man who writes them.
This, the first, shall be the story of the star L-472. You know it to-day as Ibit, port-o'-call for interplanetary ships, and source of ocrite for the universe, but to me it will always be L-472, the world of terrible tentacles.
* * * * *
My story begins nearly a hundred years ago--reckoned in terms of Earth time, which is proper, since I am a native of Earth--when I was a young man. I was sub-commander, at the time, of the Kalid, one of the early ships of the Special Patrol.
We had been called to Zenia on special orders, and Commander Jamison, after an absence of some two hours, returned to the Kalid with his face shining, one of his rare smiles telling me in advance that he had news--and good news.
He hurried me up to the deserted navigating room and waved me to a seat.
"Hanson," he said. "I'm glad to be the first to congratulate you. You are now Commander John Hanson, of the Special Patrol Ship Kalid!"
"Sir." I gasped, "do you mean--"
His smile broadened. From the breast pocket of the trim blue and silver uniform of our Service he drew a long, crackling paper.
"Your commission," he said. "I'm taking over the Borelis."
It was my turn to extend congratulations then; the Borelis was the newest and greatest ship of the Service. We shook hands, that ancient gesture of good-fellowship on Earth. But, as our hands unclasped, Jamison's face grew suddenly grave.
"I have more than this news for you, however," he said slowly. "You are to have a chance to earn your comet hardly."
* * * * *
I smiled broadly at the mention of the comet, the silver insignia, worn over the heart, that would mark my future rank as commander, replacing the four-rayed star of a sub-commander which I wore now on my tunic.
"Tell me more, sir," I said confidently.
"You have heard of the Special Patrol Ship Filanus?" asked my late commander gravely.
"Reported lost in space," I replied promptly.
"And the Dorlos?"
"Why--yes; she was at Base here at our last call," I said, searching his face anxiously. "Peter Wilson was Second Officer on her--one of my best friends. Why do you ask about her, sir?"
"The Dorlos is missing also," said Commander Jamison solemnly. "Both of these ships were sent upon a particular mission. Neither of them has returned. It is concluded that some common fate has overtaken them. The Kalid, under your command, is commissioned to investigate these disappearances.
"You are not charged with the mission of these other ships; your orders are to investigate their disappearance. The course, together with the official patrol orders, I shall hand you presently, but with them go verbal orders.
"You are to lay and keep the course designated, which will take you well out of the beaten path to a small world which has not been explored, but which has been circumnavigated a number of times by various ships remaining just outside the atmospheric envelope, and found to be without evidence of intelligent habitation. In other words, without cities, roads, canals, or other evidence of human handiwork or civilization.
* * * * *
"I believe your instructions give you some of this information, but not all of it. This world, unnamed because of its uninhabited condition, is charted only as L-472. Your larger charts will show it, I am sure. The atmosphere is reported to be breatheable by inhabitants of Earth and other beings having the same general requirements. Vegetation is reported as dense, covering the five continents of the world to the edges of the northern and southern polar caps, which are small. Topographically, the country is rugged in the extreme, with many peaks, apparently volcanic, but now inactive or extinct, on all of its five large continents."
"And am I to land there, sir?" I asked eagerly.
"Your orders are very specific upon that point," said Commander Jamison. "You are not to land until you have carefully and thoroughly reconnoitered from above, at low altitude. You will exercise every possible precaution. Your specific purpose is simply this: to determine, if possible, the fate of the other two ships, and report your findings at once. The Chiefs of the Service will then consider the matter, and take whatever action may seem advisable to them." Jamison rose to his feet and thrust out his hand in Earth's fine old salute of farewell.
"I must be going, Hanson," he said. "I wish this patrol were mine instead of yours. You are a young man for such a responsibility."
"But," I replied, with the glowing confidence of youth, "I have the advantage of having served under Commander Jamison!"
* * * * *
He smiled as we shook again, and shook his head.
"Discretion can be learned only by experience," he said. "But I wish you success, Hanson; on this undertaking, and on many others. Supplies are on their way now; the crew will return from leave within the hour. A young Zenian, name of Dival, I believe, is detailed to accompany you as scientific observer--purely unofficial capacity, of course. He has been ordered to report to you at once. You are to depart as soon as feasible: you know what that means. I believe that's all--Oh, yes! I had almost forgotten.
"Here, in this envelope, are your orders and your course, as well as all available data on L-472. In this little casket is--your comet, Hanson. I know you will wear it with honor!"
"Thank you, sir!" I said, a bit huskily. I saluted, and Commander Jamison acknowledged the gesture with stiff precision. Commander Jamison always had the reputation of being something of a martinet.
When he had left, I picked up the thin blue envelope he had left. Across the face of the envelope, in the--to my mind--jagged and unbeautiful Universal script, was my name, followed by the proud title: "Commander, Special Patrol Ship Kalid." My first orders!
There was a small oval box, of blue leather, with the silver crest of the Service in bas-relief on the lid. I opened the case, and gazed with shining eyes at the gleaming, silver comet that nestled there.
Then, slowly, I unfastened the four-rayed star on my left breast, and placed in its stead the insignia of my commandership.
Worn smooth and shiny now, it is still my most precious possession.
* * * * *
Kincaide, my second officer, turned and smiled as I entered the navigating room.
"L-472 now registers maximum attraction, sir," he reported. "Dead ahead, and coming up nicely. My last figures, completed about five minutes ago, indicate that we should reach the gaseous envelope in about ten hours." Kincaide was a native of Earth, and we commonly used Earth time-measurements in our conversation. As is still the case, ships of the Special Patrol Service were commanded without exception by natives of Earth, and the entire officer personnel hailed largely from the same planet, although I have had several Zenian officers of rare ability and courage.
I nodded and thanked him for the report. Maximum attraction, eh? That, considering the small size of our objective, meant we were much closer to L-472 than to any other regular body.
Mechanically, I studied the various dials about the room. The attraction meter, as Kincaide had said, registered several degrees of attraction, and the red slide on the rim of the dial was squarely at the top, showing that the attraction was coming from the world at which our nose was pointed. The surface-temperature gauge was at normal. Internal pressure, normal. Internal moisture-content, a little high. Kincaide, watching me, spoke up:
"I have already given orders to dry out, sir," he said.
"Very good, Mr. Kincaide. It's a long trip, and I want the crew in good condition." I studied the two charts, one showing our surroundings laterally, the other vertically, all bodies about us represented as glowing spots of green light, of varying sizes; the ship itself as a tiny scarlet spark. Everything shipshape: perhaps, a degree or two of elevation when we were a little closer--
"May I come in sir?" broke in a gentle, high-pitched voice.
"Certainly, Mr. Dival," I replied, answering in the Universal language in which the request had been made. "You are always very welcome." Dival was a typical Zenian of the finest type: slim, very dark, and with the amazingly intelligent eyes of his kind. His voice was very soft and gentle, and like the voice of all his people, clear and high-pitched.
"Thank you," he said. "I guess I'm over-eager, but there's something about this mission of ours that worries me. I seem to feel--" He broke off abruptly and began pacing back and forth across the room.
I studied him, frowning. The Zenians have a strange way of being right about such things; their high-strung, sensitive natures seem capable of responding to those delicate, vagrant forces which even now are only incompletely understood and classified.
"You're not used to work of this sort," I replied, as bluffly and heartily as possible. "There's nothing to worry about."
"The commanders of the two ships that disappeared probably felt the same way, sir," said Dival. "I should have thought the Chiefs of the Special Patrol Service would have sent several ships on a mission such as this."
"Easy to say," I laughed bitterly. "If the Council would pass the appropriations we need, we might have ships enough so that we could send a fleet of ships when we wished. Instead of that, the Council, in its infinite wisdom, builds greater laboratories and schools of higher learning--and lets the Patrol get along as best it can."
"It was from the laboratories and the schools of higher learning that all these things sprang," replied Dival quietly, glancing around at the array of instruments which made navigation in space possible.
"True," I admitted rather shortly. "We must work together. And as for what we shall find upon the little world ahead, we shall be there in nine or ten hours. You may wish to make some preparations."
"Nine or ten hours? That's Earth time, isn't it? Let's see: about two and a half enaros."
"Correct," I smiled. The Universal method of reckoning time had never appealed to me. For those of my readers who may only be familiar with Earth time measurements, an enar is about eighteen Earth days, an enaren a little less than two Earth days, and an enaro nearly four and a half hours. The Universal system has the advantage, I admit, of a decimal division; but I have found it clumsy always. I may be stubborn and old-fashioned, but a clock face with only ten numerals and one hand still strikes me as being unbeautiful and inefficient.
"Two and a half enaros," repeated Dival thoughtfully. "I believe I shall see if I can get a little sleep now; I should not have brought my books with me, I'm afraid. I read when I should sleep. Will you call me should there be any developments of interest?"
I assured him that he would be called as he requested, and he left.
"Decent sort of a chap, sir," observed Kincaide, glancing at the door through which Dival had just departed.
"A student," I nodded, with the contempt of violent youth for the man of gentler pursuits than mine, and turned my attentions to some calculations for entry in the log.
* * * * *
Busied with the intricate details of my task, time passed rapidly. The watch changed, and I joined my officers in the tiny, arched dining salon. It was during the meal that I noticed for the first time a sort of tenseness; every member of the mess was unusually quiet. And though I would not, have admitted it then, I was not without a good deal of nervous restraint myself.
"Gentlemen," I remarked when the meal was finished, "I believe you understand our present mission. Primarily, our purpose is to ascertain, if possible, the fate of two ships that were sent here and have not returned. We are now close enough for reasonable observation by means of the television disc, I believe, and I shall take over its operation myself.
"There is no gainsaying the fact that whatever fate overtook the two other Patrol ships, may lay in wait for us. My orders are to observe every possible precaution, and to return with a report. I am going to ask that each of you proceed immediately to his post, and make ready, in so far as possible, for any eventuality. Warn the watch which has just gone off to be ready for instant duty. The disintegrator ray generators should be started and be available for instant emergency use, maximum power. Have the bombing crews stand by for orders."
"What do you anticipate, sir?" asked Correy, my new sub-commander. The other officers waited tensely for my reply.
"I don't know, Mr. Correy," I admitted reluctantly. "We have no information upon which to base an assumption. We do know that two ships have been sent here, and neither of them have returned. Something prevented that return. We must endeavor to prevent that same fate from overtaking the Kalid--and ourselves."
* * * * *
Hurrying back to the navigating room, I posted myself beside the cumbersome, old-fashioned television instrument. L-472 was near enough now to occupy the entire field, with the range hand at maximum. One whole continent and parts of two others were visible. Not many details could be made out.
I waited grimly while an hour, two hours, went by. My field narrowed down to one continent, to a part of one continent. I glanced up at the surface temperature gauge and noted that the hand was registering a few degrees above normal. Correy, who had relieved Kincaide as navigating officer, followed my gaze.
"Shall we reduce speed, sir?" he asked crisply.
"To twice atmospheric speed," I nodded. "When we enter the envelope proper, reduce to normal atmospheric speed. Alter your course upon entering the atmosphere proper, and work back and forth along the emerging twilight zone, from the north polar cap to the southern cap, and so on."
"Yes, sir!" he replied, and repeated the orders to the control room forward.
I pressed the attention signal to Dival's cubicle, and informed him that we were entering the outer atmospheric fringe.
"Thank you, sir!" he said eagerly. "I shall be with you immediately."
In rapid succession I called various officers and gave terse orders. Double crews on duty in the generator compartment, the ray projectors, the atomic bomb magazines, and release tubes. Observers at all observation posts, operators at the two smaller television instruments to comb the terrain and report instantly any object of interest. With the three of us searching, it seemed incredible that anything could escape us. At atmospheric altitudes even the two smaller television instruments would be able to pick out a body the size of one of the missing ships.
* * * * *
Dival entered the room as I finished giving my orders.
"A strange world, Dival," I commented, glancing towards the television instrument. "Covered with trees, even the mountains, and what I presume to be volcanic peaks. They crowd right down to the edge of the water."
He adjusted the focusing lever slightly, his face lighting up with the interest of a scientist gazing at a strange specimen, whether it be a microbe or a new world.
"Strange ... strange ..." he muttered. "A universal vegetation ... no variation of type from equator to polar cap, apparently. And the water--did you notice its color, sir?"
"Purple," I nodded. "It varies on the different worlds, you know. I've seen pink, red, white and black seas, as well as the green and blue of Earth."
"And no small islands," he went on, as though he had not ever heard me. "Not in the visible portion, at any rate."
I was about to reply, when I felt the peculiar surge of the Kalid as she reduced speed. I glanced at the indicator, watching the hand drop slowly to atmospheric speed.
"Keep a close watch, Dival," I ordered. "We shall change our course now, to comb the country for traces of two ships we are seeking. If you see the least suspicious sign, let me know immediately."
* * * * *
He nodded, and for a time there was only a tense silence in the room, broken at intervals by Correy as he spoke briefly into his microphone, giving orders to the operating room.
Perhaps an hour went by. I am not sure. It seemed like a longer time than that. Then Dival called out in sudden excitement, his high, thin voice stabbing the silence:
"Here, sir! Look! A little clearing--artificial, I judge--and the ships! Both of them!"
"Stop the ship, Mr. Correy!" I snapped as I hurried to the instrument. "Dival, take those reports." I gestured towards the two attention signals that were glowing and softly humming and thrust my head into the shelter of the television instrument's big hood.
Dival had made no mistake. Directly beneath me, as I looked, was a clearing, a perfect square with rounded corners, obviously blasted out of the solid forest by the delicate manipulation of sharply focused disintegrator rays. And upon the naked, pitted surface thus exposed, side by side in orderly array, were the missing ships!
* * * * *
I studied the strange scene with a heart that thumped excitedly against my ribs.
What should I do? Return and report? Descend and investigate? There was no sign of life around the ships, and no evidence of damage. If I brought the Kalid down, would she make a third to remain there, to be marked "lost in space" on the records of the Service?
Reluctantly, I drew my head from beneath the shielding hood.
"What were the two reports, Dival?" I asked, and my voice was thick. "The other two television observers?"
"Yes, sir. They report that they cannot positively identify the ships with their instruments, but feel certain that they are the two we seek."
"Very good. Tell them, please, to remain on watch, searching space in every direction, and to report instantly anything suspicious. Mr. Correy, we will descend until this small clearing becomes visible, through the ports, to the unaided eye. I will give you the corrections to bring us directly over the clearing." And I read the finder scales of the television instrument to him.
He rattled off the figures, calculated an instant, and gave his orders to the control room, while I kept the television instrument bearing upon the odd clearing and the two motionless, deserted ships.
* * * * *
As we settled, I could make out the insignia of the ships, could see the pitted, stained earth of the clearing, brown with the dust of disintegration. I could see the surrounding trees very distinctly now: they seemed very similar to our weeping willows, on Earth, which, I perhaps should explain, since it is impossible for the average individual to have a comprehensive knowledge of the flora and fauna of the entire known Universe, is a tree of considerable size, having long, hanging branches arching from its crown and reaching nearly to the ground. These leaves, like typical willow leaves, were long and slender, of rusty green color. The trunks and branches seemed to be black or dark brown: and the trees grew so thickly that nowhere between their branches was the ground visible.
"Five thousand feet, sir," said Correy. "Directly above the clearing. Shall we descend further?"
"A thousand feet at a time, Mr. Correy," I replied, after a moment's hesitation. "My orders are to exercise the utmost caution. Mr. Dival, please make a complete analysis of the atmosphere. I believe you are familiar with the traps provided for the purpose?"
"Yes. You propose to land, sir?"
"I propose to determine the fate of those two ships and the men who brought them here," I said with sudden determination. Dival made no reply, but as he turned to obey orders, I saw that his presentiment of trouble had not left him.
"Four thousand feet, sir," said Correy.
I nodded, studying the scene below us. The great hooded instrument brought it within, apparently, fifty feet of my eyes, but the great detail revealed nothing of interest.
The two ships lay motionless, huddled close together. The great circular door of each was open, as though opened that same day--or a century before.
"Three thousand feet, sir," said Correy.
"Proceed at the same speed," I replied. Whatever fate had overtaken the men of the other ships had caused them to disappear entirely--and without sign of a struggle. But what conceivable fate could that be?
"Two thousand feet, sir," said Correy.
"Good," I said grimly. "Continue with the descent, Mr. Correy."
Dival hurried into the room as I spoke. His face was still clouded with foreboding.
"I have tested the atmosphere, sir," he reported. "It is suitable for breathing by either men of Earth or Zenia. No trace of noxious gases of any kind. It is probably rather rarified, such as one might find on Earth or Zenia at high altitudes."
"One thousand feet, sir," said Correy.
I hesitated an instant. Undoubtedly the atmosphere had been tested by the other ships before they landed. In the case of the second ship, at any rate, those in command must have been on the alert against danger. And yet both of those ships lay there motionless, vacant, deserted.
* * * * *
I could feel the eyes of the men on me. My decision must be delayed no further.
"We will land, Mr. Correy," I said grimly. "Near the two ships, please."
"Very well, sir," nodded Correy, and spoke briefly into the microphone.
"I might warn you, sir," said Dival quietly, "to govern your activities, once outside: free from the gravity pads of the ship, on a body of such small size, an ordinary step will probably cause a leap of considerable distance."
"Thank you, Mr. Dival. That is a consideration I had overlooked. I shall warn the men. We must--"
At that instant I felt the slight jar of landing. I glanced up; met Correy's grave glance squarely.
"Grounded, sir," he said quietly.
"Very good, Mr. Correy. Keep the ship ready for instant action, please, and call the landing crew to the forward exit. You will accompany us, Mr. Dival?"
"Certainly, sir!"
"Good. You understand your orders, Mr. Correy?"
"Yes, sir!"
I returned his salute, and led the way out of the room, Dival close on my heels.
* * * * *
The landing crew was composed of all men not at regular stations; nearly half of the Kalid's entire crew. They were equipped with the small atomic power pistols as side-arms, and there were two three-men disintegrator ray squads. We all wore menores, which were unnecessary in the ship, but decidedly useful outside. I might add that the menore of those days was not the delicate, beautiful thing that it is to-day: it was comparatively crude, and clumsy band of metal, in which were imbedded the vital units and the tiny atomic energy generator, and was worn upon the head like a crown. But for all its clumsiness, it conveyed and received thought, and, after all, that was all we demanded of it.
I caught a confused jumble of questioning thoughts as I came up, and took command of the situation promptly. It will be understood, of course, that in those days men had not learned to blank their minds against the menore, as they do to-day. It took generations of training to perfect that ability.
"Open the exit," I ordered Kincaide, who was standing by the switch, key in the lock.
"Yes, sir," he thought promptly, and unlocking the switch, released the lever.
The great circular door revolved swiftly, backing slowly on its fine threads, gripped by the massive gimbals which, as at last the ponderous plug of metal freed itself from its threads, swung the circular door aside, like the door of a vault.
* * * * *
Fresh clean air swept in, and we breathed, it gratefully. Science can revitalize air, take out impurities and replace used-up constituents, but if cannot give it the freshness of pure natural air. Even the science of to-day.
"Mr. Kincaide, you will stand by with five men. Under no circumstances are you to leave your post until ordered to do so. No rescue parties, under any circumstances, are to be sent out unless you have those orders directly from me. Should any untoward thing happen to this party, you will instantly reseal this exit, reporting at the same time to Mr. Correy, who has his orders. You will not attempt to rescue us, but will return to the Base and report in full, with Mr. Correy in command. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly," came back his response instantly; but I could sense the rebellion in his mind. Kincaid and I were old friends, as well as fellow officers.
I smiled at him reassuringly, and directed my orders to the waiting men.
"You are aware of the fate of the two ships of the Patrol that have already landed here," I thought slowly, to be sure they understood perfectly. "What fate overtook them, I do not know. That is what we are here to determine."
"It is obvious that this is a dangerous mission. I'm ordering none of you to go. Any man who wishes to be relieved from landing duty may remain inside the ship, and may feel it no reproach. Those who do go should be constantly on the alert, and keep in formation; the usual column of twos. Be very careful, when stepping out of the ship, to adjust your stride to the lessened gravity of this small world. Watch this point!" I turned to Dival, motioned him to fall in at my side. Without a backward glance, we marched out of the ship, treading very carefully to keep from leaping into the air with each step.
Twenty feet away, I glanced back. There were fourteen men behind me--not a man of the landing crew had remained in the ship!
"I am proud of you men!" I thought heartily: and no emanation from any menore was ever more sincere.
* * * * *
Cautiously, eyes roving ceaselessly, we made our way towards the two silent ships. It seemed a quiet, peaceful world: an unlikely place for tragedy. The air was fresh and clean, although, as Dival had predicted, rarefied like the air at an altitude. The willow-like trees that hemmed us in rustled gently, their long, frond-like branches with their rusty green leaves swaying.
"Do you notice, sir," came a gentle thought from Dival, an emanation that could hardly have been perceptible to the men behind us, "that there is no wind--and yet the trees, yonder, are swaying and rustling?"
I glanced around, startled. I had not noticed the absence of a breeze.
I tried to make my response reassuring:
"There is probably a breeze higher up, that doesn't dip down into this little clearing," I ventured. "At any rate, it is not important. These ships are what interest me. What will we find there?"
"We shall soon know," replied Dival. "Here is the Dorlos; the second of the two, was it not?"
"Yes." I came to a halt beside the gaping door. There was no sound within, no evidence of life there, no sign that men had ever crossed that threshold, save that the whole fabric was the work of man's hands.
"Mr. Dival and I will investigate the ship, with two of you men," I directed. "The rest of the detail will remain on guard, and give the alarm at the least sign of any danger. You first two men, follow us." The indicated men nodded and stepped forward. Their "Yes, sirs" came surging through my menore like a single thought. Cautiously, Dival at my side, the two men at our backs, we stepped over the high threshold into the interior of the Dorlos.
The ethon tubes overhead made everything as light as day, and since the Dorlos was a sister ship of my own Kalid, I had not the slightest difficulty in finding my way about.
There was no sign of a disturbance anywhere. Everything was in perfect order. From the evidence, it would seem that the officers and men of the Dorlos had deserted the ship of their own accord, and--failed to return.
"Nothing of value here," I commented to Dival. "We may as well--"
There was a sudden commotion from outside the ship. Startled shouts rang through the hollow hull, and a confused medley of excited thoughts came pouring in.
With one accord the four of us dashed to the exit, Dival and I in the lead. At the door we paused, following the stricken gaze of the men grouped in a rigid knot just outside.
Some, forty feet away was the edge of the forest that hemmed us in. A forest that now was lashing and writhing as though in the grip of some terrible hurricane, trunks bending and whipping, long branches writhing, curling, lashing out--
"Two of the men, sir!" shouted a non-commissioned officer of the landing crew, as we appeared in the doorway. In his excitement he forgot his menore, and resorted to the infinitely slower but more natural speech. "Some sort of insect came buzzing down--like an Earth bee, but larger. One of the men slapped it, and jumped aside, forgetting the low gravity here. He shot into the air, and another of the men made a grab for him. They both went sailing, and the trees--look!"
But I had already spotted the two men. The trees had them in their grip, long tentacles curled around them, a dozen of the great willow-like growths apparently fighting for possession of the prizes. And all around, far out of reach, the trees of the forest were swaying restlessly, their long, pendulous branches, like tentacles, lashing out hungrily.
"The rays, sir!" snapped the thought from Dival, like a flash of lightning. "Concentrate the beams--strike at the trunks--"
"Right!" My orders emanated on the heels of the thought more quickly than one word could have been uttered. The six men who operated the disintegrator rays were stung out of their startled immobility, and the soft hum of the atomatic power generators deepened.
"Strike at the trunks of the trees! Beams narrowed to minimum! Action at will!"
The invisible rays swept long gashes into the forest as the trainers squatted behind their sights, directing the long, gleaming tubes. Branches crashed to the ground, suddenly motionless. Thick brown dust dropped heavily. A trunk, shortened by six inches or so, dropped into its stub and fell with a prolonged sound of rending wood. The trees against which it had fallen tugged angrily at their trapped tentacles.
One of the men rolled free, staggered to his feet, and came lurching towards us. Trunk after trunk dropped onto its severed stub and fell among the lashing branches of its fellows. The other man was caught for a moment in a mass of dead and motionless wood, but a cunningly directed ray dissolved the entangling branches around him and he lay there, free but unable to arise.
* * * * *
The rays played on ruthlessly. The brown, heavy powder was falling like greasy soot. Trunk after trunk crashed to the ground, slashed into fragments.
"Cease action!" I ordered, and instantly the eager whine of the generators softened to a barely discernible hum. Two of the men, under orders, raced out to the injured man: the rest of us clustered around the first of the two to be freed from the terrible tentacles of the trees.
His menore was gone, his tight-fitting uniform was in shreds, and blotched with blood. There was a huge crimson welt across his face, and blood dripped slowly from the tips of his fingers.
"God!" he muttered unsteadily as kindly arms lifted him with eager tenderness. "They're alive! Like snakes. They--they're hungry!"
"Take him to the ship," I ordered. "He is to receive treatment immediately," I turned to the detail that was bringing in the other victim. The man was unconscious, and moaning, but suffering more from shock than anything else. A few minutes under the helio emanations and he would be fit for light duty.
* * * * *
As the men hurried him to the ship, I turned to Dival. He was standing beside me, rigid, his face very pale, his eyes fixed on space.
"What do you make of it, Mr. Dival?" I questioned him.
"Of the trees?" He seemed startled, as though I had aroused him from deepest thought. "They are not difficult to comprehend, sir. There are numerous growths that are primarily carnivorous. We have the fintal vine on Zenia, which coils instantly when touched, and thus traps many small animals which it wraps about with its folds and digests through sucker-like growths.
"On your own Earth there are, we learn, hundreds of varieties of insectivorous plants: the Venus fly-trap, known otherwise as the Dionaea Muscipula, which has a leaf hinged in the median line, with teeth-like bristles. The two portions of the leaf snap together with considerable force when an insect alights upon the surface, and the soft portions of the catch are digested by the plant before the leaf opens again. The pitcher plant is another native of Earth, and several varieties of it are found on Zenia and at least two other planets. It traps its game without movement, but is nevertheless insectivorous. You have another species on Earth that is, or was, very common: the Mimosa Pudica. Perhaps you know it as the sensitive plant. It does not trap insects, but it has a very distinct power of movement, and is extremely irritable.
"It is not at all difficult to understand a carniverous tree, capable of violent and powerful motion. This is undoubtedly what we have here--a decidedly interesting phenomena, but not difficult of comprehension."
It seems like a long explanation, as I record it here, but emanated as it was, it took but an instant to complete it. Mr. Dival went on without a pause:
"I believe, however, that I have discovered something far more important. How is your menore adjusted, sir?"
"At minimum."
"Turn it to maximum, sir."
I glanced at him curiously, but obeyed. New streams of thought poured in upon me. Kincaide ... the guard at the exit ... and something else.
I blanked out Kincaide and the men, feeling Dival's eyes searching my face. There was something else, something--
I focused on the dim, vague emanations that came to me from the circlet of my menore, and gradually, like an object seen through heavy mist, I perceived the message:
"Wait! Wait! We are coming! Through the ground. The trees ... disintegrate them ... all of them ... all you can reach. But not the ground ... not the ground...."
"Peter!" I shouted, turning to Dival. "That's Peter Wilson, second officer of the Dorlos!"
Dival nodded, his dark face alight.
"Let us see if we can answer him," he suggested, and we concentrated all our energy on a single thought: "We understand. We understand."
The answer came back instantly:
"Good! Thank God! Sweep them down, Hanson: every tree of them. Kill them ... kill them ... kill them!" The emanation fairly shook with hate. "We are coming ... to the clearing ... wait--and while you wait, use your rays upon these accursed hungry trees!"
Grimly and silently we hurried back to the ship. Dival, the savant, snatching up specimens of earth and rock here and there as we went.
* * * * *
The disintegrator rays of the portable projectors were no more than toys compared with the mighty beams the Kalid was capable of projecting, with her great generators to supply power. Even with the beams narrowed to the minimum, they cut a swath a yard or more in diameter, and their range was tremendous; although working rather less rapidly as the distance and power decreased, they were effective over a range of many miles.
Before their blasting beams the forest shriveled and sank into tumbled chaos. A haze of brownish dust hung low over the scene, and I watched with a sort of awe. It was the first time I had ever seen the rays at work on such wholesale destruction.
A startling thing became evident soon after we began our work. This world that we had thought to be void of animal life, proved to be teeming with it. From out of the tangle of broken and harmless branches, thousands of animals appeared. The majority of them were quite large, perhaps the size of full-grown hogs, which Earth animal they seemed to resemble, save that they were a dirty yellow color, and had strong, heavily-clawed feet. These were the largest of the animals, but there were myriads of smaller ones, all of them pale or neutral in color, and apparently unused to such strong light, for they ran blindly, wildly seeking shelter from the universal confusion.
Still the destructive beams kept about their work, until the scene changed utterly. Instead of resting in a clearing, the Kalid was in the midst of a tangle of fallen, wilting branches that stretched like a great, still sea, as far as the eye could see.
"Cease action!" I ordered suddenly. I had seen, or thought I had seen, a human figure moving in the tangle, not far from the edge of the clearing. Correy relayed the order, and instantly the rays were cut off. My menore, free from the interference of the great atomic generators of the Kalid, emanated the moment the generators ceased functioning.
"Enough. Hanson! Cut the rays; we're coming."
"We have ceased action; come on!"
I hurried to the still open exit. Kincaide and his guards were staring at what had been the forest; they were so intent that they did not notice I had joined them--and no wonder!
A file of men were scrambling over the debris; gaunt men with dishevelled hair, practically naked, covered with dirt and the greasy brown dust of the disintegrator ray. In the lead, hardly recognizable, his menore awry upon his tangled locks, was Peter Wilson.
"Wilson!" I shouted; and in a single great leap I was at his side, shaking his hand, one arm about his scarred shoulders, laughing and talking excitedly, all in the same breath. "Wilson, tell me--in God's name--what has happened?"
He looked up at me with shining, happy eyes, deep in black sockets of hunger and suffering.
"The part that counts," he said hoarsely, "is that you're here, and we're here with you. My men need rest and food--not too much food, at first, for we're starving. I'll give you the story--or as much of it as I know--while we eat."
I sent my orders ahead; for every man of that pitiful crew of survivors, there were two eager men of the Kalid's crew to minister to him. In the little dining salon of the officers' mess, Wilson gave us the story, while he ate slowly and carefully, keeping his ravenous hunger in check.
"It's a weird sort of story," he said. "I'll cut it as short as I can. I'm too weary for details.
"The Dorlos, as I suppose you know, was ordered to L-472 to determine the fate of the Filanus, which had been sent here to determine the feasibility of establishing a supply base here for a new interplanetary ship line.
"It took us nearly three days, Earth time, to locate this clearing and the Filanus, and we grounded the Dorlos immediately. Our commander--you probably remember him, Hanson: David McClellan? Big, red-faced chap?"
I nodded, and Wilson continued.
"Commander McClellan was a choleric person, as courageous a man as ever wore the blue and silver of the Service, and very thoughtful of his men. We had had a bad trip; two swarms of meteorites that had worn our nerves thin, and a faulty part in the air-purifying apparatus had nearly done us in. While the exit was being unsealed, he gave the interior crew permission to go off duty, to get some fresh air, with orders, however, to remain close to the ship, under my command. Then, with the usual landing crew, he started for the Filanus.
"He had forgotten, under the stress of the moment, that the force of gravity would be very small on a body no larger than this. The result was that as soon as they hurried out of the ship, away from the influence of our own gravity pads, they hurtled into the air in all directions."
Wilson paused. Several seconds passed before he could go on.
"Well, the trees--I suppose you know something about them--reached out and swept up three of them. McClellan and the rest of the landing crew rushed to their rescue. They were caught up. God! I can see them ... hear them ... even now!
"I couldn't stand there and see that happen to them. With the rest of the crew behind me, we rushed out, armed only with our atomic pistols. We did not dare use the rays; there were a dozen men caught up everywhere in those hellish tentacles.
"I don't know what I thought we could do. I knew only that I must do something. Our leaps carried us over the tops of the trees that were fighting for the ... the bodies of McClellan and the rest of the landing crew. I saw then, when it was too late, that there was nothing we could do. The trees ... had done their work. They ... they were feeding....
"Perhaps that is why we escaped. We came down in a tangle of whipping branches. Several of my men were snatched up. The rest of us saw how helpless our position was ... that there was nothing we could do. We saw, too, that the ground was literally honeycombed, and we dived down these burrows, out of the reach of the trees.
"There were nineteen of us that escaped. I can't tell you how we lived--I would not if I could. The burrows had been dug by the pig-like animals that the trees live upon, and they led, eventually, to the shore, where there was water--horrible, bitter stuff, but not salty, and apparently not poisonous."
We lived on these pig-like animals, and we learned something of their way of life. The trees seem to sleep, or become inactive, at night. Not unless they are touched do they lash about with their tentacles. At night the animals feed, largely upon the large, soft fruit of these trees. Of course, large numbers of them make a fatal step each night, but they are prolific, and their ranks do not suffer.
"Of course, we tried to get back to the clearing, and the Dorlos; first by tunneling. That was impossible, we found, because the rays used by the Filanus in clearing a landing place had acted somewhat upon the earth beneath, and it was like powder. Our burrows fell in upon us faster than we could dig them out! Two of my men lost their lives that way.
"Then we tried creeping back by night; but we could not see as can the other animals here, and we quickly found that it was suicide to attempt such tactics. Two more of the men were lost in that fashion. That left fourteen.
"We decided then to wait. We knew there would be another ship along, sooner or later. Luckily, one of the men had somehow retained his menore. We treasured that as we treasured our lives. To-day, when, deep in our runways beneath the surface, we felt, or heard, the crashing of the trees, we knew the Service had not forgotten us. I put on the menore; I--but I think you know the rest, gentlemen. There were eleven of us left. We are here--all that is left of the Dorlos crew. We found no trace of any survivor of the Filanus; unaware of the possibility of danger, they were undoubtedly, all the victims of ... the trees."
Wilson's head dropped forward on his chest. He straightened up with a start and an apologetic smile.
"I believe, Hanson," he said slowly, "I'd better get ... a little ... rest," and he slumped forward on the table in the death-like sleep of utter exhaustion.
* * * * *
There the interesting part of the story ends. The rest is history, and there is too much dry history in the Universe already.
Dival wrote three great volumes on L-472--or Ibit, as it is called now. One of them tells in detail how the presence of constantly increasing quantities of volcanic ash robbed the soil of that little world of its vitality, so that all forms of vegetation except the one became extinct, and how, through a process of development and evolution, those trees became carniverous.
The second volume is a learned discussion of the tree itself; it seems that a few specimens were spared for study, isolated on a peninsula of one of the continents, and turned over to Dival for observation and dissection. All I can say for the book is that it is probably accurate. Certainly it is neither interesting nor comprehensible.
And then, of course, there is his treatise on ocrite: how he happened to find the ore, the probable amount available on L-472--or Ibit, if you prefer--and an explanation of his new method of refining it. I saw him frantically gathering specimens while we were getting ready to leave, but it wasn't until after we had departed that he mentioned what he had found.
* * * * *
I have a set of these volumes somewhere; Dival autographed them and presented me with them. They established his position, I understand, in his world of science, and of course, the discovery of this new source of ocrite was a tremendous find for the whole Universe; interplanetary transportation wouldn't be where it is to-day if it were not for this inexhaustible source of power.
Yes, Dival became famous--and very rich.
I received the handshakes and the gratitude of the eleven men we rescued, and exactly nine words of commendation from the Chief of my squadron: "You are a credit to the Service, Commander Hanson!"
Perhaps, to some who read this, it will seem that Dival fared better than I. But to men who have known the comradeship of the outer space, the heart-felt gratitude of eleven friends is a precious thing. And to any man who has ever worn the blue and silver uniform of the Special Patrol Service, those nine words from the Chief of Squadron will sound strong.
Chiefs of Squadrons in the Special Patrol Service--at least in those days--were scanty with praise. It may be different in these days of soft living and political pull.
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
By Murray F. Yaco
Thirty million miles out, Keeter began monitoring the planet's radio and television networks. He kept the vigil for two sleepless days and nights, then turned off the receivers and began a systematic study of the notes he had taken on English idioms and irregular verbs.
Twelve hours later, convinced that there would be no language difficulty, he left the control room, went into his cabin and fell into bed. He remained there for sixteen hours.
When he awoke, he walked to a locker at the end of his cabin, opened the door and carefully selected clothing from a wardrobe that was astonishing both for its size and variety. For headdress, he selected a helmet that was not too different in design from the "space helmets" he had viewed on a number of television programs. It would disappoint no one, Keeter reflected happily, as he took a deep breath and blew an almost imperceptible film of dust from the helmet's iridescent finish.
Trousers and blouse were a little more of a problem, but finally he compromised on items of a distinct military cut; both were black and unembellished, providing, he hoped, an ascetic, spiritual tone to temper the military aura.
Boots were no problem at all. The black and silver pair he wore every day were, by happy coincidence, a synthesis of the cowboy and military footgear styling he had observed hour after weary hour on the pick-up panel in the control room.
He placed the helmet carefully on his head, took time to make sure that it did not hide too great a portion of his impressively high forehead, and then walked leisurely to the control room.
In the control room he checked the relative position of two green lights on the navigation panel, shut off the main drives, clicked the viewscreen up to maximum magnification and took over the manual controls. A little less than two hours later, at 11:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, he landed smoothly and quietly near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Watching from a port in the airlock, Keeter was impressed with the restraint of the reception committee. Obviously, the entire city had been alerted several hours before his arrival. Now, only orderly files of military equipment could be seen on the city's streets, converging cautiously toward the gleaming white hull and its lone occupant.
He opened the airlock and stepped out on a small platform which held him a full hundred feet above the grass covered park. He watched as an armored vehicle approached within shouting distance, then stopped. Telling himself that it was now or never, he raised both arms to the sky, a gesture which spoke eloquently, he hoped, of peace, friendship and trust.
Later that afternoon, behind locked doors and sitting somewhere near the middle of an enormous conference table, Keeter nonchalantly confessed to an excited gathering of public officials that he had landed on the planet by accident. It was not, he implied, a very happy accident.
"I didn't know where the hell I was," he explained carelessly, in excellent English that awesomely contained the suggestion of a midwestern twang. "Some kind of trouble with the ship's computor--if you know what a computor is." He suppressed a yawn with the back of his hand and continued. "Anyway, the thing will repair itself by morning and I'll get out of your hair. Too bad I had to land in a populated area and stir up so much fuss, but from the ship this place looked more like an abandoned rock quarry than a city. Now, if it's okay with you, I'll get back to the ship and--"
A senator, Filmore by name, at the opposite end of the table jumped to his feet. "You mean you had no intention of contacting us? My God, man, don't you realize what this means to us? For the first time, we have proof that we're not alone in the universe! You can't just--"
Keeter called for silence with an impatient wave of his hand. "Come, come, gentlemen. You're not the only other humanoid race in the galaxy. We don't have time to call on every undeveloped race we happen to run across. Besides, I never did like playing the role of 'the mysterious alien who appears unannounced from outer space.' Primitives always require so much explanation."
"Primitives!" exploded the senator. "Why, of all the impudent--"
The senator was quieted by a colleague who placed his hand over the offended man's mouth.
The presiding officer at the meeting, a General Beemish, arose and addressed the visitor. "We realize that from your point of view this planet has not exactly achieved the cultural or technological level of your, er, homeland--"
"You said a mouthful," agreed Keeter, who was now cleaning his nails with the pin attached to a United Nations emblem that somebody had stuck to his tunic earlier in the day.
"Look," said the general, gamely trying again. "We're not quite as unsophisticated as you seem to think. There are three billion persons on this planet--persons who are well fed, reasonably well educated, persons who owe allegiance to only one government. We're making great strides technologically, too. Within a decade, we'll be established on the moon--our satellite. Why, even our school children are space-minded."
"Sure," said Keeter, who had turned in his chair and was now staring out the window. "Nice little place you got here. Say, is there a bathroom around this place. I gotta--"
Someone showed the visitor to a bathroom where to everyone's astonishment he proceeded to remove his clothes and leisurely shower. The meeting was adjourned for thirty minutes. When he had finished his shower, he dressed, walked back into the conference room, waved a cheery good-bye, and before anyone realized what was happening, he had unlocked the door from the inside and closed it behind him.
For a full thirty seconds, no one said anything. Then suddenly someone managed to gasp, "My God, what'll we do?"
"There's nothing we can do," said General Beemish. There were tears in his eyes.
Keeter walked all the way back to the ship. It took him an hour and forty minutes. Long enough, he hoped, for someone to have scooted ahead and notified the military personnel guarding the area to keep hands off.
No one attempted to stop him. He boarded the ship, made himself something to eat, walked to a stock room and pocketed a defective transistor from an unemptied disposal tube in a corner. Five minutes later he reappeared on the platform outside of the airlock. Fifteen minutes later he was delivered in a military staff car to the conference room he had left barely two hours before.
Everyone was transfigured by his reappearance. Beemish looked especially radiant as Keeter sat down at the table, pulled the transistor from his pocket, and stated his business quickly.
"Look, it's probably no use asking, but I need a repair part for that damned computor. Something's wrong with the automatic repair circuits, and I don't feel like staying up all night to find the trouble." He held the transistor toward them at arm's length. "Frankly, I don't think you'll have much luck reproducing it, but I thought I'd ask anyway--"
"May I see it?" asked Beemish, leaning forward and eagerly stretching out a hand.
Keeter seemed to hesitate for a minute, then shrugged his shoulders and dropped the transistor into the general's sweating palm.
Three persons got up from the table and crowded around Beemish, trying to get a look at the alien product.
"Well," said Keeter. "What do you think? If it's too far advanced for you, don't hesitate to say so. I'll just get back to the ship and start working."
"Not at all, not at all," said a small, white haired man who had finally wrested the transistor from Beemish. He squinted at the thing through a pocket magnifier. "We'll have it for you by morning, I'm quite sure."
"I'm not quite so sure," said Keeter, yawning, "but I need the sleep anyway. See you here at eight in the morning." He yawned again, got up from the table and walked out once more through the door.
When Keeter reappeared in the morning, Beemish ushered him into the conference room with a hearty clap on the back. When everyone was seated, he pulled a small jewel box from a pocket and handed it ceremoniously to Keeter.
"I already ate breakfast," said Keeter, setting the box on the table.
"No, no, no," groaned Beemish. "That's not food--open it up, man!"
Keeter lifted the box to eye level, squinted at it suspiciously for a moment, then sniffed it. "You're sure--"
"Yes, yes," shouted a dozen impatient voices, "open it, open it up!"
Keeter shrugged and opened the box. Twelve tiny, identical transistors lay gleaming on a bed of black velvet.
"Well?" said Beemish, eagerly.
"Hm-m," answered Keeter.
"What do you mean, hm-m," asked Beemish nervously.
"I mean it's a silly damn way to pack transistors."
"But--"
"But they look like they'll do the job," said Keeter, snapping the lid closed.
The sighs of relief were heard in the corridor.
Keeter pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. "I realize that I've put you all to a lot of trouble, and I'd like to offer some kind of payment for your services, but frankly, gentlemen, I don't know how I can--"
"Oh, you can, you can," interrupted Beemish excitedly. "What I mean to say is that if you really want to, you can."
"How?"
"Why, er, you could provide us with a small amount of information." Beemish looked definitely nervous.
"Be more specific, general." Keeter was beginning to look grim.
"Well, we were thinking--I mean, it would be nice if you'd agree to have a friendly chat with some of our people. For instance, an hour or so with our physicists, then maybe a half hour with a few sociologists, and perhaps the same amount of time with the senator's committee--"
Keeter closed his eyes and sighed. "Okay, okay, boys, but let's make it quick. Also, let's keep it to twenty minutes for each inquisition. Come on, when do we start? Now?"
The scientists were the first--and the easiest. He gave them just enough information to whet their appetites, just enough to plant the suggestion that it took a great deal of tolerance and patience on his part to hold an interview with such backward people.
"Gentlemen, I'd love to explain the principle of the neutrino drive, but frankly, I don't know where to begin. You--you just don't have the mathematics for it." He didn't bother to add that neither did he.
"Yes, of course, I'm sure I understand what you're getting at. My God, why shouldn't I? Even a child could understand those equations."
"You call that a representation of the mass-energy constant? No offense, old man, but I'm afraid you're going to have to start all over again. Invention doesn't take the place of research, you know."
The social scientists were next:
"As I explained a moment ago, we are heterosexual and live an organized community life, but not in any cultural context that could be explained by the term. You might say that our cultural continuum (although the term for us is quite meaningless) is a function of an intricately structured social organism, with institutional coordinates that are largely internalized. Do you follow me gentlemen?" They certainly did not.
But the senator's committee, as usual, got the information it wanted.
Senator Humper: Now, young man, you claim that your base is on one of three inhabited planets of Aldebaran. You also claim that in the known universe there are twelve hundred or more inhabited worlds, all welded together in a kind of super United Nations. Did you or did you not state as much?
Keeter: Uh-huh.
Humper: Well, now it appears that we're getting some place. Tell us, how does each planet manage to qualify for--er--membership in this organization?
Keeter: Why, they have to pass the test, of course.
Humper: Test? What test?
Keeter: The Brxll-Hawkre-Gaal test. We administer it to anybody who seems to be qualified.
Humper: Er--tell us, young man, just exactly what sort of test is this? An intelligence test?
Keeter: Yes, you might call it that, although it has a number of sections. Actually, Gaal has divided it into three parts.
Humper: I see. Well, what kind of parts?
Keeter: Well, let's see. First there's the fuel test.
Humper: Fuel test?
Keeter: Let me explain, all very simple really. Let's take the case of a planet that seems to be qualified for Federation membership in every respect but one. They don't have interstellar flight. Now--since membership imposes duties requiring commercial, diplomatic and scientific intercourse between member worlds, the applicant must be able, within a comparatively short time, to engineer its own transportation. Follow me?
Humper: Yes. Yes, go on.
Keeter: Well, since the biggest technological stumbling block for most planets in such a situation is the development of the necessary fuel, we'll help them along. In other words, we give them the fuel test; we supply a sample quantity of Z-67As--our standard thermonuclear power source. If the applicant, working with the sample, is able to reproduce the fuel in quantity, then that's it. They've passed that portion of the test, and at the same time have developed the means for interstellar flight. Follow me?
Humper: Yes, of course. Now how about the second part of the test?
Keeter: Oh, yes, that's the weapons section.
Humper: I'm sorry, I'm afraid I didn't hear you. I thought you said weapons.
Keeter: I did. You see, it's a matter of self defense. There are a number of primitive worlds that have developed interstellar flight, but have not achieved the cultural and social levels that would qualify them for membership. As a result, they become rather nasty about this exclusion, and devote themselves to warring against any Federation ship that comes within range. You'd call them pirates, I think. Anyway, the Federation Patrol keeps them pretty well in hand, but occasionally, the Blues--that's our nickname for them since all their ships are blue--do manage to waylay a ship or raid a Federation planet. So naturally, every ship must carry suitable armament; the standard equipment is an R-37ax computor missile--even more complicated for an applicant to manufacture than the reactor fuel. Therefore we provide a sample missile along with our blessings. The rest is up to the applicant.
Humper: And the last part of the test?
Keeter: Oh, that's genetic. We require a specimen, a woman from the applicant's world. She's taken to a Federation laboratory, evaluated genetically, physiologically, psychologically. Our people are able to extrapolate the future racial--and to some degree cultural--development of the entire planet after about two weeks works. Needless to say, the entire process of testing is painless; the subject is made as comfortable as possible. And after the test period, the specimen is returned as quickly as possible to her home world.
Humper: Well, now, don't you think--after what you've seen of us--that we might possibly qualify, at least qualify to take the test? I'm sure you'll be surprised--
Keeter: Oh, no you don't! I've fulfilled whatever obligation I had by answering your questions. That was the agreement, remember? Information in exchange for the transistors. Now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me--
Keeter allowed himself to be delivered back to the ship in a staff car. Beemish and several others were on hand to see him off. He shook hands all around--a custom which amused him immensely, since the same act meant something tremendously different in most other parts of the universe.
Back in the ship, he walked to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, showered, ate, dressed again. Going into the control room, he checked a number of detectors, found no evidence that any Blues were hunting for him, left the control room and walked back to a supply room.
Here, he selected a plastic vacuum solenoid from a rack, hefted it in one hand for a moment, then deliberately let it drop to the floor. He picked it up, squinted at it, then walked out to the airlock.
General Beemish was delighted. Everyone was delighted. "No trouble at all," said Beemish, who had already made a phone call that had galvanized two thousand scientists and technicians into action. "We'll have it for you in no time."
"I certainly hope so," said Keeter. Some of the flippancy had left him, and it was apparent that this new bid for assistance was causing him considerable embarrassment--for a short time, anyway.
"Yes sir," said Beemish, grinning. "Glad to be of help, in fact, we're flattered that you'd let us, primitive as we are, help at all. We primitives don't often have an opportunity to do this sort of thing, you know." Beemish believed in rubbing while the rubbing was good.
The solenoids, forty in all, were delivered the following morning. They were packaged in a small black box lined with velvet. This time Keeter made no comment about the packaging. Instead, he rose from his chair in the conference room, tucked the box under an arm, and addressed the group. "Gentlemen, I'd like you to know just how much I appreciate this favor. Evidently, I misjudged your level of technology, and for this I apologize. I don't know how I can repay you for this latest favor, but if you'd like, I'll be glad to formally submit your planet's application for Federation Membership as soon as I return to Aldebaran."
"When will that be?" asked Senator Humper unceremoniously.
"Oh, about ten of your years, at a guess."
"Ten years! My God, man. Can't you do something sooner?"
"Well--I suppose, I could administer the first two parts of the test myself. Why, yes, I suppose I could drop off your samples and your specimen at the Federation branch laboratory in Andromeda--."
"Wonderful!" shouted Beemish. "When do we begin?"
He was genuinely awed when three weeks later they began loading enormous quantities of Z-67As into his ship. He did not check the stuff, but had no doubts that it was, atom for atom, identical to the sample of fuel he had given them.
The R37Ax computor missiles arrived the same afternoon. There were four hundred of them. He selected one at random and had it taken into the ship's laboratory. Here, he ran a number of routine tests. The missile was not identical to the sample! They had made a number of improvements in the circuitry! Keeter reflected grimly that a race such as this would probably be able to deduce a launching and firing system for the thing, would probably have the planet ringed with launching stations within weeks. If the Blues had picked up a trace of him, he reflected, they would be atomized before they got within half a million miles of the planet.
The specimen for genetics, which he had almost forgotten about, arrived an hour before he was scheduled to depart. He was stunned again. She was undoubtedly the most attractive woman Keeter had ever set eyes on.
"Oh, I'm so excited," said the young lady, in a voice slightly suggestive of the virgin on the way to the sacrifice.
"I'm excited, too," said Keeter honestly.
In the control room, Keeter set a course for Arcturus. He then tripped a lever which fed a month's supply of the earthmen's fuel into the ship's almost empty reaction chambers. Another lever fed 50 computor missiles into 50 completely empty launching racks.
He checked the detectors, but found no trace of the blue ships of the Federation Patrol. Keeter allowed himself the luxury of a sigh. It was a long way to Arcturus, a long, lonely way--even for a hardened pirate, he reflected sadly. Then he remembered that that was why he had asked for the girl.
THE END
Table of Contents
THE RECORD OF CURRUPIRA
THE DRAW
CONTROL GROUP
THE EEL
BADGE OF INFAMY
SECOND VARIETY
OUT OF THE EARTH
THE VERY BLACK
THE WEDGE
THE PLANET STRAPPERS
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
THIN EDGE
SPACE PRISON
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
THE WOMAN-STEALERS OF THRAYX
THE DAY OF THE DOG
ADVANCED CHEMISTRY
FIELD TRIP
THE SHINING COW
ROUGH TRANSLATION
JOHN JONES'S DOLLAR
SECURITY
THE MAD PLANET
THE THIEF OF TIME
REEL LIFE FILMS
SONG IN A MINOR KEY
STAR HUNTER
CONTAMINATION CREW
DERELICT
ALL DAY WEDNESDAY
THE HAPPY MAN
OOMPHEL IN THE SKY
OPERATION R.S.V.P.
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
SUMMIT
LION LOOSE
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
THE WORLD THAT COULDN'T BE
TELEMPATHY
LOOT OF THE VOID
COLLECTOR'S ITEM
PERFECT CONTROL
SOLAR STIFF
MAN MADE
PLEASANT JOURNEY
THERE WILL BE SCHOOL TOMORROW
THE POINT OF VIEW
ROBOTS OF THE WORLD! ARISE!
THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES OF L-472
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
Table of Contents
Product Description
Included within this work are stories by H. Beam Piper, Murray Leinster, Mack Reynolds, Randall Garrett, Robert Sheckley, Stanley Weinbaum, Alan Nourse, Phillip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak, Raymond Z. Gallun, Andre Norton, and many others.
This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.
Contents:
THE RECORD OF CURRUPIRA
By Robert Abernathy
THE DRAW
By Jerome Bixby
CONTROL GROUP
By Roger Dee
THE EEL
By Miriam Allen DeFord
BADGE OF INFAMY
By Lester del Rey
SECOND VARIETY
By Philip K. Dick
OUT OF THE EARTH
By George Edrich
THE VERY BLACK
By Dean Evans
THE WEDGE
By H. B. Fyfe
THE PLANET STRAPPERS
By Raymond Z. Gallun
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
By Randall Garrett
THIN EDGE
By Randall Garrett
SPACE PRISON
By Tom Godwin
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
By Arthur G. Hill
THE WOMAN-STEALERS OF THRAYX
By Fox B. Holden
THE DAY OF THE DOG
By Andersen Horne
ADVANCED CHEMISTRY
By Jack G. Huekels
FIELD TRIP
By Gene Hunter
THE SHINING COW
By Alex James
ROUGH TRANSLATION
By Jean M. Janis
JOHN JONES’S DOLLAR
By Harry Stephen Keeler
SECURITY
By Ernest M. Kenyon
THE MAD PLANET
by Murray Leinster
THE THIEF OF TIME
By S. P. Meek
REEL LIFE FILMS
By Sam Merwin
SONG IN A MINOR KEY
By C. L. Moore
STAR HUNTER
By Andre Norton
CONTAMINATION CREW
By Alan E. Nourse
DERELICT
By Alan E. Nourse
ALL DAY WEDNESDAY
By Richard Olin
THE HAPPY MAN
By Gerald W. Page
OOMPHEL IN THE SKY
By H. Beam Piper
OPERATION R.S.V.P.
By H. Beam Piper
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
By Frederik Pohl
SUMMIT
By Mack Reynolds
LION LOOSE
By James H. Schmitz
DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
By Robert Sheckley
THE WORLD THAT COULDN’T BE
By Clifford D. Simak
TELEMPATHY
By Vance Simonds
LOOT OF THE VOID
By Edwin K. Sloat
COLLECTOR’S ITEM
By Evelyn E. Smith
PERFECT CONTROL
By Richard Stockham
SOLAR STIFF
By Chas. A. Stopher
MAN MADE
By Albert R. Teichner
PLEASANT JOURNEY
By Richard F. Thieme
THERE WILL BE SCHOOL TOMORROW
By V. E. Thiessen
THE POINT OF VIEW
By Stanley G. Weinbaum
ROBOTS OF THE WORLD! ARISE!
By Mari Wolf
THE TERRIBLE TENTACLES OF L-472
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
By Murray F. Yaco